news

36 Articles

Compact Dedicated News Reader Always Brings You CBC

October 29, 2024 by 4 Comments

Your phone or laptop will give you access to the vast majority of news in the world, in languages you can read and a few hundred you can’t. Maybe you only like one news source, though, and that news source happens to be Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). If that’s the case, you might like to give this project a look from [Ron Grimes].

[Ron] built a device that does one thing and one thing only: it displays news stories from CBC. It’s built around a Raspberry Pi 2, and the project began when he wanted to interface a keypad just to see if he could. With that done, the next challenge was to integrate a 16×2 character LCD display of the HD44780 persuasion. With those two tasks completed, the question was simple — what to display? He figured tuning into the CBC news feed would be useful, and the Chocolate Box News Reader was born.

The device displays 29 news feeds in total, including the main top stories, world news, and Canadian regional news. It stores 15 news items per feed and will hang on to those stories even if the Internet drops. The reader will display the whole stash of stored news in around 90 minutes or so, and each stored item comes with more information if something strike’s [Ron’s] curiosity or interest. Files are on GitHub for the curious.

It’s a neat build, and we can imagine it being a smart item to have kicking around the house. It was also a great way for [Ron] to build on his familiarity with the Raspberry Pi, too. Meanwhile, if you’ve got your own nifty Pi-based projects—or others!—don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

The Internet Archive Has Been Hacked

October 10, 2024 by 33 Comments

There are a great many organizations out there, all with their own intentions—some selfish, some selfless, some that land somewhere in between. Most would put the Internet Archive in the category of the library—with its aim of preserving and providing knowledge for the aid of all who might call on it. Sadly, as [theresnotime] reports, it appears this grand institution has been hacked.

On Wednesday, users visiting the Internet Archive were greeted with a foreboding popup that stated the following:

Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!

The quote appears to refer to Have I Been Pwned (HIBP), a site that collates details of security breaches so individuals can check if their details have been compromised.

According to founder Brewster Kahle, the site was apparently DDOS’d, with the site defaced via a JavaScript library. It’s believed this may have been a polyfill supply chain attack. As for the meat of the hack, it appears the individuals involved made off with usernames, emails, and encrypted and salted passwords. Meanwhile, as Wired reports, it appears Have I Been Pwned first received the stolen data of 31 million users on September 30.

At the time of writing, it appears the Internet Archive has restored the website to some degree of normal operation. It’s sad to see one of the Internet’s most useful and humble institutions fall victim to a hack like this one. As is always the way, no connected machine is ever truly safe, no matter how much we might hope that’s not the case.

[Thanks to Sammy for the tip!]

Dot-Matrix Printer Brings Old School Feel To Today’s Headlines

October 9, 2024 by 20 Comments

If you remember a time when TV news sets universally incorporated a room full of clattering wire service teleprinters to emphasize the seriousness of the news business, congratulations — you’re old. Now, most of us get our news piped directly into our phones, selected by algorithms perfectly tuned to rile us up on whatever the hot-button issue du jour happens to be. Welcome to the future.

If like us you long for a simpler way to get your news, [Andrew Schmelyun] has a partial solution with this dot-matrix news feeder. It’s part of his effort to detox a bit from the whole algorithm thing and make the news a little more concrete. He managed to chase down a very old Star Micronics printer with a serial interface, which he got on the cheap thanks to the previous owner not being sure if it worked. It did, at least after some cleaning, and thanks to a USB-to-serial and the efforts of Linux kernel hackers through the ages, was able to echo output to the printer from a Raspberry Pi Zero W.

From there, getting a daily news feed was as simple as writing some PHP code to mine the APIs of a few selected services. We’re perplexed and alarmed to report that Hackaday is not among the selected sources, but we’re sure this was just a small oversight that will be corrected in version 2. The program runs as a cron job so that a dead-tree version of the day’s top stories is ready for [Andrew]’s morning coffee.

We’ve seen similar news printers before; we particularly like this roll-feed paper version. But for a seriously retro feel, we’d love to see this done on a real teletype.

Shapeways Files For Bankruptcy

July 4, 2024 by 37 Comments

One of the earliest hobbyist-friendly on-demand 3D printing and fabrication shops, Shapeways, is filing for bankruptcy. As these financial arrangements always go, this may or may not mean the end of the service, but it’s a sure sign that their business wasn’t running as well as you’d hope.

One of the standout features of Shapeways was always that they made metal printing affordable to the home gamer. Whether it was something frivolous like a custom gear-shifter knob, or something all-too functional like a prototype rocket engine, it was neat to have the alternative workflow of iterative design at home and then shipping out for manufacturing.

We don’t want to speculate too much, but we’d be surprised if the rise of similar services in China wasn’t part of the reason for the bankruptcy. The market landscape just isn’t what it was way back in 2013. (Sadly, the video linked in this article isn’t around any more. If anyone can find a copy, post up in the comments?) So while Shapeways may or may not be gone, it’s not like we can’t get metal parts made anymore.

Still, we’re spilling a little for the OG.

Thanks [Aaron Eiche] for the breaking news tip!

E-Paper News Feed Illustrates The Headlines With AI-Generated Images

September 19, 2023 by 7 Comments

It’s hard to read the headlines today without feeling like the world couldn’t possibly get much worse. And then tomorrow rolls around, and a fresh set of headlines puts the lie to that thought. On a macro level, there’s not much that you can do about that, but on a personal level, illustrating your news feed with mostly wrong, AI-generated images might take the edge off things a little.

Let us explain. [Roy van der Veen] liked the idea of an e-paper display newsfeed, but the crushing weight of the headlines was a little too much to bear. To lighten things up, he decided to employ Stable Diffusion to illustrate his feed, displaying both the headline and a generated image on a 7.3″ Inky 7-color e-paper display. Every five hours, a script running on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W fetches a headline from a random source — we’re pleased the list includes Hackaday — and composes a prompt for Stable Diffusion based on the headline, adding on a randomly selected prefix and suffix to spice things up. For example, a prompt might look like, “Gothic painting of (Driving a Motor with an Audio Amp Chip). Gloomy, dramatic, stunning, dreamy.” You can imagine the results.

We have to say, from the examples [Roy] shows, the idea pretty much works — sometimes the images are so far off the mark that just figuring out how Stable Diffusion came up with them is enough to soften the blow. We’d have preferred if the news of the floods in Libya had been buffered by a slightly less dismal scene, but finding out that what was thought to be a “ritual mass murder” was really only a yoga class was certainly heartening.

Retrotechtacular: Putting Pictures On The Wire In The 1930s

April 25, 2023 by 52 Comments

Remember fax machines? They used to be all the rage, and to be honest it was pretty cool to be able to send images back and forth over telephone lines. By the early 2000s, pretty much everyone had some kind of fax capability, whether thanks to a dedicated fax machine, a fax modem, or an all-in-one printer. But then along came the smartphone that allowed you to snap a picture of a document and send it by email or text, and along with the decrease in landline subscriptions, facsimile has pretty much become a technological dead end.

But long before fax machines became commonplace, there was a period during which sending images by wire was a very big deal indeed. So much so that General Motors produced “Spot News,” a short film to demonstrate how newspapers leveraged telephone technology to send photographs from the field. The film is very much of the “March of Progress” genre, and seems to be something that would have been included along with the newsreels and Looney Tunes between the double feature films. It shows a fictional newsroom in The Big City, where a cub reporter gets a hot tip about an airplane stunt about to be attempted out in the sticks. The editor doesn’t want to miss out on a scoop, so he sends a photographer and a reporter to the remote location to cover the stunt, along with a technology-packed photographic field car. Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: Putting Pictures On The Wire In The 1930s” →

Commodore 64 Reports The News

March 22, 2023 by 13 Comments

In the late 80s and into the 90s, [Cameron Kaiser] aka [ClassicHasClass] was an aspiring journalist, first becoming interested in the career in elementary school and then working on various publications into university. At some point, he started using a piece of software for laying out newspapers called The Newsroom which, he admits, was lacking a lot of tools that would have been modern even for the time, but had an otherwise agreeable price tag thanks to its focus more on home desktop publishing and newsletter production than on full-scale newspaper operations. It did have one interesting feature that he never could figure out, though, at least until he went back and pieced this mystery together.

The software itself ran on the Apple II and was eventually ported to other systems of the era, including the Commodore 64. The mystery feature was known as “Wire Service” and appeared to be a way that users of the software who had a modem could connect with one another and share news releases, layouts, graphics, and other content created in Newsroom, but in the days where it would have been modern never was able to connect to anything. In fact, it was eventually abandoned by the developers themselves in later releases of the software. But [ClassicHasClass] was determined to get it working. Continue reading “Commodore 64 Reports The News” →