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3 days ago | 
hackaday.com | Dan Maloney
The world’s militaries have always been at the forefront of communications technology. From trumpets and drums to signal flags and semaphores, anything that allows a military commander to relay orders to troops in the field quickly or call for reinforcements was quickly seized upon and optimized. So once radio was invented, it’s little wonder how quickly military commanders capitalized on it for field communications.
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4 days ago | 
hackaday.com | Dan Maloney
Did artificial intelligence just jump the shark? Maybe so, and it came from the legal world of all places, with this report of an AI-generated victim impact statement. In an apparent first, the family of an Arizona man killed in a road rage incident in 2021 used AI to bring the victim back to life to testify during the sentencing phase of his killer’s trial.
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1 week ago | 
hackaday.com | Dan Maloney
Not too long ago, I was searching for ideas for the next installment of the “Big Chemistry” series when I found an article that discussed the world’s most-produced chemicals. It was an interesting article, right up my alley, and helpfully contained a top-ten list that I could use as a crib sheet for future articles, at least for the ones I hadn’t covered already, like the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia. Number one on the list surprised me, though: sulfuric acid.
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1 week ago | 
hackaday.com | Dan Maloney
By now, you’ve probably heard about Kosmos 482, a Soviet probe destined for Venus in 1972 that fell a bit short of the mark and stayed in Earth orbit for the last 53 years. Soon enough, though, the lander will make its fiery return; exactly where and when remain a mystery, but it should be sometime in the coming week.
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1 week ago | 
hackaday.com | Dan Maloney
It’s the podcast so nice we recorded it twice! Despite some technical difficulties (note to self: press the record button significantly before recording the outro), Elliot and Dan were able to soldier through our rundown of the week’s top hacks. We kicked things off with a roundup of virtual keyboards for the alternate reality crowd, which begged the question of why you’d even need such a thing.
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2 weeks ago | 
hackaday.com | Dan Maloney
It’s human nature to look at the technological achievements of the ancients — you know, anything before the 1990s — and marvel at how they were able to achieve precision results in such benighted times. How could anyone create a complicated mechanism without the aid of CNC machining and computer-aided design tools? Clearly, it was aliens.
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3 weeks ago | 
hackaday.com | Dan Maloney
It’s amazing how quickly medical science made radiography one of its main diagnostic tools. Medicine had barely emerged from its Dark Age of bloodletting and the four humours when X-rays were discovered, and the realization that the internal structure of our bodies could cast shadows of this mysterious “X-Light” opened up diagnostic possibilities that went far beyond the educated guesswork and exploratory surgery doctors had relied on for centuries.
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3 weeks ago | 
hackaday.com | Dan Maloney
Building a Commodore 64 is among the easier projects for retrocomputing fans to tackle. That’s because the C64’s core chipset does most of the heavy lifting; source those and you’re probably 80% of the way there. But what if you can’t find those chips, or if you want more of a challenge than plugging and chugging? Are you out of luck? Hardly. The video below from [DrMattRegan] is the first in a series on his scratch-built C64 that doesn’t use the core chipset, and it looks pretty promising.
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3 weeks ago | 
hackaday.com | Dan Maloney
You have to admire the lengths designers went to back in the day to create engaging games and toys. One particularly clever game of this type was called GEE-WIZ, a horse racing game from the 1920s that seems like it might have been right at home at a bar or pub, and that caught [Michael Gardi]’s imagination enough that he built a modern version of the game. GEE-WIZ imitates a horse race with an extremely clever mechanism powered by a flywheel on a square shaft.
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4 weeks ago | 
hackaday.com | Dan Maloney
How it started: a simple repair job on a Roland drum machine. How it ended: a scratch-built FM drum synth module that’s completely analog, and completely cool. [Moritz Klein]’s journey down the analog drum machine rabbit hole started with a Roland TR-909, a hybrid drum machine from the mid-80s that combined sampled sounds with analog synthesis. The unit [Moritz] picked up was having trouble with the decay on the kick drum, so he spread out the gloriously detailed schematic and got to work.
