In the world of information security, much thought goes into ensuring that no information can leave computer networks without expressly being permitted to do so. Conversely, a lot of effort is expended on the part of would-be attackers to break through whatever layers are present. [Halcy] has a way to share data between computers, whether they are networked or not, and it uses ultrasound.

To be fair, this is more of a fun toy than an elite exploit, because it involves a web interface that encodes text as ultrasonic frequency shift keying. Your computer speakers and microphone can handle it, but it’s way above the human hearing range. Testing it here, we were able to send text mostly without errors over a short distance, but at least on this laptop, we wouldn’t call it reliable.

We doubt that many sensitive servers have a sound card and speakers installed where you can overhear them, but by contrast, there are doubtless many laptops containing valuable information, so we could imagine it as a possible attack vector. The code is on the linked page, should you be interested, and if you want more ultrasonic goodness, this definitely isn’t the first time we have touched upon it. While a sound card might be exotic on a server, a hard drive LED isn’t.

For over a decade, most passports have contained an NFC chip that holds a set of electronically readable data about the document and its holder. This has resulted in a much quicker passage through some borders as automatic barriers can replace human officials, but at the same time, it adds an opaque layer to the process. Just what data is on your passport, and can you read it for yourself? [Terence Eden] wanted to find out.

The write-up explains what’s on the passport and how to access it. Surprisingly, it’s a straightforward process, unlike, for example, the NFC on a bank card. Security against drive-by scanning is provided by the key being printed on the passport, requiring the passport to be physically opened.

He notes that it’s not impossible to brute force this key, though doing so reveals little that’s not printed on the document. The write-up reveals a piece of general-purpose technical knowledge we should all know. However, there’s a question we’re left with that it doesn’t answer. If we can read the data on a passport chip, could a passport forger thus create a counterfeit one? If any readers are in the know, we’d be interested to hear more in the comments. If you are into NFC hacking, maybe you need a handy multitool.

Header: [Tony Webster], CC BY-SA 4.0.

We have all suffered from this; the boss wants you to compile a report on the number of paper clips and you’re crawling up the wall with boredom, so naturally your mind strays to other things. You check social media, or maybe the news, and before you know it a while has been wasted. [Neil Chen] came up with a solution, to configure a cheap smart plug with a script to block his diversions of choice.

The idea is simple enough, the plug is in an outlet that requires getting up and walking a distance to access, so to flip that switch you’ve really got to want to do it. Behind it lives a Python script that can be found in a Git Hub repository, and that’s it! We like it for its simplicity and ingenuity, though we’d implore any of you to avoid using it to block Hackaday. Some sites are simply too important to avoid!

Of course, if distraction at work is your problem, perhaps you should simply run something without it.

A favourite thing for the developers behind a complex software project is to embed an Easter egg: something unexpected that can be revealed only by those in the know. Apple certainly had their share of them in their early days, a practice brought to a close by Steve Jobs on his return to the company. One of the last Macs to contain one was the late 1990s beige G3, and while its existence has been know for years, until now nobody has decoded the means to display it on the Mac. Now [Doug Brown] has taken on the challenge.

The Easter egg is a JPEG file embedded in the ROM with portraits of the team, and it can’t be summoned with the keypress combinations used on earlier Macs. We’re taken on a whirlwind tour of ROM disassembly as he finds an unexpected string in the SCSI driver code. Eventually it’s found that formatting the RAM disk with the string as a volume name causes the JPEG to be saved into the disk, and any Mac user can come face to face with the dev team. It’s a joy reserved now for only a few collectors of vintage hardware, but still over a quarter century later, it’s fascinating to learn about. Meanwhile, this isn’t the first Mac easter egg to find its way here.

As we watched the latest SpaceX Starship rocket test end in a spectacular explosion, we might have missed the news from Japan of a different rocket passing a successful test. We all know Honda as a car company but it seems they are in the rocket business too, and they successfully tested a reusable rocket. It’s an experimental 900 kg model that flew to a height of 300 m before returning itself to the pad, but it serves as a valuable test platform for Honda’s take on the technology.

It’s a research project as it stands, but it’s being developed with an eye towards future low-cost satellite launches rather than as a crew launch platform.As a news story though it’s of interest beyond its technology, because it’s too easy to miss news from the other side of the world when all eyes are looking at Texas. It’s the latest in a long line of interesting research projects from the company, and we hope that this time they resist the temptation to kill their creation rather than bring it to market.

When seeing a story from MIT’s Lincoln Labs that promises 3D printing glass, our first reaction was that it might use some rare or novel chemicals, and certainly a super-high-tech printer. Perhaps it was some form of high-temperature laser sintering, unlikely to be within the reach of mere mortals. How wrong we were, because these boffins have developed a way to 3D print a glass-like material using easy-to-source materials and commonly available equipment.

The print medium is sodium silicate solution, commonly known as waterglass, mixed with silica and other inorganic nanoparticles. It’s referred to as an ink, and it appears to be printed using a technique very similar to the FDM printers we all know. The real magic comes in the curing process, though, because instead of being fired in a special furnace, these models are heated to 200 Celsius in an oil bath. They can then be solvent cleaned and are ready for use. The result may not be the fine crystal glass you may be expecting, but we can certainly see plenty of uses for it should it be turned into a commercial product. Certainly more convenient than sintering with a laser cutter.

All-in-one computers in which the mainboard lurked beneath a keyboard were once the default in home computing, but more recently they have been relegated to interesting niche devices such as the Raspberry Pi 400 and 500.

The Bento is another take on the idea, coming at it not with the aim of replacing a desktop machine, instead as a computer for use with wearable display glasses. The thinking goes that when your display is head mounted, why carry around a screen with your laptop.

On top it’s a keyboard, but underneath it’s a compartmentalized space similar to the Japanese lunchboxes which lend the project its name. The computing power comes courtesy of a Steam Deck so it has a USB-C-for-everything approach to plugging in a desktop, though there’s a stated goal to produce versions for other boards such as the Raspberry Pi. There’s even an empty compartment for storage of peripherals.

We like this computer, both for being a cyberdeck and for being without a screen so not quite like the other cyberdecks. It’s polished enough that we could almost imagine it as a commercial product. It’s certainly not the first Steam Deck based cyberdeck we’ve seen.

If you have very old pieces of analogue test equipment with CRTs on your bench, the chances are they will all have surprisingly similar surrounds to their screens. Back when they were made it was common to record oscilloscope screens with a Polaroid camera, that would have a front fitting for just this purpose.

More recent instruments are computerized so taking a screen shot should be easier, but that’s still not easy if the machine can’t save to a handy disk. Along comes [Tom] with a solution, to hook up a fake printer, and grab the screen from a print.

Old instruments come with a variety of ports, serial, IEE-488, or parallel, but they should usually have the ability to print a screen. Then capturing that is a case of capturing an interpreting the print data, be it ESC/P, PCL5, Postscript, or whatever. The linked page takes us through a variety of techniques, and should be of help to anyone who’s picked up a bargain in the flea market.

This isn’t the only time we’ve touched on the subject of bringing older computerized equipment into the present, we’ve also shown you a disk drive emulator.

Thanks [JohnU] for the tip.

The advent of cheap and accessible one-off PCB production has been one of the pivotal moments for electronic experimenters during the last couple of decades. Perhaps a few still etch their own boards, but many hobbiest were happy to put away their ferric chloride. There’s another way to make PCBs, though, which is to mill them. [Tom Nixon] has made a small CNC mill for that purpose, and it’s rather beautiful.

In operation it’s a conventional XYZ mechanism, with a belt drive for the X and Y and a lead screw for the Z axis. The frame is made from aluminium extrusion, and the incidental parts such as the belt tensioners are 3D printed. The write-up is very comprehensive, and takes the reader through all the stages of construction. The brains of the outfit is a Creality 3D printer controller, but he acknowledges that it’s not the best for the job.

It’s certainly not the first PCB router we’ve seen, but it may be one of the nicer ones. If you make a PCB this way, you might like to give it professional-looking solder mask with a laser.

What’s the GitHub repository you have created that you think is of most note? Which one do you think of as your magnum opus, the one that you will be remembered by? Was it the CAD files and schematics of a device for ending world hunger, or perhaps it was software designed to end poverty? Spare a thought for [AasishPokhrel] then, for his latest repository is one that he’ll be remembered by for all the wrong reasons. The poor guy created a repository with a scatalogical name, no doubt to store random things, but had the misfortune to inadvertently create the billionth repository on GitHub.

At the time of writing, the repository sadly contains no commits. But he seems to have won an unexpectedly valuable piece of Internet real estate judging by the attention it’s received, and if we were him we’d be scrambling to fill it with whatever wisdom we wanted the world to see. A peek at his other repos suggests he’s busy learning JavaScript, and we wish him luck in that endeavor.

We think everyone will at some time or another have let loose some code into the wild perhaps with a comment they later regret, or a silly name that later comes back to haunt them. We know we have. So enjoy a giggle at his expense, but don’t give him a hard time. After all, this much entertainment should be rewarded.

When a man wearing an Atari T-shirt tells you he’s buying Commodore it sounds like the plot for an improbable 1980s movie in which Nolan Bushnell and Jack Tramiel do battle before a neon synthwave sunset to a pulsating chiptune soundtrack. But here on the screen there’s that guy doing just that, It’s [Retro Recipes], and in the video below he’s assembling a licensing deal for the Commodore brand portfolio from the distant descendant of the Commodore of old.

It’s a fascinating story and we commend him for tracing a path through the mess that unfolded for Commodore in the 1990s. We tried the same research path with a friend a few years ago and ended up with an anonymous Dutch paper company that wouldn’t answer our calls, so we’re impressed. In conjunction with several other players in the Commodore retrocomputing world he’s trying to assemble a favourable percentage deal for manufacturers of new parts, computers, and other goodies, and we’re pleased to see that it’s for the smaller player as much as for the industry giant.

When looking at a story like this though, it’s important not to let your view become clouded by those rose tinted glasses. While it’s great that we’re likely to see a bunch of new Commodore-branded Commodore 64s and parts, there are many pitfalls in taking it beyond that. We’ve seen the Commodore logo on too many regrettable licensed products in the past, and we fear it might be too tempting for it to end up on yet another disappointing all-in-one video game or just another budget PC. If something new comes out under the Commodore brand we’d like it to be really special, exploiting new ground in the way the Amiga did back in the day. We can hope, because the alternative has dragged other famous brands through the mud in recent years.

If you want an insight into the roots of the original Commodore’s demise, have a read of our Hackaday colleague [Bil Herd]’s autobiography.

Header: Evan-Amos, Public domain.

When you watch a movie and see those perfect focus switches or zooms, the chances are you’re not seeing the result of the cameraman or focus operator manually moving the lens controls. Instead, they will have been planned and programmed in advance and executed by a motor. If you take a close look at many lenses you’ll see a ring that’s more than just extra knurling, it’s a gear wheel for this purpose. Want to experiment with this technique without buying professional grade accessories? [l0u0k0e] has you covered with a 3D printable focus zoom motor accessory.

The motor behind it all is a geared stepper motor, and there are a set of printed parts to complete the model. It’s recommended to use PETG, and nylon for the gears, but it would work in PLA with a shorter life. It’s designed to work with the standard 15 mm tube you’ll find on many camera rigs, and while you can write your own Arduino sketches to control it if you wish, we’re given instructions for hooking it up to existing focus drivers. The model is on Printables, should you wish to try.

This is by no means the first focus puller we’ve seen, in fact you can even use LEGO.

We recently published an affectionate look at a Polaroid Land camera, whose peel-apart instant film is long out of production except for a very few single exposure packs form a boutique manufacturer. All that was left was a discussion of modifying it for conventional roll film, or perhaps hacking a modern back-to-front Polaroid sheet into it.

Never say never though, because along come the Chinese company Light Lens Lab with a short announcement at the end of a post talking about grain structures and anti-halation layer materials for their black and white film.

Lastly, with our future development plan, we are currently developing and researching instant peel-apart film, with plans on producing and making available black and white peel-apart film by 2025 in various format. We aim to have an update on our packaging and test shot for the next development/research progress installment. We are also researching, developing and producing colour reversal films that consist of a dye-incorporating development process, commonly known as K-14, for 135 and 120 formats in 2026.

So there you go, no sooner has Hackaday declared a format unavailable, than it shows every sign of reappearing. At this point we’d like to take the opportunity to report that McDonalds Szechuan Chicken McNugget sauce will never ever be available again.

So what does this mean? First of all, assuming that the stuff doesn’t need the GDP of a small country to buy in Europe, the Hackaday Polaroid 104 will be able to shoot in its native format again. But perhaps more interestingly, it opens up a new option for the camera hacker. Pack film is much easier than modern instant film to deal with; it requires only rollers and someone to tug on that paper tab, no gears or motors involved. We’re here for this.

The observant will also have noted at the end of the announcement, mention of a dye-incorporating development process. This refers to the colour chemistry seen in Kodachrome, a long-extinct single-layer film that offered legendarily sharp and vibrant-coloured pictures at the expense of a very complex development path. We’d love to see it, but we’ll take the instant pack film and run.

The Hackaday Land camera is here.

If you need to weigh your pet, you’ll soon find that getting an animal to stand on a weighing machine to order is very difficult indeed. If the critter in question is a cat or a small dog you can weigh yourself both holding them and not holding them, and compute the difference. But in the case of a full size Bernese mountain dog, the hound is simply too big for that. Lateral thinking is required, and that’s how [Saren Tasciyan] came up with the idea of making a dog bed that’s also a weighing machine. When the mutt settles down, the weight can be read with ease. The bed itself is a relatively straightforward wooden frame, with load cells placed above rubber feet. The load cells in turn talk to an ESP8266 which has an LCD display to deliver the verdict. Dog weighed, without the drama.

This project is of course part of the Hackaday 2025 Pet Hacks contest, an arena in which any of the cool hacks you’ve made to enhance you and your pet’s life together can have an airing. Meanwhile this isn’t the first time this particular pooch has had a starring role; he’s sported a rather fetching barrel in a previous post.

It’s fair to say that there can’t be many developers who have found the need for a rotary telephone dial as a peripheral for their Linux computer, but in case you are among them you might find [Stefan Wiehler]’s kernel driver for rotary dials to be of use.

It’s aimed at platforms such as systems-on-chip that have ready access to extra GPIOs, of which it will need a couple to service the BUSY and PULSE lines. There are full set-up instructions, and once it’s in place and configured it presents the dial as though it were a number pad.

We like this project, in fact we like it a lot. Interfacing with a dial is always something we’ve done with a microcontroller though, so it will be interesting to see whether it finds a use beyond merely curiosity. We can already see a generation of old-school dial IP phones using Linux-capable dev boards. He leaves us with a brief not as to whether Linus Torvalds would see it as worthy of mainline inclusion, and sadly however much we want things to be different, we agree that it might be wishful thinking.

If you’d like to use a dial phone, there can be simpler ways to do it.

Header: Billy Brown, CC BY 2.0 .

At the dawn of the PC, IBM provided the Basic Input Output System (BIOS). It took care of bringing the machine up, and exposed a series of software hooks for the hardware. Over the years the BIOS and its updated descendants served us well, but as we entered a 64-bit world its limitations began to show.

The replacement was the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface or UEFI, and the chances are you’re viewing this on a machine which uses it in some capacity. But what if you only have UEFI and need BIOS to run a piece of older software? Never fear, because here’s CSMWrap, which brings it back, just for you.

Under the hood it’s a wrapper for the SeaBIOS compatibility support module, doing the work of setting up the memory mapping such that it will load, and ensuring that other services such as the VGA BIOS are loaded. As it stands it can boot FreeDOS and some older Windows versions under UEFI in QEMU, and it’s claimed also run on real hardware. We don’t often need to run DOS on our 2025 machine, but it’s neat to know we can.

Meanwhile if the BIOS interests you, know that there’s also an open source BIOS for the earliest of PCs.

BIOS header image: Thomas Schanz, CC BY-SA 4.0.

If you ask someone for a piece of received opinion about Bernese mountain dogs, the chances are that the tale of their carrying barrels of brandy round their necks for the revival of those lost in the snow. It’s a story of uncertain provenance and may indeed be a myth, but that hasn’t stopped [Saren Tasciyan] 3D printing one for their faithful hound. In its own way it too is a saviour, for as well as a small camera, it carries a supply of dog poop bags.

It’s a two part print, held together with strong magnets. Waterproofing is achieved using liberal quantities of hot glue. There’s a protrusion on one side designed to take an action camera for a dog’s-eye-view of the world. The files are downloadable, so your pooch can have one too if you like. We are wondering whether a couple of miniatures of brandy might just fit in there as well.

It’s is part of the 2025 Pet Hacks contest, so if this has whetted your appetite, expect more. If your dog carries around something you’ve made, how about making it an entry of your own?

Part of the charm of having a cat in your life is that by their nature these animals are very interactive. They will tell you in no uncertain terms when something in their lives needs attention, for example when their water dish is empty. But why not give them a drinking fountain all of their own? It’s what [supermarioprof] did for their adorable ginger cat [Piki Piki], providing a cat-operated trickle of water on demand.

It’s a simple enough device in its operation, but very well constructed. There’s a small basin with a train, and a water cistern valve operated by the cat placing a paw on a lever. This starts a trickle of water, from which they can lap as much as they like.

The physical construction comes courtesy of some laser-cut ply, and what looks like some 3D print work. It’s certainly easy to operate for the cat, and has worked reliably for a few years now.

This project is part of the 2025 Pet Hacks contest, so expect to see more in the same vein. If your cat’s life is improved by one of your projects, consider making an entry yourself!

There was a period in the 1990s when it seemed like the personal data assistant (PDA) was going to be the device of the future. If you were lucky you could afford a Psion, a PalmPilot, or even the famous Apple Newton — but to trap the unwary there were a slew of far less capable machines competing for market share.

[Nick Bild] has one of these, branded Rolodex, and in a bid to make using a generative AI less alluring, he’s set it up as the interface to an LLM hosted on a Raspberry Pi 400. This hack is thus mostly a tale of reverse engineering the device’s serial protocol to free it from its Windows application.

Finding the baud rate was simple enough, but the encoding scheme was unexpectedly fiddly. Sadly the device doesn’t come with a terminal because these machines were very much single-purpose, but it does have a memo app that allows transfer of text files. This is the wildly inefficient medium through which the communication with the LLM happens, and it satisfies the requirement of making the process painful.

We see this type of PDA quite regularly in second hand shops, indeed you’ll find nearly identical devices from multiple manufacturers also sporting software such as dictionaries or a thesaurus. Back in the day they always seemed to be advertised in Sunday newspapers and aimed at older people. We’ve never got to the bottom of who the OEM was who manufactured them, or indeed cracked one apart to find the inevitable black epoxy blob processor. If we had to place a bet though, we’d guess there’s an 8051 core in there somewhere.