Category: Software Hacks

3D scanning is becoming much more accessible, which means it’s more likely that the average hacker will use it to solve problems — possibly odd ones. That being the case, a handy tool to have in one’s repertoire is a way to work with point clouds. We’ll explain why in a moment, but that’s where […]
A spectrometer is one of those tools that many of us would love to have, but just can’t justify the price of. Sure there are some DIY options out there, but few of them have the convenience or capability of what’s on the commercial market. [Chris] from Zoid Technology recently found a portable spectrometer complete […]
We recently got a note in the tips line from [Tavis Gustafson], who is one of the developers of Tronbyt — a replacement firmware and self-hosted backend that breaks the Tidbyt smart display free from its cloud dependency. When they started the project, [Tavis] says the intent was simply to let privacy-minded users keep their […]
It doesn’t matter if its a Vespa or a Peterbilt truck — if you ignore the maintenance needs of your vehicle, you do so at your own peril. But it can be difficult enough to keep track of basic oil changes, to say nothing of keeping records on what parts were changed when. Instead of […]
Recently Raspberry Pi publicly announced the release of their new rpi-image-gen tool, which is advertised as making custom Raspberry Pi OS (i.e. Debian for specific Broadcom SoCs) images in a much more streamlined fashion than with the existing rpi-gen tool, or with third-party solutions. The general idea seems to be that the user fetches the […]
Cloudflare has gotten more active in its efforts to identify and block unauthorized bots and AI crawlers that don’t respect boundaries. Their solution? AI Labyrinth, which uses generative AI to efficiently create a diverse maze of data as a defensive measure. This is an evolution of efforts to thwart bots and AI scrapers that don’t […]
Surely by now you’ve at least heard of RTL-SDR — a software project that let’s cheap TV tuner dongles work as a software-defined radios. A number of projects and tools have spun off the original effort, but in his latest video, [Tech Minds] shows off a particularly unique take. It’s a Web browser-based radio application […]
Do you like high-detail 3D models intended for resin printing, but wish you could more easily print them on a filament-based FDM printer? Good news, because [Jacob] of Painted4Combat shared a tool he created to make 3D models meant for resin printers — the kind popular with tabletop gamers — easier to port to FDM. […]
Some slicers have introduced brick layers, and more slicers plan to add them. Until that happens, you can use this new script from [Geek Detour] to get brick layer goodness on Prusa, Orca, and Bambu slicers. Check out the video below for more details. The idea behind brick layers is that outer walls can be […]
Shell scripting is an often forgotten programming environment, relegated to simple automation tasks and little else. In fact, it’s possible to achieve much more complex tasks in the shell. As an example, here’s [calebccf] with an emulated 6502 system in a busybox ash shell script. What’s in the emulator? A simple 6502 system with RAM, […]