Some time ago, Linus Torvalds made a throwaway comment that sent ripples through the Linux world. Was it perhaps time to abandon support for the now-ancient Intel 486? Developers had already abandoned the 386 in 2012, and Torvalds openly mused if the time was right to make further cuts for the benefit of modernity. It […]
Some Mondays are worse than others, but April 28 2025 was particularly bad for millions of people in Spain and Portugal. Starting just after noon, a number of significant grid oscillations occurred which would worsen over the course of minutes until both countries were plunged into a blackout. After a first substation tripped, in the […]
Look out of a window, ask yourself the question, “Has a nuke gone off?”. Maybe, maybe not, and all of us here at Hackaday need to know the answer to these important questions! Introducing the hasanukegoneoff.com Indicator from [bigcrimping] to answer our cries. An ESP32 running a MicroPython script handles the critical checks from hasanukegoneoff.com […]
Since October 1978, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has operated its fleet of Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) — the data from which has been used for a wide array of environmental monitoring applications, from weather forecasting to the detection of forest fires and volcanic eruptions. But technology marches on, and considering that […]
If legend is to be believed, three disparate social forces in early 20th-century America – the temperance movement, the rise of car culture, and the Scots-Irish culture of the South – collided with unexpected results. The temperance movement managed to get Prohibition written into the Constitution, which rankled the rebellious spirit of the descendants of […]
Earlier this month we covered the brewing controversy over libogc, the community-developed C library that functions as the backbone for GameCube and Wii homebrew software. Questions about how much of the library was based on leaked information from Nintendo had been circulating for decades, but the more recent accusations that libogc included code from other […]
Last week, the mainstream news was filled with headlines about K2-18b — an exoplanet some 124 light-years away from Earth that 98% of the population had never even heard about. Even astronomers weren’t aware of its existence until the Kepler Space Telescope picked it out back in 2015, just one of the more than 2,700 […]
Over the course of more than a decade, physical media has gradually vanished from public view. Once computers had an optical drive except for ultrabooks, but these days computer cases that even support an internal optical drive are rare. Rather than manuals and drivers included on a data CD you now get a QR code […]
The list of countries to achieve their own successful orbital space launch is a short one, almost as small as the exclusive club of states that possess nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union was first off the rank in 1957, with the United States close behind in 1958, and a gaggle of other aerospace-adept states followed […]
When a Loch Ness Monster story appears at the start of April, it pays to check the date on the article just to avoid red faces. But there should be no hoax with this one published on the last day of March, scientists from the UK’s National Oceanography Centre were conducting underwater robotics tests in […]