Sometimes a write-up of a piece of retrocomputing hardware goes way beyond the hardware itself and into the industry that spawned it, and thus it is with [OldVCR]’s resurrection of a Blasto arcade board from 1978. It charts the history of Gremlin Industries, a largely forgotten American pioneer in the world of arcade games, and though it’s a long read it’s well worth it.

The board itself uses an Intel 8080, and is fairly typical of microcomputer systems from the late 1970s. Wiring it up requires a bit of detective work, particularly around triggering the 8080’s reset, but eventually it’s up and playing with a pair of Atari joysticks. The 8080 is a CPU we rarely see here.

The history of the company is fascinating, well researched, and entertaining. What started as an electronics business moved into wall games, early coin-op electronic games, and thence into the arcade segment with an 8080 based system that’s the precursor of the one here. They even released a rather impressive computer system based on the same hardware, but since it was built into a full-sized desk it didn’t sell well. For those of us new to Gremlin Industries the surprise comes at the end, they were bought by Sega and became that company’s American operation. In that sense they never went away, as their successor is very much still with us. Meanwhile if you have an interest in the 8080, we have been there for you.

If you’re a regular GitHub user you’ll be familiar with the website’s graphical calendar display of activity as a grid. For some of you it will show a hive of activity, while for others it will be a bit spotty. If you’re proud of your graph though, you’ll want to show it off to the world, and that’s where [HarryHighPants]’ Git Contributions E-Ink Display comes in. It’s a small desktop appliance with a persistent display, that shows the current version of your GitHub graph.

At its heart is an all-in-one board with the display and an ESP32 on the back, with a small Li-Po cell. It’s all put in a smart 3D printed case. The software is the real trick, with a handy web interface from which you can configure your GitHub details.

It’s a simple enough project, but it joins a growing collection which use an ESP32 as a static information display. The chip is capable of more though, as shown by this much more configurable device.

Some time last year, a weird thing happened in the hackerspace where this is being written. The Internet was up, and was blisteringly fast as always, but only a few websites worked. What was up? Fortunately with more than one high-end networking specialist on hand it was quickly established that we had a problem with our gateway’s handling of IPv4 addresses, and normal service was restored. But what happens if you’re not a hackerspace with access to the dodgy piece of infrastructure and you’re left with only IPv6? [James McMurray] had this happen, and has written up how he fixed it.

His answer came in using a Wireguard tunnel to his VPS, and NAT mapping the IPv4 space into a section of IPv6 space. The write-up goes into extensive detail on the process should you need to follow his example, but for us there’s perhaps more interest in why here in 2025, the loss of IPv4 is still something that comes with the loss of half the Internet. As of this writing, that even includes Hackaday itself. If we had the magic means to talk to ourselves from a couple of decades ago our younger selves would probably be shocked by this.

Perhaps the answer lies in the inescapable conclusion that IPv6 answers an address space problem of concern to many in technical spaces, it neither solves anything of concern to most internet users, nor is worth the switch for so much infrastructure when mitigations such as NAT make the IPv4 address space problem less of a problem. Will we ever entirely lose IP4? We’d appreciate your views in the comments. For readers anxious for more it’s something we looked at last year.

Normally when a government extends a piece of copyright law we expect it to be in the favour of commercial interests with deep pockets and little care for their consumers. But in Denmark they do things differently it seems, which is why they are giving Danes the copyright over their own features such as their faces or voices. Why? To combat deepfakes, meaning that if you deepfake a Dane, they can come after you for big bucks, or indeed kronor. It’s a major win, in privacy terms.

You might of course ask, whether it’s now risky to photograph a Dane. We are not of course lawyers here but like any journalists we have to possess a knowledge of how copyright works, and we are guessing that the idea in play here is that of passing off. If you take a photograph of a Volkswagen you will have captured the VW logo on its front, but the car company will not sue you because you are not passing off something that’s not a Volkswagen as the real thing. So it will be with Danes; if you take a picture of their now-copyrighted face in a crowd you are not passing it off as anything but a real picture of them, so we think you should be safe.

We welcome this move, and wish other countries would follow suit.

Pope Francis, Midjourney, Public domain, (Which is a copyright story all of its own!)

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 .