Category: Hackaday Columns

We lost a true legend this week with the passing of NASA astronaut Jim Lovell at the ripe old age of 97. Lovell commanded the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission back in 1970, and along with crewmates Jack Swigert and Fred Haise — along with just about every person working at or for NASA — he […]
An old friend of mine at my hackerspace introduced me to the concept of Prototype Zero: The Version that Even Your Own Sweet Mother Isn’t Allowed to See. The idea is that when you’re building something truly new, or even just new to you, your first take will almost always be ugly, and nothing will […]
Elliot and Dan got together this week for a review of the week’s hacking literature, and there was plenty to discuss. We addressed several burning questions, such as why digital microscopes are so terrible, why computer systems seem to have so much trouble with names, and if a thermal receipt printer can cure ADHD. We […]
The Internet is fighting over whether robots.txt applies to AI agents. It all started when Cloudflare published a blog post, detailing what the company was seeing from Perplexity crawlers. Of course, automated web crawling is part of how the modern Internet works, and almost immediately after the first web crawler was written, one managed to […]
Many of us have boiled an egg at some point or another in our lives. The conventional technique is relatively straightforward—get the water boiling, drop the egg in, and leave it for a certain period of time based on the desired consistency. If you want the yolk soft, only leave it in for a few […]
When I was a student, I was a diehard Commodore Amiga user, having upgraded to an A500+ from my Sinclair Spectrum. The Amiga could do it all, it became my programming environment for electronic engineering course work, my audio workstation for student radio, my gaming hub, and much more. One thing that was part of […]
The wait is over — once this post hits the front page, ticket sales for the 2025 Hackaday Supercon will officially be live! As is tradition, we’ve reserved 100 tickets priced at $148 (plus fees) for what we like to call the True-Believers. Those are the folks that are willing to sign up even without […]
Originally known as FORTRAN, but written in lower case since the 1990s with Fortran 90, this language was developed initially by John Backus as a way to make writing programs for the IBM 704 mainframe easier. The 704 was a 1954 mainframe with the honor of being the first mass-produced computer that supported hardware-based floating […]
When all else fails, there’s amateur radio — and handwritten notes. Both ham radio and clear thinking helped rescue a mother and her son from a recent California camping trip gone wrong. While driving to the campsite in the Stanislaus National forest, the 49-year-old mother had the not-uncommon experience of GPS leading her and her […]
We’re saddened to report the passing of Shunsaku Tamiya, the man behind the Tamiya line of models. What was surprising about this, though, is how many of our readers and writers alike felt touched by the Tamiya model company. I mean, they made great models, and they’re definitely a quality outfit, but the outpouring of […]