Category: Hackaday Columns

You may have noticed that large pieces of the Internet were down on Tuesday. It was a problem at Cloudflare, and for once, it wasn’t DNS. This time it was database management, combined with a safety limit that failed unsafe when exceeded. Cloudflare’s blog post on the matter has the gritty details. It started with […]
It’s likely that Hackaday readers have among them a greater than average number of people who can name one special thing they did on September 23rd, 2002. On that day a new web browser was released, Phoenix version 0.1, and it was a lightweight browser-only derivative of the hugely bloated Mozilla suite. Renamed a few […]
This week Jonathan chats with Kevin, Colin, and Curtis about Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead! It’s a rogue-like post-apocalyptic survival game that you can play in the terminal, over SSH if you really want to! Part of the story is a Kickstarter that resulted in a graphics tile-set. And then there’s the mods! https://cataclysmdda.org/ https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA Did […]
We aren’t here to praise the penny, but rather, to bury it. The penny, and its counterparts, have been vanishing all around the world as the cost of minting one far outweighs its value. But hackers had already lost a big asset: real copper pennies, and now even the cheaply made ones are doomed to […]
For the Component Abuse Challenge, we asked you to do the wrong thing with electrical parts, but nonetheless come out with the right result. It’s probably the most Hackaday challenge we have run in a long time, and you all delivered! The judging was tight, but in the end three projects rose up to the […]
I must confess that my mouth froze in an O when I saw [Jeff]’s Typeframe PX-88 Portable Computing System, and I continue to stare in slack-jawed wonder as I find the words to share it with you. Let me give it a shot. [Jeff] tells us that he designed Typeframe for his spouse to use […]
We make no claims to be an expert on anything, but we do know that rule number one of working with big, expensive, mission-critical equipment is: Don’t break the big, expensive, mission-critical equipment. Unfortunately, though, that’s just what happened to the Deep Space Network’s 70-meter dish antenna at Goldstone, California. NASA announced the outage this […]
I was looking over the week’s posts on Hackaday – it’s part of my job after all – and this gem caught my eye: a post about how to make your own RP2040 development board from scratch. And I’ll admit that my first thought was “why would you ever want to do that?” (Not a […]
It’s a wet November evening across Western Europe, the steel-grey clouds have obscured a rare low-latitude aurora this week, and Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List for this week’s podcast. And we’ve got a fine selection for your listening pleasure! The 2025 Component Abuse Challenge has come to an end, so this week you’ll […]
Let’s talk about LANDFALL. That was an Android spyware campaign specifically targeted at Samsung devices. The discovery story is interesting, and possibly an important clue to understanding this particular bit of commercial malware. Earlier this year Apple’s iOS was patched for a flaw in the handling of DNG (Digital NeGative) images, and WhatsApp issued an […]