TechyMagThings

This week Jonathan chats with Olaf Andreas Schulte and Lars Kiesow about Opencast, the video management system for education. What does Opencast let a school or university accomplish, how has that changed over the last decade, and what exciting new things are coming? Watch to find out!

• https://explore.opencast.org/
• https://opencast.org/
• https://opencast.org/2025/12/19/opencast-apereo-update/

Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on our YouTube Channel? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or have the guest contact us! Take a look at the schedule here.

Direct Download in DRM-free MP3.

If you’d rather read along, here’s the transcript for this week’s episode.

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Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

I just love it when y’all send in your projects, so thanks, [Kai]! But were do I even begin with this one? Okay, so, first of all, you need to know that [Kai Ruhl] built an amazing split keyboard with plenty of keys for even someone like me. Be sure to check it out, because the build log is great reading.

But that wasn’t enough — a mousing solution was in order that didn’t require taking [Kai]’s hands off of the keyboard. And so, over the course of several months, the RollerMouse Keyboard came into being. That’s the creation you see here.

Essentially, this is an ortholinear split with a built-in roller bar mouse, which basically acts like a cylindrical trackball. There’s an outer pipe that slides left/right and rolls up and down, and this sits on a stationary inner rod. The actual mouse bit is from a Logitech M-BJ69 optical number.

[Kai] found it unpleasant to work the roller bar using thumbs, so mousing is done via the palm rests. You may find it somewhat unpolished with all that exposed wiring in the middle. But I don’t. I just worry about dust is all. And like, wires getting ripped out accidentally.

All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy

As I write this, a terrible snowpocalypse is snuggling up to the southern and mid-western states. What a time to watch The Shining and check out the dullboy prototype by [Blind_Heim].

This is [Blind_Heim]’s first project, and I think it looks mighty fine, especially with those slanty thumb keys. They are [Blind_Heim]’s own creation and were inspired by the design of the 1959 Adler Universal featured in The Shining. (Hence the name of the keyboard.) In case it isn’t obvious, they are meant for Kailh choc v1 switches.

Rev 1 shown here has a nice!nano and supports v1 chocs only. Rev 2 will support v1 and v2, and will have a 40 mm Cirque trackpad in that middle space there. Rev 2 will also be open-source and entirely free of copyright, so watch out for that.

Regarding those thumb keys, [Blind_Heim] says that they wanted something ergonomic and monoblock at first, and so the angles were just for looks. But after using it, he realized they were actually quite useful when it comes to determining which key is which without having to look.

The Centerfold: Downtown Busy Town Is the Place to Be

This desk mat ought to bring back some memories. Hopefully good ones, of daycare and snacks and nap time. Here it is for sale if you feel the need to drive little cars around on it.

As for the keyboard, that’s a Norbauer Heavy Grail Ghost of Christmas Future edition, which was of course a limited release that’s long sold out. I’m sure there are other transparent bodies out there, but good luck finding a bug-eyed, duck-faced keycap.

Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad? Send me a picture along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!

Historical Clackers: the Saturn

The Virtual Typewriter Museum calls the 1899 Saturn “one of the most impractical machines ever, built with proverbial precision in Switzerland”.

The operation of this blind writer is pretty interesting, and that’s putting it politely. There are nine U-shaped type bars: four on each side beneath the carriage, and one in the middle that swings up from behind.

Each of these type bars holds eight characters, and these are selected by moving a wire up and down the index card using that giant round selector button the left side. The you would strike one of the nine keys corresponding to the column your character appears in.

Evidently the lower case characters were laid out differently than the upper case, which made it even more difficult to use. But hey, Swiss precision.

There is not a lot of information out there about the Saturn, but the Virtual Typewriter Museum does have more shots of various angles.

Finally, a Keyboard Made of Marble and Ceramic

Apparently there was a Kickstarter near the end of 2025 for this thing. Well, this is the first I’ve heard of it. This here is the Keychron Q16 HE 8K ceramic and marble keyboard, which debuted at CES.

This is a luxury keyboard for sure, right down to the pre-lubed Keychron ultra-fast Lime magnetic switches which features Tunnel Magnetoresistance (TMR) and per-key adjustable actuation.

They say it’s built for gaming, but I don’t know. I think it’s built for whatever you want to use it for. It will be available in April. I sincerely hope that it’s like typing on little coffee cups, and it probably sounds amazingly thocky.

Now Tweak Town doesn’t have a whole lot to say about this keyboard, so I found a review to go with it. [YouallareToxic] has quite a bit to say about the keyboard. I think the biggest takeaway from this review is that this keyboard sounds like no other. [YouallareToxic] likens it to a frog guiro. A what? Check out the video below.

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Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards? Help me out by sending in a link or two. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to email me directly.

Very-long baseline interferometry (VLBI) is a technique in radio astronomy whereby multiple radio telescopes cooperate to bundle their received data and in effect create a much larger singular radio telescope. For this to work it is however essential to have exact timing and other relevant information to accurately match the signals from each individual radio telescope. As VLBI is used for increasingly higher ranges and bandwidths this makes synchronizing the signals much harder, but an optical frequency comb technique may offer a solution here.

In the paper by [Minji Hyun] et al. it’s detailed how they built the system and used it with the Korean VLBI Network (VLB) Yonsei radio telescope in Seoul as a proof of concept. This still uses the same hydrogen maser atomic clock as timing source, but with the optical transmission of the pulses a higher accuracy can be achieved, limited only by the photodiode on the receiving end.

In the demonstration up to 50 GHz was possible, but commercial 100 GHz photodiodes are available. It’s also possible to send additional signals via the fiber on different wavelengths for further functionality, all with the ultimately goal of better timing and adjustment for e.g. atmospheric fluctuations that can affect radio observations.

Some time ago, Lego released a beautiful (and somewhat pricey) typewriter set that was modeled after one used by company founder Ole Kirk Kristiansen. To the disappointment of some, it doesn’t actually work—you can’t really write a letter with it. [Koenkun Bricks] decided to rectify this with their own functional design.

Right away, we’ll state that this is not a traditional typewriter. There are no off-the-shelf Lego components with embossed letters on them, so it wasn’t possible to make Lego type bars that could leave an impression on paper with the use of an inked ribbon. Instead, [Koenkun Bricks] decided to build a design that was Lego all the way down, right to the letters themselves. The complicated keyboard-actuated mechanism picks out flat letter tiles and punches them on to a flat Lego plate, creating a plastic document instead of a paper one.

It’s not perfect in operation. It has some issues unique to its mode of operation. Namely, the round letter tiles sometimes rotate the wrong way as they’re feeding through the typewriter’s mechanisms, so you get sideways letters on your finished document. It looks kind of cool, though. Outside of that, sometimes the letter pusher doesn’t quite seat the letter tiles fully on the document plate.

Overall, though, it’s a highly functional and impressive build. We’ve seen some other great DIY typewriters before, too, like this 3D printed build. Video after the break.

[Thanks to hn3000] for the tip!]

As part of his quest to find the best affordable generator for his DIY hydroelectric power system, [FarmCraft101] is trying out a range of off-the-shelf and DIY solutions, with in his most recent video trying his hands at the very relaxing activity of rewiring the stator of an alternator.

Normally car alternators output 12VDC after internal rectification, but due to the hundreds of meters from the turbine to the shed, he’d like a higher voltage to curb transmission losses. The easiest way to get a higher voltage out of a car alternator is to change up the wiring on the stator, which is definitely one of those highly educational tasks.

Disassembling an alternator is easy enough, but removing the copper windings from the stator is quite an ordeal, as they were not designed to ever move even a fraction of a millimeter after assembly.

With that arduous task finished, the rewinding was done using 22 AWG copper enamel wire, compared to the original 16 AWG wire, and increasing the loops per coil from 8 to 30. This rewinding isn’t too complicated if you know what you’re doing, with each coil on each of the three windings placed in an alternating fashion, matching the alternating South/North poles on the rotor.

Each phase’s winding is offset by two slots, leaving space for the other two phases, which then correspondingly are 90° out of phase when running, creating the three-phase AC output. This is further detailed in the video.

To make sure the windings do not short out on the stator, each slot has a bit of Nomex insulating paper placed into it, and a PETG 3D printed slot holder makes sure that none of the windings sneak out of their slot after installation.

The phases were connected in a Wye configuration, which gives it the maximum possible voltage rather than optimizing it for current as in a Delta configuration.

With the rewinding done, the alternator was reassembled, and the three-phase output of the new stator tested. After some trial and error it was able to do 200 VDC after passing it through an external rectifier, for a total of 700 Watt.

While not an unmitigated success, it seems quite possible to use this alternator as a higher-voltage generator with the hydro setup, especially after the upcoming replacement of the rotor’s electromagnet with neodymium magnets to further simplify it. As a bonus, if he ever needs to rebuild a broken alternator from scratch, rewinding a stator is now child’s play.

Part of traveling the world as an Anglophone involves the uncomfortable realization that everyone else is better at learning your language than people like you are at learning theirs. It’s particularly obvious in the world of programming languages, where English-derived language and syntax rules the roost.

It’s always IF foo THEN bar, and  never SI foo ALORS bar. It is now possible to do something akin to OS foo YNA bar though, because [Richard Hainsworth] has created y Ddraig (the Dragon), a programming language using Welsh language as syntax. (The Welsh double D, “Dd” is pronounced something like an English soft “th” as in “their”)

Under the hood it’s not an entirely new language, instead it’s a Welsh localisation of the Raku language. A localisation file is created, that can as we understand it handle bidirectional transcription between languages. The write-up goes into detail about the process.

There will inevitably be people asking what the point of a programming language for a spoken language with under a million native speakers is, so it’s worth taking a look at that head on. It’s important for Welsh education and the Welsh tech sector because a a geeky kid in a Welsh-medium school Pwllheli deserves to code just as much as an English kid in a school near Oxford, but it goes far beyond Welsh alone. There are many languages and cultures across the world where English is not widely spoken, and every single one of them has those kids like us who pick up a computer and run with it. The more of them that can learn to code, and thrive without having the extra burden of knowing English, the better. Perhaps in a couple of decades we’ll be using code from people who learned this way, without our ever knowing it.

As your scribe, this needs to be added: Mae’n ddrwg gyda fi ffrendiau Cymraeg, mae Cymraeg i yn wael iawn. Dwi’n dôd o’r Rhydychen, ni Pwllheli.

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Header image: Jeff Buck, CC BY-SA 2.0.

The KDE desktop’s new login manager (PLM) in the upcoming Plasma 6.6 will mark the first time that KDE requires that the underlying OS uses systemd, if one wishes for the full KDE experience. This has especially the FreeBSD community upset, but will also affect Linux distros that do not use systemd. The focus of the KDE team is clear, as stated in the referenced Reddit thread, where a KDE developer replies that the goal is to rely on systemd for more tasks in the future. This means that PLM is just the first step.

In the eyes of KDE it seems that OSes that do not use systemd are ‘niche’ and not worth supporting, with said niche Linux distros that would be cut out including everything from Gentoo to Alpine Linux and Slackware. Regardless of your stance on systemd’s merits or lack thereof, it would seem to be quite drastic for one of the major desktop environments across Linux and BSD to suddenly make this decision.

It also raises the question of in how far this is related to the push towards a distroless and similarly more integrated, singular version of Linux as an operating system. Although there are still many other DEs that will happily run for the foreseeable future on your flavor of GNU/Linux or BSD – regardless of whether you’re more about about a System V or OpenRC init-style environment – this might be one of the most controversial divides since systemd was first introduced.

Top image: KDE Plasma 6.4.5. (Credit: Michio.kawaii, Wikimedia)