TechyMagThings

Four years ago the EMF hacker camp in the UK released a new kind of event badge. The Tildagon was designed to be a recurring event badge, useful for the next EMF rather than destined to be e-waste. With the 2026 event coming up there’s a new Tildagon called the Spaceagon, and as you might expect it’s very familiar indeed.

Tildagon owners can update their badge with the Spaceagon front panel, while those without one can buy the new badge. It has a few minor updates from its predecessor, including better buttons, LEDs, and display mounting, and there’s a compass, a joystick, and touch sensitive areas.

The Tildagon introduced its own add-on format, the Hexpansion. This year there’s the first official Hexpansion, a keyboard, using the same rubber moulding we see on quite a few maker projects. We like the Hexpansion idea because it uses an edge connector rather than a set of pins on the device, but at the cost of more expensive badge parts.

If you’re going to EMF you should be able to order yourself a Spaceagon, or an upgrade kit if you already own a Tildagon. Meanwhile we covered the 2024 version back when it arrived, and surprisingly this isn’t the first keyboard add-on for it either.

For a piece of wearable technology, Pebble has had a fairly “rocky” history. One of the most successful Kickstarters of its era, it went on to get acquired by FitBit, quietly shelved by them, then acquired by Google and open-sourced, where it’s now somewhat back in the hands of its original creator. Its new open source nature means that regular people can develop for these popular watches again, and [Coconauts] have developed a guide for these watches, new and old.

The original watches had to be coded using C, which is a fundamental language but one that generally isn’t used much in the modern world outside of embedded systems and other areas where efficieny is important. C does much less hand-holding than modern languages, so there are a number of things to keep an eye on when coding for these watches that languages like Rust, Go, and Python handle on their own. Regardless, the two-person team recently built a pair of apps for the Pebble platform as part of an app-making contest, one which notifies the user that the watch is charged to 80%, and another that shows an interactive kitten on the watch’s face.

Both of the apps are available from the Pebble app repository, and from there the source code can be found on respective GitHub pages if you’re looking for some examples to dust off old C skills. If you happen to have an old Pebble watch or always wanted one but didn’t want to deal with FitBit, now might be a good time to get them out and start tinkering around with it since it’s now in the open-source domain.

[Bob] recently completed LanguageLearner, a desktop device that increases his exposure to a second language by offering up bite-sized news items in Italian, with a complementary English translation. Even better, it’s a project made almost entirely from inexpensive parts he had on hand; it consists of little more than a Raspberry Pi Pico W, a 4.2″ E-paper display, and a 3D-printed stand.

Here’s how it works: once every few hours, the system wakes up and uses its WiFi connection to fetch news from an Italian RSS feed. Having chosen a slice of current events, it translates to English with an API call then displays both versions on the display: original Italian up top, translated English below.

E-paper is ideal for a semi-passive project like this because once data is written to the display, there it remains without needing power or upkeep of any kind. Perfect for a device that only wakes up every few hours for an update before going right back to sleep.

Due to the limited RAM of the Raspberry Pi Pico [Bob] has to be purposeful about fetching data, so he relies on text from a simple RSS feed to avoid running out of memory while making web requests. The other minor quibble is that the driver for the display only handles plain ASCII; characters that cannot be rendered are displayed as grey boxes, which you can see in the image up top. Still, it gets the job done.

Increasing exposure to a language one is learning is beneficial, and people like to experiment. From trying to optimize human wait times by inserting language micro-lessons to a calculator that works in Toki Pona, technology offers new ways for folks to experiment with how we learn and play with language.

There’s a thing that people who grew up on farms all share: a connection with food production that isn’t some mystical rose-tinted woo from a TV chef, but instead a practical general knowledge from being there on the ground. A glance at a crop in a field and you immediately recognise what it is, if it’s ploughing time you’ll know the soil type, and there’s always either too little, or too much rain. For a given foodstuff you’ll know far too much about where it came from, because if your dad wasn’t involved in its production, the chances are someone he knew was. You take this for granted, after all doesn’t everyone have this general knowledge? Seemingly not.

Hackaday is not a cooking channel, but I know we’re all interested here in how things are made. Shouldn’t that also extend to what we eat? It’s fashionable to follow a back-to-nature line that all commercial foodstuffs are somehow over-processed junk, but without the requisite knowledge you’re flying blind there. To know both how common foodstuffs should be made, as well as how they are made industrially, should be an essential for everyone.

Mm-Mm-Mmmm, Coagulated Milk!

So without further ado, it’s time to dive straight in with cheese, or to be more specific, hard cheese. In simple terms the flavoursome snack is matured fermented coagulated preserved milk, which sounds a lot less appetizing than what the cheese marketing people will tell you, but that’s the hacker’s truth.

The milk comes from lactating farm animals, in most cases cows, but as an example in my local supermarket I can buy sheep and goat cheeses too. A dairy herd is also a breeding herd, and after the calves are weaned the cow continues to be milked until the next time she’s brought into calf.

Pulling no punches here, in most commercial settings the calves are removed from their mothers very young and brought up on a kind of cow infant formula, which is without doubt rather cruel. I grew up with a small suckler herd in which the aim is to breed high quality breeding cattle, so ours were fortunate enough to stay with their mothers until they were naturally weaned.

The milk will be collected and refrigerated, and in most cases will be pasteurised, heat treated to kill bacteria. Some people will tell you this removes all the goodness from the milk which is a questionable assertion, given that what it really does is make the stuff easier to transport without going off, and stop people dying from milk-borne infection. In a cheese context some cheeses rely on un-pasteurised milk for their flavour or authenticity, but as I’ll explain later, in most cases this doesn’t make them a health hazard.

Gambling at the Bacteria Races

Cheesemaking is a fermentation process, and as with others, the point is to control the fermentation such that its by-products kill off the harmful bacteria and preserve the food before they can spoil it. In the case of beer or wine the alcohol from anaerobic yeast metabolism does this job, but in the case of cheese it’s lactic acid from a class of bacteria that produce it given the right conditions.

This is why un-pasteruised milk can be used without too much worry, as those undesirable bugs should be removed by the lactic acid. You need lactic acid bacteria to be present which could be a hit-and-miss affair growing them in the milk naturally, but here in 2026 you add them as a pre-prepared culture. The make-up of this culture would originally be derived from the terroir of the cheesemaking region, for example the bacteria where Emmental cheese originated produces gas which gives that cheese its characteristic bubbles. It’s here you see the origins of the different types of cheese, as alongside the different bacteria are local variations in technique which lend the final product its unique qualities.

The milk is heated to speed up the fermentation, the idea being that a warm temperature favours the lactic acid bacteria over the undesirable bugs that might spoil it. Once the lactic acid fermentation is mostly done, the mixture is turned into curds and whey by the addition of rennet. This is an enzyme that coagulates the milk solids, the fat and proteins, leaving a thin liquid, whey, as the leftover.

Rennet is another of those things that can involve some cruelty, as traditionally it would have been produced from the stomachs of young calves slaughtered for the veal industry. Sorry veal farmers — I have never knowingly eaten veal. Fortunately it’s now much more likely to be made commercially from an engineered fungal or bacterial culture, which is why you will see most cheeses labelled as vegetarian.

The cheese is now a big tank full of curd, swimming in whey. The whey is strained off and the curd is broken up. releasing more whey. There is then a process of stirring the curd to release as much whey as possible, which yet again has an effect on the final cheese and is part of those different varieties, and eventually you have a pile of relatively dry fermented curds.

If you were Canadian you’d run off with some of it and make poutine, but sadly for me as a Brit we didn’t invent that marvelous street food, so we’d add salt before pressing it into moulds to make a basic cheese shape and extract the last drops of whey. We’d then wrap it in muslin and place it in a cool dark place to mature for several months. What you’d extract at the end would be covered in mould, but the cheese once you’d peeled off the muslin would (most of the time) be amazing!

Blessèd Are The Cheesemakers

So there you have it, that in a few paragraphs is how you make a farmhouse cheese. For us it was on a small kitchen-table scale for our own consumption, but it would be substantially the same for any small-to-medium farmhouse operation. Even the large-scale factory cheese operations do the same thing, with the key difference being that they require the process to be efficient and optimised, but above all consistent.

Remember I said that our cheese would be most of the time amazing? Cheese can go wrong, it can get infected with a bad bacteria, it can ferment differently, and it can taste, well, not so good. We could afford to lose a few cheeses, but a multi-million-dollar company can’t. So their process is controlled to the n’th degree, and out slightly hit-and-miss steps are eliminated. The hygiene, temperature, humidity, and every other possible variable are controlled exactly, to ensure that every cheese they make has the same flavour and texture, and time from milk to finished cheese is the same every time.

If I were asked, I would say that a commercial cheese from my supermarket is entirely as good a product as the most artisanal of farmhouse cheeses, and I think in terms of nutrition and quality, I would be right. Of course the farmhouse cheese would almost certainly taste a lot better because its production schedule is optimised for those qualities in a premium product rather than for low price, but I think it’s an important thing to say in order to head off those who’ll tell you that the cheaper stuff is not so good for you.

There certainly are cheeses that come closer to that, for example “pizza cheese analogue” which is a synthetic product, or plastic wrapped slices for which the name “Processed cheese” should be a clue, but in general if it’s “proper” cheese it’ll be real enough.

I hope now you know more about cheese from a hacker perspective rather than a culinary one than you did before you started. I’ve shared what I know about the agriculture behind it with an unflinching approach because I feel consumers should know what’s behind what they eat. Above all then, buy decent cheese, and enjoy it.

Featured Image: US Department of Agriculture, Public Domain

Generally, the frame and other structural parts of an FDM printer use steel or similar, but could you use wood instead for that truly artisan look? As [Mitsu Makes] demonstrates after half a year of work, you absolutely can, and it looks about as amazing as you might imagine.

Naturally, you cannot make everything out of wood – such as the linear rails and lead screws – and there is a fair bit of FDM-printed black PLA in there too, but the wood is both structural and decorative. The stained look does really add something. For the FDM-specific parts, the Voron 0 was taken as the base, including the bed. The motion system isn’t CoreXY but Cartesian for ease of construction and driving the axes, while also providing more torque due to the additional motors.

Since it’s more or less a Voron FDM printer and even has automatic bed leveling, it works basically perfectly after assembly and input shaping. Even if it’s not the most practical way to make your own FDM printer from parts, it definitely makes it look unique and would be the focal point of any printing farm.

Running an optical character recognition (OCR) server might sound like it would need some powerful hardware, like a rack-mounted, water-cooled machine, or at least a nice desktop or laptop. But if you have the time, anything could be used. [Hemant] has a long-running personal project that processes a lot of image data over a long time, and set up the OCR server on an iPhone 8 running entirely with solar power, rather than turn to more typical hardware.

Part of what makes this task feasible for low-powered hardware is Apple’s Vision framework, which uses machine learning to aid in things like character recognition (among other tasks). It will run on an iPhone just as easily as a Mac. The phone’s built-in battery already provides the first step of an off-grid setup. This build relies on a separate power bank to integrate the phone with the solar panel more easily. On the software side, [Hemant] reports that the true challenge wasn’t setting up the server as much as it was keeping the iPhone from sleeping or stopping his program from running full-time.

A system like this running off-grid, especially considering the costs of the solar panel and power bank, might seem counterproductive. But when comparing electricity costs for running the same software on his server, he estimates he saves about $10 per month with this setup, which has a payback of somewhere around 2-3 years. Not too bad for a phone that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill. Old phones can be surprisingly good choices for servers, too. It helps if they can run Linux, but plenty of phones will support server applications, even when running their native OS.

If you’re located in the Northeast United States and thought you heard an explosion yesterday afternoon, it wasn’t just your imagination — multiple sources have now confirmed that a 1 meter (3 foot) meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere and broke up in the air off the coast of Massachusetts, releasing the energy equivalent of 300 tons of TNT.

Well, maybe. The latest update from NASA says it might actually qualify as a meteorite, with radar data indicating that debris from the space rock may have fallen into Cape Cod Bay. For those unfamiliar, the difference between a meteor and a meteorite is whether or not any of the object survived its encounter with the atmosphere and made it down to the surface.

There’s an argument to be made that a larger asteroid would have likely set off some alarm bells as it approached the planet, but the fact that this deep space interloper showed up unannounced is a sobering reminder that our ability to detect incoming threats isn’t nearly as robust as we’d like. Fortunately, it looks like the event didn’t result in any serious damage or injury.

Speaking of mid-air threats, here’s a reminder of what not to do on an airliner: on Saturday a flight departing Newark airport for Spain had to turn around when it was discovered a Bluetooth device bearing the name “BOMB” was onboard. There was no actual explosive device found on the plane when it was searched upon its return, and reports are that the whole incident was the result of an Ill-conceived device name on a portable speaker.

The details on this one are interesting, as a first-hand account posted to Reddit would seem to indicate that both the flight crew and teams back at United Airlines headquarters in Chicago were able to see the Bluetooth devices on the plane in real-time. The passengers were actually given several chances to turn off their devices before the order was given to turn the plane around, and at one point the crew claimed they were even able to see the number of Bluetooth devices that were still active.

Admittedly, it could have been as simple as one of the crew members using an app on their phone to see how many discoverable Bluetooth devices they could pick up and reporting their findings back to the home office. But in the modern security climate, it’s not hard to imagine that the aircraft has some form of integrated Wireless Intrusion Detection System (WIDS). Something to keep in mind the next time they ask you to put your gadgets into airplane mode during takeoff.

It seems like every week we’ve been reporting on some service going dark, and today is no different. As pointed out by OMG Ubuntu, Canonical will be shutting down the Ubuntu Pastebin service in June. In fact, originally it was supposed to go offline today, but they’ve pushed the date back by a month due to the response from the community. Turns out giving your users just a few days to pack up their belongings before kicking them to the digital curb isn’t popular. Who knew?

Now granted Hackaday is geared more towards hardware than software, but a search through the database would seem to indicate we’ve never once run a post that linked to Ubuntu Pastebin in the 18 years the service has been available. Conversely, we had pages of results when searching our back catalog for instances of the classic pastebin.com. So we’re actually curious about this one and would love to hear from the readers: how many of you were actually using this service regularly, and will you miss it?

Finally, those in the market may be interested to hear that Wells Fargo will start offering mortgages for 3D printed homes produced by the Texas-based ICON Technologies. They’ve even got a special incentive program lined up for the extruded domiciles, offering a lender credit that can offset some of the closing costs.

This might not sound like that big of a deal, but apparently most banks have been understandably skeptical of the technology and the long-term market for 3D printed homes up to this point. After all, it was just a few years ago that a recently completed 3D printed home in Iowa had to be demolished after the structure fell short of safety standards. As pointed out by CNBC, previous communities produced with ICON’s concrete printing technology had to be financed through the developer.

We’re still not sure that 3D printed homes make a whole lot of sense, but making the technology more accessible is surely a net positive. Even if the current state of the art in house squirting isn’t quite there, you know how the old saying goes: a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single layer.

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.