It’s likely that Hackaday readers have among them a greater than average number of people who can name one special thing they did on September 23rd, 2002. On that day a new web browser was re…

When you’re like [Wes] from Watch Wes Work fame, you don’t have a CNC machine hoarding issue, you just have a healthy interest in going down CNC machine repair rabbit holes. Such too wa…

Once upon a time, owning a calculator watch was the epitome of cool. Well, for a very specific subset of the population with our own definition of “cool” anyway. The only thing cooler t…

If you’ve ever used an NE602 or similar IC to build a radio, you might have noticed that the datasheet has a “gilbert cell” mixer. What is that? [Electronics for the Inquisitive E…

On November 18 of 2025 a large part of the Internet suddenly cried out and went silent, as Cloudflare’s infrastructure suffered the software equivalent of a cardiac arrest. After much panicke…

Since the dawn of computers, we’ve tried different ways to store data. These days, you grab data over the network, but you probably remember using optical disks, floppies, or, more recently, …

Have you ever wondered what goes into making it possible to use the restroom at 30,000 feet (10,000 m)? [Jason Torchinsky] at the Autopian recently gave us an interesting look at the history of the…

The original Xbox was different from the consoles that had gone before, in that its hardware shared much with a PC of the day. It was found to be hackable, and one of the most successful projects t…

You may have noticed that large pieces of the Internet were down on Tuesday. It was a problem at Cloudflare, and for once, it wasn’t DNS. This time it was database management, combined with a…

Have trouble sleeping, or getting to sleep in the first place? You’ve no doubt heard of white noise machines, but know it would be much cooler to make your own. Enter Noise Maker, a DIY sound…

Wait, what? Is it time for the podcast again? Seems like only yesterday that Dan joined Elliot for the weekly rundown of the choicest hacks for the last 1/52 of a year. but here we are. We had quit…

When people talk about the lack of a DOOM being the doom Commodore home computers, they aren’t talking about the C64, which was deep into obsolescence when demon-slaying suddenly became the m…

For those of you who haven’t spent time in North America around this time of year, you may be unaware of two things: one, the obligatory non-stop loop of “All I Want For Christmas Is Yo…

[Andrew Greenberg] has some specific ideas for how open-source hardware hackers could do a better job with their KiCad schematics. In his work with students at Portland State University, [Andrew] f…

You have that slide rule in the back of the closet. Maybe it was from your college days. Maybe it was your Dad’s. Honestly. Do you know how to use it? Really? All the scales? That’s wha…

The history of the game Zork is a long and winding one, starting with MUDs and kin on university mainframes – where students entertained themselves in between their studies – and ending…

There’s more to making an oscillator than meets the eye, and [lcamtuf] is here with a good primer on the subject. It starts with the old joke that if you need an oscillator it’s best to…

We absolutely adore inspired labor-of-love tales such as this one. [Alastair] wanted to build a synth for his daughter’s third birthday in spite of having no prior hardware knowledge. It beca…

One of our newer writers, [Tyler August], recently wrote a love letter to plasma TV technology. Sitting between the ubiquitous LCD and the vanishing CRT, the plasma TV had its moment in the sun, bu…

That macOS (formerly OS X) has BSD roots is a well-known fact, with its predecessor NeXTSTEP and its XNU kernel derived from 4.3BSD. Subsequent releases of OS X/macOS then proceeded to happily copy…