Author: Bryan Cockfield

1696 Articles

Channel Surfing Nostalgia Machine

October 17, 2025 by 5 Comments

As any generation of people get older, they tend to look back fondly on their formative years when there was less responsibility and more wonder. Even if things have objectively improved, we often have a fondness for the past. Such is the case for cable television, where even though ads were everywhere and nothing was on-demand, we can see that something was lost from this era in the modern streaming ecosystem. [Ricardo] brought back the good parts of this golden era of cable TV with this small channel surfing television.

The project attempts to keep the good parts of this era while discarding things we certainly don’t miss. The ability to channel surf is still here, with a rotary encoder standing in for an antique television channel selector knob, but dealing with any telecommunications company is out, including those of the Internet variety. Instead it is a fully offline machine with the user able to curate their own channels and programming with a Flask application, and [Ricardo]’s includes his own collection of commercials from Argentina.

The hardware itself is fairly straightforward as well, with a Raspberry Pi doing the heavy lifting, paired with a small screen and enclosed in a retro-themed television case. It’s a clever throwback to a time where we might not know what we wanted to see but there was always something on. Builds like this are gaining popularity right now as well, and we’ve even seen them recreate the cable company’s preview channel as well.

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A New Golden Age Of Browser Games

October 17, 2025 by 20 Comments

Arguably, the golden age of browser gaming occurred in the 00s mostly revolving around Adobe Flash. This was an era with high creativity and a low barrier of entry, and also decentralized from gatekeeping app stores. Sadly, these times have passed us by as the security concerns around Flash led to its discontinuation and most casual gamers have migrated to the app store for their fix. But that doesn’t stop some from continuing to bring gaming to the browser, even if those games were never intended for it in the first place like this browser port of Celeste.

Celeste is an indie platformer where the player climbs a mysterious mountain while confronting her inner struggles. Originally meant for consoles and PC, a group of friends including [velzie], [bomberfish], and [Toshit] aka [r58Playz] took this as a challenge especially after seeing someone else’s half finished web port of this game. Most of the build revolves around WebAssembly (wasm) and around “cursed” .NET runtime hacks which also allow the port to run the community-made Everest mod loader. It uses a multithreaded and JIT compiling version of mono-wasm backported from .NET 10 to .NET 9 to maximize performance. The team actually first started by porting Terraria to the browser, and then moved on to this Celeste port from there.

The port of Celeste can be played here, and their port of Terraria is also available, although may not support a ton of Hackaday traffic so some patience is advised. There are also GitHub repositories for Celeste and Terraria as well.  With impressive ports of relatively modern games moving into the browser, perhaps we’re entering a new golden age of browser gaming; we’ve also seen things like Minecraft implemented in only HTML and CSS lately as well.

A Tale Of Two Car Design Philosophies

October 16, 2025 by 114 Comments

As a classic car enthusiast, my passion revolves around cars with a Made in West Germany stamp somewhere on them, partially because that phrase generally implied a reputation for mechanical honesty and engineering sanity. Air-cooled Volkswagens are my favorites, and in fact I wrote about these, and my own ’72 Super Beetle, almost a decade ago. The platform is incredibly versatile and hackable, not to mention inexpensive and repairable thanks to its design as a practical, affordable car originally meant for German families in the post-war era and which eventually spread worldwide. My other soft-spot is a car that might seem almost diametrically opposed to early VWs in its design philosophy: the Mercedes 300D. While it was a luxury vehicle, expensive and overbuilt in comparison to classic Volkswagens, the engineers’ design choices ultimately earned it a reputation as one of the most reliable cars ever made.

As much as I appreciate these classics, though, there’s almost nothing that could compel me to purchase a modern vehicle from either of these brands. The core reason is that both have essentially abandoned the design philosophies that made them famous in the first place. And while it’s no longer possible to buy anything stamped Made in West Germany for obvious reasons, even a modern car with a VIN starting with a W doesn’t carry that same weight anymore. It more likely marks a vehicle destined for a lease term rather than one meant to be repaired and driven for decades, like my Beetle or my 300D.

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Attack Turns Mouse Into Microphone

October 15, 2025 by 14 Comments

As computer hardware gets better and better, most of the benefits are readily apparent to users. Faster processors, less power consumption, and lower cost are the general themes here. But sometimes increased performance comes with some unusual downsides. A research group at the University of California, Irvine found that high-performance mice have such good resolution that they can be used to spy on a user’s speech or other sounds around them.

The mice involved in this theoretical attack need to be in the neighborhood of 20,000 dpi, as well as having a relatively high sampling rate. With this combination it’s possible to sense detail fine enough to resolve speech from the vibrations of the mouse pad. Not only that, but the researchers noted that this also enables motion tracking of people in the immediate vicinity as the vibrations caused by walking can also be decoded. The attack does require a piece of malware to be installed somewhere on the computer, but the group also theorize that this could easily be done since most security suites don’t think of mouse input data as particularly valuable or vulnerable.

Even with the data from the mouse, an attacker needs a sophisticated software suite to be able to decode and filter the data to extract sounds, and the research team could only extract around 60% of the audio under the best conditions. The full paper is available here as well. That being said, mice will only get better from here so this is certainly something to keep an eye on. Mice aren’t the only peripherials that have roundabout attacks like this, either.

Thanks to [Stephen] for the tip!

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Factorio Running On Mobile

October 15, 2025 by 27 Comments

As a video game, DOOM has achieved cult status not just for its legendary gameplay and milestone developments but also because it’s the piece of software that’s likely been ported to the most number of platforms. Almost everything with a processor can run the 1993 shooter, but as it ages, this becomes less of a challenge. More modern games are starting to move into this position, and Factorio may be taking a leading position. [Point Substantial] has gotten this game to run on a mobile phone.

The minimum system requirements for Factorio are enough to make this a challenge, especially compared to vintage title like DOOM. For Linux systems a dual-core processor and 8 GB of memory are needed, as well as something with at least 1 GB of VRAM. [Point_Substantial]’s Xiaomi Mi 9T almost meets these official minimum requirements, with the notable exception of RAM. This problem was solved by adding 6 GB of swap space to make up for the difference.

The real key to getting this running is that this phone doesn’t run Android, it runs the Linux-only postmarketOS. Since it’s a full-fledged Linux distribution rather than Android, it can run any software any other Linux computer can, including Steam. And it can also easily handle inputs for periphreals including a Switch Pro controller, which is important because this game doesn’t have touch inputs programmed natively.

The other tool that [Point_Substantial] needed was box86/box64, a translation layer to run x86 code on ARM. But with all the pieces in place it’s quite possible to run plenty of games semi-natively on a system like this. In fact, we’d argue it’s a shame that more phones don’t have support for Linux distributions like postmarketOS based on the latest news about Android.

Thanks to [Keith] for the tip!

C Project Turns Into Full-Fledged OS

October 14, 2025 by 7 Comments

While some of us may have learned C in order to interact with embedded electronics or deep with computing hardware of some sort, others learn C for the challenge alone. Compared to newer languages like Python there’s a lot that C leaves up to the programmer that can be incredibly daunting. At the beginning of the year [Ethan] set out with a goal of learning C for its own sake and ended up with a working operating system from scratch programmed in not only C but Assembly as well.

[Ethan] calls his project Moderate Overdose of System Eccentricity, or MooseOS. Original programming and testing was done in QEMU on a Mac where he was able to build all of the core components of the operating system one-by-one including a kernel, a basic filesystem, and drivers for PS/2 peripherals as well as 320×200 VGA video. It also includes a dock-based GUI with design cues from operating systems like Macintosh System 1. From that GUI users can launch a few applications, from a text editor, a file explorer, or a terminal. There’s plenty of additional information about this OS on his GitHub page as well as a separate blog post.

The project didn’t stay confined to the QEMU virtual machine either. A friend of his was throwing away a 2009-era desktop which [Ethan] quickly grabbed to test his operating system on bare metal. There was just one fault that the real hardware threw that QEMU never did, but with a bit of troubleshooting it was able to run. He also notes that this was inspired by a wiki called OSDev which, although a bit dated now, is a great place to go to learn about the fundamentals of operating systems. We’d also recommend checking out this project that performs a similar task but on the RISC-V instruction set instead.

Billy Bass Gets New Job As A Voice Assistant

October 9, 2025 by 8 Comments

For those who were alive and conscious before the modern Internet, there were in fact things that went “viral” and became cultural phenomenon for one reason or another. Although they didn’t spread as quickly or become forgotten as fast, things like Beanie Babies or greeting a friend with an exaggerated “Whassup?” could all be considered viral hits of the pre-Internet era.

Another offline hit from the late 90s was the Billy Bass, an absurdist bit of physical comedy in the form of a talking, taxidermied fish. At the time it could only come to life and say a few canned lines, but with the help of modern hardware it can take on a whole new life.

This project comes to us from [Cian] who gutted the fish’s hardware to turn it into a smart voice assistant with some modern components, starting with an ESP32 S3. This chip has enough power to detect custom “wake words” to turn on the fish assistant as well as pass the conversation logic to and from a more powerful computer, handle the audio input and output, and control the fish’s head and tail motors. These motors, as well as the speaker, are the only original components remaining. The new hardware, including an amplifier for the speaker, are mounted on a custom 3D printed backplate.

After some testing and troubleshooting, the augmented Billy was ready to listen for commands and converse with the user in much the same way as an Alexa or other home assistant would. [Cian] built this to work with Home Assistant though, so it’s much more open and easier to recreate for anyone who still has one of these pieces of 90s kitch in a box somewhere.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these talking fish have been the basis of plenty of hacks over the years since their original release like this one from a few years ago that improves its singing ability or this one from 2005 that brings Linux to one.

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