Category: Rants

Al and I were talking on the podcast today about a sweet 3D printed wide-format camera build, and we got to musing on why we 3D-print. For Al, it’s an opportunity to experiment with 3D printing itself: tweaking his machines to get the best performance out of them. Other people make small, functional objects that […]
An auspicious anniversary passed for me this week, as it’s a decade since I started writing for Hackaday. In that time this job has taken me all over  Europe, it’s shown me the very best and most awesome things our community has to offer, and I hope that you have enjoyed my attempts to share […]
In theory having a single device that combines the features of multiple dedicated devices is a great idea, saving a lot of space, time and money. However, in reality it mostly means that these features now conflict with each other, force us to deal with more complex devices that don’t last nearly as long, and […]
Your project doesn’t necessarily have to be a refined masterpiece to have an impact on the global hacker hivemind. Case in point: this great demo of using a 64-point time-of-flight ranging sensor. [Henrique] took three modules, plugged them into a breadboard, and wrote some very interactive Python code that let him put them all through […]
The media is full of breathless reports that AI can now code and human programmers are going to be put out to pasture. We aren’t convinced. In fact, we think the “AI revolution” is just a natural evolution that we’ve seen before. Consider, for example, radios. Early on, if you wanted to have a radio, […]
Musician Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies are like a Tarot card deck full of whimsical ideas meant to break up a creative-block situation, particularly in the recording studio. They’re loads of fun to pick one at random and actually try to follow the advice, as intended, but some of them are just plain good advice for […]
Anyone who has spent any amount of time in or near people who are really interested in energy policies will have heard proclamations such as that ‘baseload is dead’ and the sorting of energy sources by parameters like their levelized cost of energy (LCoE) and merit order. Another thing that one may have noticed here […]
We were talking on the podcast about rope. But not just any rope – especially non-stretchy rope for using in a mechanical context. The hack in question was a bicycle wheel that swapped out normal metal spokes for lighter and stronger high-density polypropylene weave, and if you can tension up a bike wheel and ride […]
We miss the slide rule. It isn’t so much that we liked getting an inexact answer using a physical moving object. But to successfully use a slide rule, you need to be able to roughly estimate the order of magnitude of your result. The slide rule’s computation of 2.2 divided by 8 is the same […]
My son went over to a friends house this afternoon, when my wife had been planning on helping him with his French homework. This meant she had an hour or so of unexpected free time. Momentarily at a loss, she asked me what she should do, and my reply was “slack off”, meaning do something […]