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Turning a Junk Laptop Screen Into a Portable Monitor

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Sure, you can buy a portable monitor off your favorite e-tailer, but with perfectly fine displays in devices like laptops being tossed out every single day, why not repurpose those instead? That’s what [ScuffedBits] recently did with the panels  pulled from some old laptops. A good question with any such salvaged panel is just how practical it is to still use them, with disqualifying features being things like passive-matrix TFTs as well as the use of CCFL backlighting as with one of the three panels demonstrated in the video. Looking up the model number of a panel on a site like panelook.com will tell you the display technology, resolution and other important details before you decide to commit to using it. If it’s using a LED backlight and at least Low-Voltage Differential Signaling (LVDS) but ideally eDP you can likely find a cheap driver board for it that has all the requisite inputs like HDMI and power. The hardest part is probably the case for the panel, as they...
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Hackaday Links: May 17, 2026

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To start things off, we’d like to extend a special thanks to everyone who joined us for Hackaday Europe this weekend in Lecco, Italy . It was 48 hours of fascinating talks, incredible badge hacks, and some of the greatest company you could hope for. For those who couldn’t make it in person, we didn’t forget you — expect to hear more about what went down once we get a chance to catch our collective breath. That’s not the only thing to keep an eye out for in the coming days. This is your reminder that Amazon will be officially ending support for older Kindles in a few days . After May 20th, any of the megacorp’s e-readers that were introduced before 2012 will be persona non grata, so you should plan accordingly. The biggest change is that these older devices won’t be able to buy digital books from Amazon, but you can still use them offline, and the fantastic Calibre makes it a breeze to load up content from other sources. To be perfectly honest...
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NFC Record Player Promotes Intentional Listening

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Streaming services have enabled many of us to have easy access to the world’s media library at the touch of a screen, but [Coconauts] thinks we’ve lost something along the way. To bring some intentionality back to the listening experience, they built an NFC record player called Minilos . Like a normal record player, Minilos requires the user to select an album to play on the machine. These were originally decorative coasters with records printed on them, so they are much smaller than even a 45. Each one features an NFC tag that instructs ESP32 microcontroller hidden in the device to play the requested song. Once placed on the record player, it will then play through that album and come to a stop. In [Coconauts]’s current setup, the ESP32 is connected to a Home Assistant server which then instructs a Google Speaker to play the requested song via Spotify, although we could easily imagine this being used to play music directly from an SD card or other digital storage de...
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Your Browser Probably Lies to the Big Sites (Blame Chrome)

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When you visit certain large sites in Firefox or Safari, the browser may detect your visit and change its behavior. It could be as simple as lying about its identity, or it may totally change how it renders the page. But according to a post by [Den Odel], this isn’t a conspiracy between browsers and big Internet — rather, it is a byproduct of Chrome’s dominance . Here’s how it goes. Chrome puts out a new feature and everyone rushes to implement it on their site. Maybe the new code breaks other browsers. Maybe the other browser supports the feature, but the website doesn’t detect it correctly or is unaware. Maybe it just relies on some quirk of Chrome. Regardless, Firefox and Safari will change to match the site rather than mess up the user’s experience. If you want to check it out, Firefox will show you what it does and let you disable specific fixes if you visit the about:compat URL. For Safari, you’ll have to read code from a file named quir...
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Asimov is an Open Source Humanoid Robot For the Rest of Us

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Given that some of the more famous demos were by Honda and Tesla, you might be forgiven for thinking you need pockets as deep as a car company to get into humanoid robotics — and maybe that was true once, but now Asimov v1 is here . It doesn’t have a positronic brain, and you’ll have to code in the Three Laws for yourself, but at least you have the freedom to, because Asimov is open source.  It’s not exactly cheap: the kit version comes with a target price of $15,000 USD, but they do provide the Bill of Materials on the GitHub repository so you can try and hunt down some deals. Still, compared to the millions poured into these sorts of robots in the early days, we have to consider it accessible. With 25 total degrees of freedom, you’ll have to source a lot of actuators, but at least the onboard compute will be easy to get. Rather than begging CERN for spare positrons, you’ only need a Raspberry 5 and a Radaxa CM5. No word on if this robot can write ...
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After Stumbling From CVE to CVE Will Linux get a Kill Switch?

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For the few people who have spent the past weeks living under a security rock, the Linux kernel has found itself the subject of multiple severe bugs in the form of Copy Fail and Dirty Frag, both of which allow for privilege escalation. They’ve made many people very upset, and also potentially put many thousands of systems at risk of exploitation. Worse is that system managers are generally left to twiddle their thumbs while waiting for patches to be rolled out. This is where NVIDIA engineer [Sasha Levin] has proposed a ‘kill switch’ for affected kernel functions . The basic concept seems rather simple, with this feature merely intercepting a call to the affected function and instead returning a predefined return value. This makes it less extreme than hitting a general SCRAM button on the entire kernel, and could theoretically allow the affected systems to keep running until the patched kernel becomes available. A disadvantage of this is that it obviously modifies the...
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21st Century Punch Cards are 3D Printed and Read By OpenCV

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While a punch card is perhaps the lowest-density storage medium available, it has some distinct advantages. As [Bitroller] points out in the write-up of his punch card project , if he was using stainless steel instead of PLA his 3D printed punch cards would likely outlast everything he owns, and survive a five-alarm fire to boot. If you have 16 bytes you really, really don’t want to forget — or are willing to store your private key in a shoe box — this project might be of interest. The nice part is that he’s built a handy Python script to generate printable files for the punch cards, which encode 16 bytes of information and 4 bytes of error correction using the Reed-Solomon algorithm. That’s just enough for a password and the error correction means up to two bytes can be recovered in the case of read failure. The reading is where this gets interesting — again, [Bitroller] provides a handy script, but this one uses OpenCV to read the entire punch car...
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