Ep 322: Fake Hackaday Writers, New Retro Computers, and a Web Rant
May 23, 2025
This week, the hosts pay tribute to Ed Smylie, who ingeniously helped save the Apollo 13 astronauts. They unveil exciting open-source projects, including a high-speed Ethernet switch and the revival of Doom on an Atari ST. A minimalist programming language from the '70s, Mouse, is explored alongside hacks like a Raspberry Pi image processor. The discussion also critiques modern web design challenges and the pitfalls of tech company dominance, while humorously pondering AI's attempt at emulating human creativity. Tune in for a mix of nostalgia and innovation!
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Ed Smylie's Life-Saving Duct Tape Hack
Ed Smylie used duct tape and on-board materials to build a carbon dioxide filter that saved Apollo 13 astronauts.
His cleverness made duct tape a permanent fixture on all US space missions.
insights INSIGHT
Open Source Revives Retro Computers
Open source projects now replicate hard-to-find parts of retro computers like the Mac Plus.
This trend enables building complete retro systems with modern, more available components.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Secure LoRa Messenger With Rolling Keys
Bertrand Selva's PiPico LoRa messenger uses preloaded SD card keys to encrypt communication dynamically.
Keys change every two minutes with backward secrecy by deleting old keys, ensuring privacy.
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In 'Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe', Niall Ferguson delves into the global history of disasters, analyzing why humanity consistently fails to prepare for catastrophes. The book covers a wide range of disasters, from pandemics and earthquakes to financial crises and wars, and argues that many disasters have man-made components. Ferguson critiques the responses of developed countries to the COVID-19 pandemic and highlights the role of bureaucratic failures and complex systems in exacerbating disasters. The book draws on various fields such as economics, epidemiology, and network science to offer a general theory of disasters and suggests ways to improve future responses to crises.
We're back in Europe for this week's Hackaday podcast, as Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List. In the news this week is the passing of Ed Smylie, the engineer who devised the famous improvised carbon dioxide filter that saved the Apollo 13 astronauts with duct tape.
Closer to home is the announcement of the call for participation for this year's Hackaday Supercon; we know you will have some ideas and projects you'd like to share.
Interesting hacks this week include a new Mac Plus motherboard and Doom (just) running on an Atari ST, while a LoRa secure messenger and an astounding open-source Ethernet switch captivated us on the hardware front. We also take a dive into the Mouse programming language, a minimalist stack-based environment from the 1970s. Among the quick hacks are a semiconductor dopant you can safely make at home, and a beautiful Mac Mini based cyberdeck.
Finally, we wrap up with our colleague [Maya Posch] making the case for a graceful degradation of web standards, something which is now sadly missing from so much of the online world, and then with the discovery that ChatGPT can make a passable show of emulating a Hackaday scribe. Don't worry folks, we're still reassuringly meat-based.
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