What has 8 ARM cores, 8 GB of RAM, fits in a pocket, and runs NixOS? It’s no pi-clone SBC, but [MWLabs]’s smartphone– a OnePlus 6, to be precise. The video embedded below, and the git link above, are [MWLabs]’s walk-through for loading the mobile version of Nix onto the cell phone, turning it into […]
We take it for granted that we almost always have cell service, no matter where you go around town. But there are places — the desert, the forest, or the ocean — where you might not have cell service. In addition, there are certain jobs where you must be able to make a call even […]
Today in old school nostalgia our tipster [Clint Jay] wrote in to let us know about this rotary dial. If you’re a young whippersnapper you might never have seen a rotary dial. These things were commonly used on telephones back in the day, and they were notoriously slow to use. The way they work is […]
If you’ve only been around for the Internet age, you may not realize that Hackaday is the successor of electronics magazines. In their heyday, magazines like Popular Electronics, Radio Electronics, and Elementary Electronics brought us projects to build. Hacks, if you will. Just like Hackaday, not all readers are at the same skill level. So […]
[Yaymukund] made an interesting observation. Old-style rotary phones were made to last and made for service. Why? Because you didn’t own them, the phone company did. There was no advantage for them for you to need a service call or a new phone. Of course, many of these old phones are still hanging around like […]
The Nokia 3310 has a reputation of being one of the most indestructible devices ever crafted by humanity. It’s also woefully out of date and only usable in a handful of countries that still maintain a GSM network. It might not be easy to bring it into the 5G era, but you can at least […]
It seems obvious once you think about it, but if you can spin your cell phone and coordinate the display with the motion, you can create a 3D display. [Action Lab] had used such a setup to make a display that you could view from any angle. After he showed it, a viewer wrote him […]
In general, military gear is designed to be rugged and reliable. A side effect of this is that the equipment usually has a distinct visual look that many people find appealing. You might not need a laptop that can survive being in a war zone, but plenty of hackers have picked such machines up on […]
[Corelatus] said recently that “someone” asked them to identify the phone signals in the 1982 film The Wall, based on the Pink Floyd song of the same name. We suspect that, like us, that someone might have been more just the hacker part of the brain asserting itself. Regardless, the detective work is fascinating, and […]
A decade ago, [Jouke Waleson] bought a Dutch ‘model 1950’ PTT (The Dutch Postal Service) rotary-dial telephone of presumably 1950s vintage manufactured by a company called Standard Electric, and decided it would be neat to hack it to function as a Bluetooth hands-free device. Looking at the reverse, however, it is stamped “10.65” on the bottom, so […]