You might know how to select all by using the Ctrl + A shortcut, but few know that with only one click of the corner button, as shown in the screenshot below, all data will be selected in seconds. When you have different spreadsheets open, it’s really annoying shifting between different files.
Hack a day / // / / / / / / `/ / '/ / `/ / // / `/ // /////,/// ,/ //,/, /retro edition //First person that loads this with a 4004 gets a t-shirtRetro successesThese brave souls have proven their worth by getting a really, really old computer on the internet:cnlohr, the guy who made his own electron microscope and can, found an old green screen CRT while cleaning out a friend's place. He and did the usual text terminal fare; ASCII Star Wars and using lynx to load up the retro site.
It's only a 48-column display, but the retro edition is surprisingly readable. Very cool.Kyle has a. It's a Compaq 486SX overclocked from 25MHz to 33MHz. 20 Megabytes of RAM, network card, and a Soundblaster 16 make this computer from 1993 a very respectable box for old DOS gaming.
It can also browse the web with.Here's a weird one: it's a originally used for a building management display. It has a 10 inch touch screen display at 640x480 resolution and runs Windows CE 5.0. After fiddling with some files, Nick managed to get the networking running on this machine and tried to load Google. Anyone who has played around with the class of machines we seen for retro submissions knows what happened next (nothing), but luckily Nick remembered Hackaday has a retro site. The rest is history.Another old Mac submission,.
It was he first not-all-in-one mac, complete with a NuBus Ethernet card, MacTCP, Netscape 2.02, and a 68020 processor. Not bad for a computer that is coming up on it's 30th trip around the sun.Scott. This was a chore; after getting a serial connection from his SE to the outside world, Scott realized he didn't have a browser on his retro mac. 800k drives are a pain, it seems. He eventually got everything running in a terminal session, and the results are fantastic.Here's another ultraportable from the depths of Curtis' basement. It's a with a 100 MHz Pentium and 64 Megs of RAM.
Here's what Curtis has to say about it: 'Although it now has a 16bit 11Mbps wireless card (rescued from a Netgear MR314 - thus the severed pigtail), getting the drivers on the device was more challenging as I did not manage to scavenge the FDD also, leaving me with no way to get files on/off the device. I did, however, have a Cisco rollover cable, which was promptly plugged into the AUX port of the router and configured as an access server. A Hyperterminal telnet session later and the drivers are happily xmodeming along - the rest is history!'
Eugenio sent in four old laptops he managed to get on the Internet. First up is a running Netscape Communicator 4. There's also a, an and a, one of the last 68k Powerbooks.This one is really cool: Greg has an old Powerbook Duo 2300c that unfortunately lost its screen. No worries, because the screen from a black-and-white Duo 230 fits neatly in its faster PowerPC kin.
After plugging in a DuoDock adapter with built-in Ethernet, Greg was able to get the smallest Mac laptop until the Air on the Interwebs. Pics here:,.It's not one of historical significance, but Victor got a Corel Netwinder to load this site. Built in the late-90s, ran an ARM processor with a hard drive, VGA output, sound, and dual (!) Ethernet. Victor's hard drive has long since bitten its platter, so he's booting it off the network with an old Red Hat distro. Here's.Oh the glory days of the interwebs; back in 1999, we were downloading everything labled 'Metallica' from Napster out of spite, and downloading 700MB rips of John Carpenter movies and the Matrix. Yes, now we can download those same movies in a few minutes as compared to an entire weekend, but the siren inside the modem still calls to us, much like it did to Glen Lashley. Glen had an old, old Compaq Armada 1500c lying around loaded up with Windows 98, 32MB of RAM and an old Pentium II.
(yes, apparently you can still do that), and pulled up this retro site. It's not very old, but we're giving bonus points for the 56k modem.If normal computers aren't your thing, how about some old-school PDAs?
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Andrew Hull had an old Psion 5mx lying around, and needed a project for his new Raspberry Pi. He and connected the Psion serial cable. Using PPPD, Andrew fired up the built-in browser and loaded up the retro site. Here's some pics: and.How about some PowerPC action?
rusbus had an old Power Macintosh 6100 - the first PowerPC Macintosh - and pulled up this site with Internet Explorer 3.01 and an AAUI ethernet tranciever. Here's some pics:. Nice job, rusbus.What do you do if your retro computer doesn't have a web browser? Well, you could do what azog did and write an.
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Yes, it's crazy.Giovanni used, a VT100 terminal, and a macbook to load this up. The Apple IIc+ doesn't get enough love: 3.5' disks are awesome, and the integrated power supply makes it the ideal Apple II machine for today.leadacid can't get enough of this retro site.
He had an IBM RS/6000 running AIX lying around and pulled up this page. This beast of a machine uses a POWER2 processor running at 67 MHz and most likely cost tens of thousands of dollars in its prime.Another OS/2 Warp submission! Chris had an HP Omnibook 800CT lying around.
Pentium 166MHz running Opera 5.Witek got a Wyse thin client. It only had a 300MHz Geode GX1 CPU, and 32MB of RAM.
Usually, this thing boots Windows CE off a small Flash drive, but Witek put GRUB on the box and booted Debian Squeeze off a USB Flash drive. We have a little experience with these Wyse thin clients, and we assure you they're crappy enough to make the cut for a retro success.leadacid sent in. First one is a Power Macintosh 8100/80, the high-end, first generation PowerPC Macintosh.
We're a ambivilant over the PowerPC, but is the bees knees. (arguably) the best 68k Mac. Nice job.Lunatic loaded up this site on his Commodore 64 with a 64NIC. His is really cool: it's also going for the retro 1993-era HTML this site strives for.
Oh why didn't I think of PETCII?Here's a 486 running Trumped Winsock (pic and ). It's Mark's old machine that he uses to play DOOM and a few other old games. Here's the specs: 486DX running at 133MHz, 16 MB of RAM, a Sound Blaster 16 ISA, 3Com ISA network card, and Windows 3.1 running Netscape 4.07.Santiago Crespo Castillo's Toshiba T1850 - a wonderful 386 machine with 4MB of RAM. Here's some pics:,.azog didn't want to use Lynx, so he connected an.
This was cool enough to make the.logik's old Commodore 64 with a little help from Ubuntu, a copy of Novaterm, a null modem cable. This is one of the best retro entries we've seen - logik threw together a serial level converter with an MAX232 chip (dead bug style gets extra points). Bravo.Here's Chris Osborn's (a.k.a. @FozzTexx)Malvineous put a DEC VT320 serial terminal from 1989 back into service as a serial console for a Linux machine.
Logging in and running made it easy to access the web. Surprisingly, Malvineous reports the terminal had to be switched to VT100 compatibility mode to work correctly, as the VT320 is just a bit too advanced for Linux. Here's aTheOneTrueStickman sent in three pics (, ) of an IBM Thinkpad 380D. Here's what he had to say: 'I just dug out my IBM Thinkpad 380D - I think the oldest (complete) piece of PC kit I've got - and loaded up the retro page. I used linksbrowser from the terminal and then from an xterm in X (fluxbox).
It's running Debian Lenny, which tells you how long it's been since I booted this thing.leadacid sent in four retro successes. The most interesting is an old running OS/2 Warp 4.5 (remember that?) There's also, on a Thinkpad T20, and a Thinkpad i-Series 1400 running. Nice work.RetroAppleFanToday used his Apple IIc as a terminal to connect to his mac. From there, running lynx and pulling up the retro site was a piece of cake. Awesome job, RetroAppleFan.Dylan Jesernik loaded up this page with his awesome NEXT cube! (, ) He telnetted into a WRT54g, then sshed into his Macbook Air and used and used w3m to view this site. You know the first browser was written on a NEXT cube, right?moontear loaded up the retro edition© 2012 hackaday.com.
All Rights Reserved.
Go — a modern programming language with roots at Google — is one of the new generation languages that would like to unseat C (and C) for what we think of as traditional programming. It is only for PCs, though, right? Provides a compiler that — in their words — is for small places. They can target code for the Arduino Uno or the BBC micro:bit.
It can also produce code for x86 or ARM Linux (both 32- and 64-bit) as well as WebAssembly. They claim that a recent project to add ESP8266 and EPS32 support to LLVM will eventually enable TinyGo to target those platforms, too.As you would expect, there are some subtle differences between TinyGo and the full-blown version.
The compiler handles the entire program at once which is slower but offers more for optimization. Certain optimizations for interface methods are not used in TinyGo, and global variable handling changes to accommodate moving data from flash to RAM efficiently. TinyGo passes parameters in registers.Posted in, Tagged,. This story started all the way back in September 12, 1981, when an F-15C aircraft’s landing attempt at Soesterberg Airbase during an airshow went completely FUBAR and the airframe was scrapped.
The forward fuselage section was sold and eventually ended up with Gene Buckle who began work on creating a fully accurate F-15C simulator using these parts. He has blogged about his progress since 2009 over at.The F-15C was number, which at the time of the crash had flown only 9.5 hours total, making it a very early retirement for an incredible fighter jet. But now, or at least part of it: Gene managed to get the whole system into a state where the instrumentation and controls work again, using the original computer systems and instruments where they were still usable. You can find the YouTube video embedded after the break as well.Detailed technical information on the F-15 series and this simulator build can be found on the project site, which is awesome both for F-15 fans and those who are into really accurate simulators.Posted in, Tagged.
It’s not uncommon to find us doodling on paper as an aid to thinking, for recreation, or simply because we’re bored. But, this kind of manual labor is so last century. It’s 2019, and we should have robots to fill our notebooks with cross-hatched illustrations. Well, Alex Weber is way ahead of us on this account: the can be unleashed to draw all manner of things at his command.The robot, named Mechpen, and pronounced “McPen”, is of a SCARA (Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm) design, with two parallel axes controlling the x-y movement of the arm. Robot design is always a series of trade-offs; in this case, Alex has sacrificed some accuracy to achieve a long reach. Two NEMA 23 stepper motors reside in the base, along with all the electronics. This makes the base a heavy 15 kg, which is good as it helps stabilize the arm during movement.
The arm uses a mix of off-the-shelf and custom hardware, most of which is dotted with holes drilled to reduce the mass of the moving parts. Two 700 mm sections of the arm made from carbon fiber tubes give the drawbot a 140 cm reach — long enough to fill an A0 paper with its beautiful mechanical doodling.The brains behind the arm are two-tiered. An Einsy RAMBo board, designed for 3D printers, controls the stepper motors. Above that, a Raspberry Pi runs Octoprint to control the ‘bot. This choice turned out to be very convenient for working around a mechanical issue: the elbow flexes too far in the Z-axis.
The difference in pen height between the elbow at 90 vs 180 degrees was 20-25 mm; too much to fix with just a spring-loaded pen. The solution: use a bed-leveling algorithm designed for 3D printers. A VL6180X distance sensor measures the distance to the paper over a number of grid points, then the software moves the servo up and down accordingly while drawing to keep the pen on the paper.Some custom-written software converts SVG graphic files to gcode suitable for printing, allows selection of different stroke and fill types, and separation of different colors into individual gcode files to be plotted with different pens.Definitely check out the video of Mechpen in action, after the break.Posted in, Tagged. Conceptually, cooking on a grill is simple enough: just crank up the flames and leave the food on long enough for it to cook through, but not so long that it turns into an inedible ember. But when smoking, the goal is actually to prevent flames entirely; the food is cooked by the circulation of hot gasses generated by smoldering wood.
If you want a well-cooked and flavorful meal, you’ll need the patience and dedication to manually keep the fuel and air balanced inside the smoker for hours on end.Or in the case of the Smokey Mc Smokerson, while you go watch TV. Powered by the Raspberry Pi Zero and a custom control board, this open source smoker offers high-end capabilities on a DIY budget. Granted you’ll still need to add the fuel of your choice the old fashioned way, but with automatic air flow control and temperature monitoring, it greatly reduces the amount of fiddly work required to get that perfect smoke.HackersHub has been working on Smokey Mc Smokerson for a few months now, and are getting very close to building the first complete prototype. The initial version of the software is complete, and the classy black PCBs have recently arrived. Some simulations have been performed to get an idea of how the smoke will circulate inside of the smoker itself, built from a 55 gallon drum, but technically the controller is a stand-alone device.
If you’re willing to makes the tweaks necessary, the controller could certainly be retrofitted to commercially available smoker instead.Ultimately, this project boils down to tossing a bunch of temperature sensors at the problem. The software developed by HackersHub takes the data collected by the five MAX6675 thermocouples and uses it to determine when to inject more air into the chamber using a PWM-controlled fan at the bottom of the smoker. As an added bonus, all those temperature sensors give the user plenty of pretty data points to look at in the companion smartphone application.We’ve actually seen a fair number of technologically-augmented grills over the years.
To, we can confidently say that not all hackers are living on a diet of microwaved ramen. This is a fantastic summer for hacker camps and I was very happy to make it to this year. This week-long camp attracts hackers from all over Europe and the mix of a few hundred friends and soon-to-be friends who gathered on the Danish island of Fyn delivered a unique experience for the curious traveller.The camp takes place at the Hylkedam Danish scout camp, located in a forest amid the rolling Danish famland not too far from the small town of Gelsted.
It’s a few kilometres from a motorway junction, but easy enough to find after the long haul up from the UK via the Channel Tunnel. As an aside, every bored cop between France and the Danish border wanted to stop my 20-year-old right-hand-drive Volkswagen on UK plates, but soon lost interest after walking up to the passenger side and finding no driver. It seems Brits are considered harmless, which is good to hear.Hylkedam is at the end of a long dirt track, which opens out into a spacious campsite with good quality permanent facilities. At a guess it is a former sand quarry or similar as it seems to be set below the level of the forrest, as well as having what appears to be a former railway cutting that conveniently housed the bar. The hot tub in its woodland surroundings became a popular place to unwind. Thanks for the image.A wellness area was placed in the forest, including for a unique experience among hacker camps.
There were three camping zones separated by trees, the main site, with noisy and quiet fields on opposite sides of it. With only a few hundred attendees who by no means filled the available space there was plenty of room for expansion here. As one of very few Brits I pitched myself between the Labitat Copenhagen hackerspace village and the Netherlands village, and threw my lot in with my Dutch friends. A Less Frantic Pace Of Life Means More Time For Important Stuff This should give a flavour of the rural atmosphere of the Hylkedam site.The larger camps are very high-energy affairs, in which everyone is busy showing of their work and in which it feels impossible to catch everything.
By contrast this smaller camp was much more relaxed, with an emphasis on hanging out and more time to get to know people. My impression was that more of the attendees were from a software or infosec background than a hardware one, so some of the builds such as EMF Camp’s Hacky Racers or CCCamp’s home made trains were absent. This did not detract from the experience for the visitor because there was still plenty with which to keep occupied in the talk schedule, and if that was not enough there were still the sights of Denmark to provide plenty of distraction.Posted in, Tagged. There is a treasure trove of history locked away in closets and attics, where old shoeboxes hold reels of movie film shot by amateur cinematographers. They captured children’s first steps, family vacations, and parties where Uncle Bill was getting up to his usual antics. Little of what was captured on thousands of miles of 8-mm and Super 8 film is consequential, but giving a family the means to see long lost loved ones again can be a powerful thing indeed.That was the goal of Anton Gutscher’s. Yes, commercial services exist that will digitize movies, slides, and snapshots, but where’s the challenge in that?
And a challenge is what it ended up being. Aside from designing and printing something like 27 custom parts, Anton also had a custom PCB fabricated for the control electronics. Film handling is done with a stepper motor that moves one frame into the scanner at a time for scanning and cropping. An LCD display allows the archivist to move the cropping window around manually, and individual images are strung together with ffmpeg running on the embedded Raspberry Pi. There’s a brief clip of film from a 1976 trip to Singapore in the video below; we find the quality of the digitized film remarkably good.Hats off to Anton for stepping up as the family historian with this build. We’ve seen before, but few this polished looking. We’ve also featured other archival attempts before, like this.Posted in, Tagged,.
Potentially coming to a service station near you.In every comment section, there’s always one. No matter the electric vehicle, no matter how far the technology has come, there’s always one.“Only 500 miles of range?
Electric cars are useless! Me, and everyone I know, drives 502 miles every day at a minimum! Having to spend more than 3 minutes to recharge is completely offensive to my entire way of life. Simply not practical, and never will be.”Yes, it’s true, electric cars do have limited range and can take a little longer to recharge than a petrol or diesel powered vehicle. Improvements continue at a rapid pace, but it’s not enough for some.To these diehards, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles may have some attractive benefits. By passing hydrogen gas through a proton-exchange membrane, electricity can be generated cleanly with only water as a byproduct.
The technology holds a lot of promise for powering vehicles, but thus far hasn’t quite entered our daily lives yet. So what is the deal with hydrogen as a transport fuel, and when can we expect to see them in numbers on the ground? Finally, A Clean Fuel?Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, as far as we currently understand it, and is present in great quantities in our oceans too.
Readily available through the electrolysis of water and other chemical methods, it has yet to be used as a mainstream fuel. Hydrogen has many benefits, but also a few key drawbacks, and these all impact its potential use in vehicles. Pros Hydrogen can be produced relatively cleanly, if renewable energy is used.Hydrogen is easy to find – every water molecule has two hydrogen atoms just sitting there, ripe for the taking. The simplest way to obtain it in pure form is through electrolysis, which can be a relatively clean process when powered by renewable sources of electricity. In many processes, it can also be used as a fuel while creating minimal pollution. When used to generate electricity in a fuel cell, the only byproduct is pure water. As the clock ticks down in the race to prevent irreversible climate crisis, these attributes make hydrogen a highly attractive choice for future energy needs.As far as vehicles are concerned, being a liquid fuel, hydrogen has a big leg up on battery technologies.
Refilling a tank can be achieved in a handful of minutes, something not yet possible with even the fastest charging electric vehicles. This promises to ease long trips and remove the spectre of range anxiety.
Cons Storage of hydrogen for transport use requires placing it under immense pressure in specially designed tanks. The official engineering term is that it’s “a bit of a pain”.Hydrogen is highly flammable, something that humanity usually prizes in its liquid fuels. However, combined with the difficulty of containing the tiny atoms, this flammability is an outsized risk when handling hydrogen. Additionally, to store hydrogen in a compact and practical way for transport and energy use requires placing it under immense pressure, further compounding the problem.Thus far, hydrogen also faces the classic chicken-and-egg problem of infrastructure.
There are few hydrogen vehicles on the road, so there is little incentive to invest in a network of hydrogen refuelling stations. Conversely, as there are few refuelling stations, there is little demand for hydrogen vehicles.The problems extend to distribution, as well. Unlike electricity, which can be sent down simple wires, hydrogen has to be delivered through tankers or pipelines.
For trucks, safe storage is a problem once more, along with the fact that carting hydrogen around necessarily takes energy. Pipelines pose further problems, as hydrogen tends to cause embrittlement in metals and requires special management to deliver safely. We’ve covered the topic before, The Current State of Play The Toyota Mirai.
The Hyundai Nexo.There’s a long list of hangups holding hydrogen back from the mainstream. On top of this, the automotive industry has invested heavily in battery electric technologies. As the range of battery electric vehicles increases, and recharge times drop, the main competitive advantage of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is being eroded, all before they hit the marketplace in real numbers.Despite this, there are hydrogen vehicles on the market today. Hyundai are currently selling their new Nexo fuel cell vehicle in Europe, with limited numbers reaching Australia and California. Toyota have been selling the Mirai in markets with suitable infrastructure since 2014, and Honda’s FCX Clarity has also been available on a series of limited lease programs since 2008.
Automakers have thus far kept a tight leash on these vehicles, as it remains impractical to sell them in areas without hydrogen refuelling stations. Unlike electric vehicles, installing a refuelling station at a customer’s home isn’t really an option either, further limiting the rollout.Prices of fuel cell vehicles are exceptionally high, too – with a Nexo SUV retailing around $60,000 USD.
This is largely due to the high cost of the fuel cell technology, which relies heavily on platinum and doesn’t yet enjoy the benefits of economies of scale. While stunts like, it seems that consumer demand remains too low to push wider acceptance. Potential For The Future If fuel cells ever become common in off-road vehicles, expect some truly compelling survivalist tales.With EV recharging stations beginning to spread like wildfire, and ranges increasing with each new model, it may seem that battery EVs have an unassailable lead.
With that said, there are still many edge cases where humble hydrogen may yet find its place in the market.Battery EVs are great for urban commuters who travel only short distances each day. At the same time, for those stuck street parking on a regular basis, accessing charging infrastructure can be incredibly frustrating. Those with parking at their apartments may struggle to lobby for charger installation, too. For these people, the idea of a simple weekly fill up is far more palatable than spending an hour a week sitting at the service station.Another area which may be well served by hydrogen is in larger vehicles.
Buses and trucks often travel long distances in a single day. Drivers and operators don’t always have the time to take a vehicle out of commission to charge for hours, either. In these applications, hydrogen may serve as an easy way to reduce emissions. Additionally, many of these vehicles are operated out of depots serving many vehicles, which are already set up for refuelling. Installing hydrogen infrastructure on site would be relatively simple for a single refuelling point such as this.There’s also the potential for fuel cells to act as a range-extender for battery electric vehicles. Whether as an add-on module, or an option at order time, it would be simple to integrate fuel cells into an electric vehicle to enable it to undertake longer trips without having to charge for excessively long periods.While hydrogen doesn’t look like it will knock battery EVs out of the market any time soon, it may yet find its place in the market. Whether in heavy haulage, or as an alternative to batteries, it’s likely to be around for a while yet.
Only time will tell! Posted in, Tagged, Posts navigation.