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We’re All Abuzz About the Bee Write Back Writerdeck

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Friends, there will likely come a time in your life when you have trouble sleeping. When this happens, it may behoove you to do some writing, any kind of writing. But consider that a physical journal will force you to turn past pages you’ve already filled, which may leave you deflated if you happen to read them. So the answer lies in a sort of journalistic deposit box. That’s basically what we have here. [Simon Shimel]’s Bee Write Back writerdeck was inspired by sleepless nights, so you know it’s effective. The form factor is so great for [Simon], in fact, that he has developed more apps and functions for it, including a Claude client. Inside is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2w, and input comes from an Air40 keyboard with quite awesome low-profile key caps. The display is a 5.5″ AMOLED, which leaves just enough room for a pair of the cutest bees ever. Be sure to check out the short video below for the build guide to accompany the build guide (PDF), and head over to GitHub for the full deta...
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Trying to Install Haiku on a 2009 Mac Mini

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Although the number of uses for a 2009-era Mac Mini aren’t very long, using them to run new-and-upcoming operating systems like Haiku on would seem to be an interesting use case. This is what [The Phintage Collector] recently took a swing at , using both the 2024 Beta 5 release and a current nightly build. The focus was mostly on the 32-bit build, as this has binary compatibility with BeOS applications, but the 64-bit version of Haiku was of course also installed. One of the main issues with these Mac systems is that they use EFI for the BIOS, so you’re condemned to either take your chances with the always glitchy CSM ‘classical BIOS’ mode, or to make Haiku and EFI get along. While for the 64-bit version of Haiku this wasn’t too much of a struggle, the 32-bit version ran into the problem that the 64-bit EFI BIOS really doesn’t like 32-bit software. After a while the 32-bit version of Haiku was thus abandoned for a later revisit. With the 64-bit version a lot of things just work, tho...
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Hackaday Links: April 12, 2026

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At this point, we’ll assume you already know that four humans took a sightseeing trip around the Moon and made their triumphant return to Earth on Friday. Even if you somehow avoided hearing about it through mainstream channels, we kept a running account of the mission’s highlights stuck to the front page of the site for the ten days that the crew was in space. On the assumption that you might be a bit burned out with space news at this point, we won’t bring up it up in this post… other than to point out that excitement for the lunar flyby has driven the number of simultaneous players of Kerbal Space Program to its highest count ever — nearly 20,000 armchair astronauts spent this weekend trying to cobble together their own rocket in honor of the Artemis II mission. With so many folks focused on the Moon it would be the perfect time for a company to sneak out some bad news, which is perhaps why Amazon picked this week to announce they would be dropping support for Kindles released...
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Who had “New OS for the Z80” On Their 2026 Bingo Card?

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Some might say the venerable Z80 doesn’t need another operating system, but [Scott Baker] obviously disagrees. He has come up with a brand new, from scratch OS called NostOS for the Z80-based RC2014 homebrew retrocomputer. [Scott] describes it as CP/M-like, but it’s not CP/M– in fact, it’s totally incompatible with CP/M–and has a few tricks of its own up its sleeve. As you might expect of an operating system for this vintage of hardware, it is “rommable” — that is, designed to run from read-only-memory, and fit inside 64kB. It of course supports banking memory to go higher than that 16 bit limit, and natively supports common serial devices, along with the good old WD37C65 floppy controller to get some spinning rust into the game. Of course if you don’t have floppies you can plug in a compact flash card– try that with CP/M– or, interestingly Intel Bubble Memory. [Scott] has a soft-spot for bubble memory , which at one point seemed poised to replace both hard drives and RAM at the sam...
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Testing Refrigerants and Capillary Tubes to Find Peak Performance

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Heat lift graphs. (Credit: Hyperspace Pirate, YouTube) Although vapor-compression refrigeration is a simple concept, there are still a lot of details in the implementation of such a system that determines exactly how efficient it is. After making a few of such systems, [Hyperspace Pirate] decided to sit down and create a testing system that allows for testing of many of these parameters . Some of the major components that determine the coefficient of performance ( COP ) of a heat pump or similar system include the used refrigerant, as well as the capillary tube diameter or expansion valve design. For the testing in the video three refrigerants are used: R600 (N-Butane), R134a (tetrafluoroethene, AKA Freon) and R290 (propane), with R134a being decidedly illegal in places like the EU. The use of R600 instead of R600A is due to the former allowing for a lower pressure system, which is nice for low-power portable systems. The test rig has the typical fresh-from-the-scrap-heap look ...
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Kiki is the Unknown Array Language

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Kiki bills itself as the “array programming system of unknown origin.” We thought it reminded us of APL which, all by itself, isn’t a bad thing. The announcement post is decidedly imaginative. However, it is a bit sparse on details. So once you’ve read through it, you’ll want to check out the playground , which is also very artistically styled. If you explore the top bar, you’ll find the learn button is especially helpful, although the ref and idiom buttons are also useful. Then you’ll find some examples along with a few other interesting tidbits. One odd thing is that Kiki reads right to left. So “2 :* 3 :+ 1” is (1+3) 2 not (2 3)+1. Of course, you can use parentheses to be specific. If you are jumping around in the tutorial, note that some cells depend on earlier cells, so randomly pressing a “run” button is likely to produce an error. Would you use kiki? There are plenty of array languages out there, although perhaps none that have such poetic documentation. Let us know if y...
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A Suction-Driven Seven-Segment Display

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There’s a long history of devices originally used for communication being made into computers, with relay switching circuits, vacuum tubes, and transistors being some well-known examples. In a smaller way, pneumatic tubes likewise deserve a place on the list; [soiboi soft], for example, has used pneumatic systems to build actuators, logic systems, and displays, including this latching seven-segment display . Each segment in the display is made of a cavity behind a silicone sheet; when a vacuum is applied, the front sheet is pulled into the cavity. A vacuum-controlled switch (much like a transistor, as we’ve covered before ) connects to the cavity, so that each segment can be latched open or closed. Each segment has two control lines: one to pressurize or depressurize the cavity, and one to control the switch. The overall display has four seven-segment digits, with seven common data lines and four control lines, one for each digit. The display is built in five layers: the front displ...
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