Category: Software Hacks

If you were to troll your colleagues, you can label your office coffee maker any day with a sticker that says ‘voice activated’. Now [edholmes2232] made it actually come true. With Speech2Touch, he grafts voice control onto a Franke A600 coffee machine using an STM32WB55 USB dongle and some clever firmware hacking. The office coffee […]
If we’re talking about oxidized iron… probably nobody. If we’re talking about Rust the programming language, well, that might be a different story. Google agrees, and is working on bringing the language into Android. That’s not enough for [Paul Sanja], who has the first Redox OS smartphone. It’s alive! Redox OS is a Unix-like operating […]
Over this series test-driving operating systems, we’ve tried to bring you the unusual, the esoteric, or the less mainstream among the world of the desktop OS. It would become very boring very quickly of we simply loaded up a succession of Linux distros, so we’ve avoided simply testing the latest Debian, or Fedora. That’s not […]
As the sun sets on Windows 10 support, many venues online decry the tsunami of e-waste Windows 11’s nonsensical hardware requirements are expected to create. Still more will offer advice: which Linux distribution is best for your aging PC? [Sean] from Action Retro has an alternate solution: get a 20 year old Sun Workstation, and […]
emojis. It takes the long-established 7-bit ASCII character set and extends it into multiple bytes to represent many thousands of characters. How it does this may well be beyond that basic grasp, and [Vishnu] is here with a primer that’s both fascinating and easy to read. UTF-8 extends ASCII from codes which fit in a […]
[darrenburns]’ Rich Pixels is a library for sending colorful images to a terminal. Give it an image, and it’ll dump it to your terminal in full color. While it also supports ASCII art, the cool part is how it makes it so easy to display an arbitrary image — a pixel-art rendition of it, anyway […]
Over at Quanta Magazine [Shalma Wegsman] asks What Is the Fourier Transform? [Shalma] begins by telling you a little about Joseph Fourier, the French mathematician with an interest in heat propagation who founded the field of harmonic analysis in the early 1800s. Fourier’s basic insight was that you can represent everything as a sum of […]
Here at Hackaday Central, we fancy that we know a little something about Linux. But if you’d tasked us to run any GUI program inside a Linux terminal, we’d have said that wasn’t possible. But, it turns out, you should have asked [mmulet] who put together term.everything. You might be thinking that of course, you […]
When making a personal website, one will naturally include a personal touch. What could be more personal than creating a font from your own handwriting? That’s what [Chris Smith] has done, and it looks great on his blog, which also has a post summarizing the process. Like most of us [Chris] tried to use open-source […]
If you’re working with a microcontroller that reads a sensor, the chances are that at some point you’re faced with a serial port passing out continuous readings. The workflow of visualizing this data can be tedious, involving a cut-and-paste from a terminal to a CSV file. What if there were a handy all-in-one serial data […]