Category: newsletter

Al and I were talking on the podcast about Dan Maloney’s recent piece on how lead and silver are refined and about the possibility of anyone fully understanding a modern cellphone. This lead to Al wondering at the complexity of the constructed world in which we live: If you think hard enough about anything around […]
A couple weeks ago, we had a kerfuffle here on Hackaday: A writer put out a piece with AI-generated headline art. It was, honestly, pretty good, but it was also subject to all of the usual horrors that get generated along the way. If you have played around with any of the image generators you […]
A while back we got an anonymous complaint that Hackaday was “elitist”, and that got me thinking. We do write up the hacks that we find the coolest, and that could lead to a preponderance of gonzo projects, or a feeling that something “isn’t good enough for Hackaday”. But I really want to push back […]
Some of the entries we got into the Tiny Games Contest have been really mind-blowing. Just as you think you’ve seen it all, for instance, alnwlsn comes along and mills the DIP-package ATtiny84 and embeds a complete Simon game in the space normally wasted by all that plastic overmolding. It’s the tiniest, and most gonzo, […]
My sister is a beekeeper, or maybe a meta-beekeper. She ends up making more money by breeding and selling new queen bees to other beekeepers than she does by selling honey, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t also process the sweet stuff from time to time. She got a free steam-heated oscillating hot knife, […]
I try not to go off on security rants in the newsletter, but this week I’m unable to hold back. An apparent breach of a data aggregator has resulted in a monster dataset of US, UK, and Canadian citizens names, addresses, and social security numbers. As a number of reports have pointed out, the three […]
Many smart electric meters in the US use the 900 MHz band to broadcast their usage out to meter readers as they walk the neighborhood. [Jeff Sandberg] used an RTL-SDR dongle and some software to integrate this data into his own home automation system, which lets him keep track of his home’s power usage. Half […]