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Hacked Video File Holds Multiple Films On YouTube

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We notice there are a lot of hacks on YouTube lately, but we don’t share enough hacks about YouTube. That’s why [PortalRunner]’s latest oeuvre is interesting: it’s a video that gives you a different picture depending on the selected bitrate . Watch it at 1080p, you get one thing; at 360p, the image is completely different. The hack relies on understanding precisely how YouTube cuts down videos — because if you haven’t uploaded a video there before, you might not know the creator doesn’t have to encode all of those options; they’re invited to upload in the highest possible definition, and YouTube reencodes the rest. 1080p and 720p films are shown at 60FPS, while 360p and below are 30FPS– so that’s one way to hide the difference. Since YouTube drops every second frame when encoding the lower-quality video, images you want in the HD version can be kept only in even-numbered frames that YouTube will remove. That seems easy enoug...

Binaural Microphone on a Budget

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For as many speakers as someone can cram into a surround sound system, humans still (generally) only have two ears to listen to those sounds with. This means that, for recording purposes, it’s possible to create incredibly vivid three-dimensional sounds with just two microphones, provided that there’s an actual physical replica of a human ear attached to each microphone. This helps ensure that all the qualities of the sounds are preserved in a way a real human would experience them, and as [David Green] demonstrates, these systems don’t need to be very expensive . This build doesn’t just use models of human ears for recording sounds through. The silicone ears are mounted on a styrofoam mannequin head as well, which provides some sound isolation between the two microphones, much like a real human head. The ears are mounted in appropriate locations with the microphones installed inside, and the entire microphone apparatus is positioned on a PVC rig with a camera s...

Hackaday Links: May 10, 2026

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While Artemis II was primarily a demonstration flight of the architecture NASA plans to use for future lunar missions, it was also an excellent excuse for the crew to snap some photos of the Moon and Earth with the benefit of modern camera technology. If you’ve been looking forward to seeing more of the crew’s images, you’re in luck, as thousands of new images have recently been released. Now we don’t mean to beat up on the folks at NASA, but browsing through these images, we couldn’t help but be reminded of an article we saw on PetaPixel that discussed the space agency’s haphazard approach to sharing images online. It’s really more like an unsorted file dump than anything, made worse by the fact that you have to access it through a government website that looks and performs like it was designed in the early 2000s. There’s even a prominent button that attempts to load a gallery feature that relies on the long-deprecated Adobe Flash. It ...

Why Using Cardboard for a PC Case is a Chore

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The idea of using cardboard for a sloppy PC case isn’t new; it’s a time-honored tradition dating back to at least the 1990s. That said, with today’s CNC cutters and other advanced tooling available to hobbyists, you might be curious to see how far you can push the concept. As demonstrated in a recent video by [mryeester], the answer appears to be that good planning and a solid understanding of cardboard’s limitations are as essential as ever. After having the PC case drawn up in CAD and cut on a professional CNC cutter by a buddy who makes commercial cardboard displays, the installation procedure for the PC components showed where a bit of foresight could have saved a lot of time and effort. The first problem was that the GPU couldn’t be installed due to wrong measurements on where the IO bracket normally is screwed into the case. Some cardboard cutting later, the GPU slid into place, but of course, there’s no way to screw it down, putting the ful...

Challenging The Way We Pedal

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The bicycle is an invention that has not changed in its fundamentals since the first recognisably modern machines appeared in the closing years of the 19th century. Its frame uses a structure of two triangles, its wheels are equal in size, and it’s propelled by a pedal crank and (in most cases) a chain. Bicycles have improved vastly in materials and performance, but if you were to wheel a 2026 tourer into an 1886 bike shop, the Victorian proprietor would recognise it. Only a very brave engineer would try to fundamentally change such a formula, but here’s [Not programming] with a crankless bicycle . The idea is to replace the crank’s circular motion with a linear one, thus providing a more constant propulsion. The build was inspired by another that used a sinusoidal track in a rotating cylinder to achieve the necessary conversion. This design takes a different tack, using an arrangement of gears and freewheels he describes as a mechanical rectifier to convert the back-...

Running Your Own 3G Network

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CDMA2000 was one of the protocols defined for 3G networks and is now years out of date and being phased out worldwide. Nevertheless, there are still vast numbers of phones that will happily connect to it, creating an opportunity for hackers seeking to run their own cellular networks. [Chrismoos] recently made this endeavour significantly easier by releasing 1xBTS , a Rust implementation of the lower three layers of a CDMA2000 network. The lowest layer of the stack is an SDR for the actual radio communications. It’s been tested with the USRP B200 and B210, the LimeSDR Mini 2, and the BladeRF Micro 2.0. The code might work with certain other SDRs using the SoapySDR abstraction layer. The SDR is controlled by the base station (BTS) software, which, in turn, is controlled by the base station controller (BSC) over an Abis link. The BSC manages channels and mobile device associations, and exchanges frames with the mobile switching center (MSC), which handles message switching. The s...

The Noctua Fan Files and the Limits of 3D Printing PC Fans

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After Noctua recently released CAD files for a range of their computer fans, one of the first thoughts that popped up for most people was: Can you just to 3D print their fans? Even though Noctua begs you not to 3D print the files and even says they changed the design slightly so it wouldn’t be the same anyway, the question persists. Fortunately, [Steve] of Gamers Nexus is here to help us answer the question of whether it makes sense to 3D print a computer fan . Unsurprisingly, the answer is mostly a resounding ‘no’. After reworking the original CAD models to be both printable on a Bambu Lab FDM printer and printing the parts in PLA, the arguably most important part, the motor, still had to be sourced from an original Noctua fan. Although you could source a cheaper motor, that could change the fan’s characteristics. The other issue is materials. The special polymer that Noctua uses for its fans is designed not to change shape significantly when the fan blades a...