TechyMagThings

Although everyone’s favorite Linux overlord [Linus Torvalds] has been musing on dropping Intel 486 support for a while now, it would seem that this time now has finally come. In a Linux patch submitted by [Ingo Molnar] the first concrete step is taken by removing support for i486 in the build system. With this patch now accepted into the ‘tip’ branch, this means that no i486-compatible image can be built any more as it works its way into the release branches, starting with kernel 7.1.

No mainstream Linux distribution currently supports the 486 CPU, so the impact should be minimal, and there has been plenty of warning. We covered the topic back in 2022 when [Linus] first floated the idea, as well as in 2025 when more mutterings from the side of [Linus] were heard, but no exact date was offered until now.

It remains to be seen whether 2026 is really the year when Linux says farewell to the Intel 486 after doing so for the Intel 386 back in 2012. We cannot really imagine that there’s a lot of interest in running modern Linux kernels on CPUs that are probably older than the average Hackaday reader, but we could be mistaken.

Meanwhile, we got people modding Windows XP to be able to run on the Intel 486, opening the prospect that modern Windows might make it onto these systems instead of Linux in the ultimate twist of irony.

When LG left the smartphone market, quite a number of strange devices were left behind. While some, like the Wing, made it to consumers, others did not. The strangest of these would have to be their rollable phone concept; a device which would expand by unrolling a portion of the screen like a scroll. This never made it to market, but one managed to make its way to [JerryRigEverything’s] workbench, and we are fortunate enough to see the insides of this strange device. 

There are a few interesting tidbits about the device before even entering the device. Very clearly this phone was ready to be sold, with a tidy user interface for expanding the display, and even animated wallpapers which which expand with it. The display, when rolled onto the back of the device, sits behind a glass cover to keep it protected from debris, and can be used to take selfies with the larger sensors of the rear facing cameras. You can also see a bit of the track that the screen rolls on, hinting at what lies inside.

One doesn’t have to get far into a teardown of this phone to find more. A tiny brush hides in the curved corner of the screen rolling mechanism, to keep debris out of the pocket the screen sits inside. This also gives a better look at the aforementioned track system, which guides the display around the corner and keeps it stable and secure.

Further inside, you can see the mechanism which allow the phone to unfurl. Two rather small, but powerful DC motors resting a rack and pinion move the surprisingly strong phone to its full sized state. A number of spring loaded arms provide stability to the mechanism, preventing racking. The mechanism is surprisingly strong, able to push a number of books out of its way. However, if its movement is resisted, it will display a warning that you might damage the phone.

Tearing down a phone that doesn’t exist is not terribly useful, so the focus was very much on the mechanism, with no detours or destructive disassembly. However, if destructive reverse engineering is what your here for, make sure to check out this teardown of a smart LEGO brick next!

When you’re programming microcontrollers, you’re likely to think in C if you’re old-school, Rust if you’re trendy, or Python if you want it done quick and have resources to spare. What about Go? The programming language, not the game. That’s an option, too, with TinyGo now supporting over 100 different dev boards, along with webASM.

We covered TinyGo back in 2019, but they were just getting started at that point, targeting the Arduino and BBC:micro boards. They’ve grown that list to include everything from most of Adafruit’s fruitful suite of offerings, ESP32s, and even the Nintendo Game Boy Advance. So now you can go program go in Go so you can play go on the go.

The biggest drawback–which is going to be an absolute dealkiller for a lot of applications–is a lack of wireless connectivity support. Claiming to support the ESP8266 while not allowing one to use wifi is a bit of a stretch, considering that’s the whole raison d’être of that particular chip, but it’s usable as a regular microcontroller at least.

They’ve now implemented garbage collection, a selling point for those who like Go, but admit it’s slower in TinyGo compared to its larger cousin and won’t work on AVR chips or in WebAssembly. It’s still not complete Go, however, so just as we reported in 2019, you won’t be able to compile all the standard library packages you might be used to. There are more of them than there were, so progress has been made!

Still, knowing how people get about programming languages, this will please the Go fanatics out there. Others might prefer to go FORTH and program their Arduinos, or to wear out their parentheses keys with LISP. The more the merrier, we say!

Adding another item on the list of things you probably shouldn’t be trying at home, we got [Brainiac75] giving magnetic levitation a shot using an unmodified induction cooktop and aluminium foil. Although not ferromagnetic, it turns out that aluminium can be made to do interesting things in the magnetic field created by the powerful electromagnet that underlies the induction principle.

Interestingly, although there’s a detection circuit in these units that should detect the presence of an appropriate (ferromagnetic) object, it appears that even a thin sheet of aluminium foil can completely deceive it. The effect is that of a force pushing the foil away from the cooktop’s surface, with foil areas that remain close enough to the ferrite bars on the electromagnet even heating up enough to begin melting the aluminium.

After a bit of fun with various shapes and types of aluminium objects, the video moves on to a scientific explanation of what’s going on. The surface resistivity of the foil is similar enough to ferromagnetic cookware that it fools the sensor, after which the skin effect of aluminium induces a current. This then does the typical Lorentz force things.

A few years back a company had an ad campaign with a discouraged caveman who was angry because the company claimed their website was “so easy, even a caveman could do it.” Maybe that inspired [JuliusBrussee] to create caveman, a tool for reducing costs when using Claude Code.

The trick is that Claude, like other LLMs, operates on tokens. Tokens aren’t quite words, but they are essentially words or word fragments. Most LLM plans also charge you by the token. So fewer tokens means lower costs. However, LLMs can be quite verbose, unless you make them talk like a caveman.

For example, here is some normal output from Claude:

Sure! I’d be happy to help you with that. The issue you’re experiencing is most likely caused by your authentication middleware not properly validating the token expiry. Let me take a look and suggest a fix.

After Caveman that is reduced to:

Bug in auth middleware. Token expiry check use < not <=. Fix:

Turns out, you can understand the caveman output just fine.

There are a few rules. Caveman removes filler words, but knows to keep technical terms, code blocks, and error messages intact. It also outputs normal messages for things like commits.

As the website says: “Caveman not dumb. Caveman efficient. Caveman say what need saying. Then stop. If caveman save you mass token, mass money — leave mass star.”

If you want to code with an LLM, make sure you understand the terms of service. If you want to learn more about how LLMs work with tokens and other details, but want to skip the math, we can help with that.

3D printing is a staple of the hacker community. From decorative items to rugged functional parts, almost anything you can think of, can be printed. [anurag.id] shows us some classic 3D printing hacks by converting his keyboard into a compact workstation.

Like any hacker project, the initial idea is small: he decides the knob on his mechanical keyboard is boring, so he designs some alternatives. First, one “retro style” knob. Then, like any good project, the scope creep begins. He makes another knob, and another… by the end he has 6 different designs! But don’t worry, the scope can get even bigger. He decides his ipad needs a good stand on his desk–and what better place to put it than on the keyboard? Now it’s starting to look like a real little workstation. Finally, as a finishing touch, he adds some magnetically-attached wrist rests for a compact, ergonomic workstation.

Video after the break.

P.S.: Bonus points for the good video editing.

Although the Sega Dreamcast had many good qualities that made it beloved by the thousands of people who bought the console, one glaring omission was the lack of DVD video capabilities. Despite its optical drive being theoretically capable of such a feat, Sega had opted to use the GD-ROM disc format to not have to cough up DVD licensing fees, while the PlayStation 2 could play DVD movies. Fortunately it’s possible to hack DVD capability into the Dreamcast if you aren’t too fussy about the details, as [Throaty Mumbo] recently demonstrated.

For the Tl;dw folk among us, there’s a GitHub repository that contains the basic summary and all needed files. Suffice it to say that it is a bit of a kludge, but on the bright side it does not require one to modify the Dreamcast. Instead it uses a Pico 2 board that emulates a Sega DreamEye camera on the Dreamcast’s Maple bus via the controller port. The Dreamcast then requests image data as if from said camera.

On the DVD side of things there’s a Raspberry Pi 5 that connects to an external USB DVD drive and which encodes the video for transmission via USB to the Pico 2 board. Although somewhat sketchy, it totally serves to get DVDs playing on the Dreamcast. If only Sega had not skimped on those license fees, perhaps.