Kritik sah

People in hotter parts of the world may permit themselves a grin at this, but Europeans have recently been suffering under an unseasonal June heatwave. Most of us have been cowering inside with our air conditioners, but not [Making Stuff With Mike]. He’s adapting a safety helmet with a Noctua fan for only slightly uncool on-the-go cooling . On the face of it, the hat is a straightforward hack. [Mike] mounted a 3D-printed chimney to the top of a hard hat and placed a fan in the top of it. But as always, there’s a little more to it than meets the eye, and in this case it’s because he’s modeled the hat/chimney interface by 3D scanning the hat and using the scan to create his CAD model. The two are attached with four small bolts, and a set of large holes are made in the hat for airflow. Taking it out for a spin, he finds it does the job, but has a few ideas for improvements. So Mike’s ready for the upcoming BornHack hacker camp, which Hackaday has been to a...

Happy belated July 4th to all the readers from the United States — hopefully you aren’t reading this from a hospital bed after losing a hand or burning off your eyebrows. While we suspect amateur firework shows and their related injuries will be around for many years to come, we did note that many major cities switched over to drone shows this year . At least on paper, the appeal is obvious. Beyond the fact that drones are safer and quieter than pyrotechnics, they’re also capable of far more complex displays. Good luck trying to draw George Washington’s face in the sky with exploding rockets. But even if it’s a little more than nostalgia, there’s still something about the sights and sounds of fireworks that enthrall audiences. For many, the whole “rockets’ red glare” thing is a bit more meaningful than the “drones’ red LEDs.” Earlier this week , we brought you news that Sony would stop producing physical PlayStat...

Unlike almost every other kind of microscope, atomic-force microscopes (AFMs) don’t use any kind of optical beam to image their subjects. Instead, they physically detect the subject’s surface with a tiny probe, repeating this thousands of times to build up a height map of the subject, sometimes with a resolution below a single nanometer. [Ben Krasnow] got to use an AFM in an investigation of one of his projects, and shared some unusual uses of it in his latest video . For his first demonstration, [Ben] took a video of the probe head in action. Since the probe oscillates at nine kilohertz, this was less straightforward than it sounds, but a stroboscopic welding camera filming near that frequency could visualize its motion. The next project was to image some biological samples, particularly bacteria. First, [Ben] let the bacteria from nattō (fermented soybeans) multiply in a sterile growth medium, then centrifuged and washed them. He spin-coated a thin layer of gelatine onto part of...

Valve has always designed hacker-friendly hardware, and in that spirit, [NaKyle Wright] released Inkterface , a design for an E-ink faceplate to fit the recently released Steam Machine. As far as projects go, this one is meticulously documented, so give it a peek. The system uses a selection of components that include a 5.83″ E-ink panel and driver board, a small lithium-polymer battery, and an ESP32-based controller board. A cleverly-designed 3D printed frame and bezel hold everything just so, creating a snug assembly with minimal wiring hassles. A small service can be easily configured to control how the display updates. The faceplate is wireless and self-contained, attaching with the help of four magnets. On the software side, the host machine communicates over Bluetooth, and a service takes care of pushing updates. An app for configuring and talking to the display will be available on Steam eventually, but in the meantime one can install that part manually. [NaKyle]’...

We all know the e-ink persistent displays, as they’re cheap and plentiful enough to have become ubiquitous in applications such as supermarket price labels. But we don’t often see some of the other technologies that  almost did the same thing. The BBC Archive has a report from 1986 showing one of them, a prototype display from STC . E-ink relies on flipping the arrangement of black and white particles in its pixels, while this one has a fluid in which the molecules are aligned to let light through, or dispersed randomly, at which point they block light. Frustratingly, we aren’t told what the liquid is, but we are given what might be the reason that we’ve never seen one. The activation voltage is rather high at 200 volts. It’s still a fascinating glimpse of something we might have had, with some tasty early-PC-era portables along the way. The BBC archive has served up quite a bit of retro goodness over time, and we’ve certainly featured one or two o...

Although there’s probably no good reason to want to run image editing software from 1996 other than for nostalgia’s sake, if you ever wanted to run the GIMP version 0.54 from back when Windows 98 was still called Windows 97, you can do so now from the comfort of a modern-day Linux desktop. What enables this is a Flatpak version of a beta release , assembled by [balooii] for everyone’s enjoyment. It wasn’t a simple matter of compiling the old software’s code and packaging it up, with the repository for the project containing a series of patches that were required to make this possible. Also of note is that this is the first version of GIMP with full surviving source code. Back then, GIMP used the Motif widget toolkit. Later on, it switched to the GIMP Toolkit (GTK). Bundled with this Flatpak release are a lot of plugins and tutorials that were created at the time, making it a veritable time capsule of a more innocent era. As noted by [balooii], this ver...