Dan Maloney

A word of caution if you’re planning to try this cryocooler method for making liquid nitrogen: not only does it involve toxic and flammable gasses and pressures high enough to turn the works into a bomb, but you’re likely to deplete your rent account with money you’ll shell out for all the copper tubing and fittings. You’ve been warned.

Designing an anthropomorphic robotic hand seems to make a lot of sense — right up until the point that you realize just how complex the human hand is. What works well in bone and sinew often doesn't translate well to servos and sensors, and even building a single mechanical finger can require dozens of parts.

There’s no doubt that you’ll instantly recognize clips from the video below, as they’ve been used over and over for more than 100 years to illustrate the development of the assembly line. But those brief clips never told the whole story about just how much effort Ford was forced to put into manufacturing just one component of their iconic Model T: the wheels.

Despite the summer doldrums, it was another big week in the hacking world, and Elliot sat down with Dan for a rundown. Come along for the ride as Dan betrays his total ignorance of soccer/football, much to Elliot’s amusement. But it’s all about keeping the human factor in sports, so we suppose it was worth it. Less controversially, we ogled over a display of PCB repair heroics, analyzed a reverse engineering effort that got really lucky, and took a look at an adorable one-transistor ham transceiver. We also talked about ants doing surgery, picking locks with nitric acid, a damn cute dam, and how to build one of the world’s largest machines from scratch in under a century. Plus, we answered the burning question: can a CRT be used as an audio amplifier? Yes, kind of, but please don’t let the audiophiles know or we’ll never hear the end of it.

Can you weld wood? It seems like a silly question — if you throw a couple of pieces of oak on the welding table and whip out the TIG torch, you know nothing is going to happen. But as [Action Lab] shows us in the video below, welding wood is technically possible, if not very practical.

When monitors around the world display a “Blue Screen of Death” and you know it’s probably your fault, it’s got to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day at work. That’s likely the situation inside CrowdStrike this weekend, as engineers at the cybersecurity provider struggle to recover from an update rollout that went very, very badly indeed

Unless you hold a First Degree RF Wizard rating, chances are good that coax stubs seem a bit baffling to you. They look for all the world like short circuits or open circuits, and yet work their magic and act to match feedline impedances or even as bandpass filters. Pretty interesting behavior from a little piece of coaxial cable.

We’ve all heard about the perils of counterfeit chips, and more than a few of us have probably been bitten by those scruple-free types who run random chips through a laser marker and foist them off as something they’re not. Honestly, we’ve never understood the business model here — it seems like the counterfeiters spend almost as much time and effort faking chips as they would just getting the real ones. But we digress.

Sometimes, all it takes is a change in perspective to take something boring and make it fun. That’s true about 16×2 LCD; in its usual landscape format, it’s a quick and easy way to provide a character-based display for a project. But flip it 90 degrees and use a little imagination, and it can become a cool retro racing game that fits in the palm of your hand.

Hacking — at least the kind where you’re breaking into stuff — is very much a learn-by-doing skill. There’s simply no substitute for getting your hands dirty and just trying something. But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn something by watching, with this root password exploit on a cheap IP video camera being a good look at the basics.