Category: Software Hacks

[Ryan Flowers] writes in with a clever little hack that can allow you to hide data where nobody is going to go looking for it. By exploiting the fact that a web server will generally log all HTTP requests whether or not it’s valid, he shows how you can covertly send a message by asking […]
One of the core lessons any physics student will come to realize is that the more you know about physics, the less intuitive it seems. Take the nature of light, for example. Is it a wave? A particle? Both? Neither? Whatever the answer to the question, scientists are at least able to exploit some of […]
As the 2019 mushroom foraging season approaches it’s timely to combine my thirst for knowledge about low level machine learning (ML) with a popular pastime that we enjoy here where I live. Just for the record, I’m not an expert on ML, and I’m simply inviting readers to follow me back down some rabbit holes […]
We know the 6502 isn’t exactly the CPU of choice for today’s high-performance software, but with the little CPU having appeared in so many classic computers — the Apple, the KIM-1, The Commodores, to name a few — we have a real soft spot for it. [Janne] has a post detailing the eight best entries […]
Robotics is hard, maybe not quite as difficult as astrophysics or understanding human relationships, but designing a competition winning bot from scratch was never going to be easy. Ok, so [Paul Bupe, Jr’s] robot, named ‘Goose’, did not quite win the competition, but we’re very interested to learn what golden eggs it might lay in […]
If you travel on the British rail system, you’ll be familiar with the ubiquitous orange dot-matrix departure display boards. At a glance they tell you the expected arrival times of the next few trains, where they are headed, and at the bottom the current time.  [Chris Crocker-White] was inspired by a Tweet to recreate one […]
Humans seem to have a need to do things that aren’t practical. Make the biggest ball of twine. Engrave the Declaration of Independence on a grain of rice. We want to make things bigger, smaller, faster, or whatever. That might explain why [nanochess] put out bootBASIC. The 8088 (or later) assembly code gives you a […]
We’ve all come to terms with a neural network doing jobs such as handwriting recognition. The basics have been in place for years and the recent increase in computing power and parallel processing has made it a very practical technology. However, at the core level it is still a digital computer moving bits around just […]
We featured [Fabrizio Di Vittorio]’s FabGL library for the ESP32 back in April of this year. This library allows VGA output using a simple resistor based DAC (3 resistors for 8 colors; 6 resistors for 64 colors), and includes functions for PS/2 mouse and keyboard input, a graphics library, and many of the miscellaneous functions […]
Cloud based IDEs and development tools have grown over the years, though most have limitations in their free tiers and may not be fully compatible with other services such as GitHub. [Aadi Bajpai] loved using PythonAnywhere and to collaborate using GitHub, so he made a update server that automatically updates the running code once you […]