2026-04-06 16:00:49
When the inevitable Kessler Syndrome cascade sweeps Starlink and its competitors from Low Earth Orbit in what will doubtless be a spectacular meteor shower of debris, the people behind Sceye and its competitors are going to be laughing to the bank. That’s because they’re putting their connectivity rather lower than orbit — in the stratosphere, with high-altitude dirigibles.
The advantages are pretty obvious: for one, the dirigible isn’t disposable in the way the very-low-orbit satellites Starlink and its planned imitators use. For another, the time-of-flight for a signal to get to a dirigible 20 km up is less than a tenth of the time it takes to get 480 km up — and that affects latency. Thirdly, the High Altitude Platform System (HAPS) concept won’t require any special transmitters. Regular cellular modems using ordinary 4G and 5G bands and speeds are usable, which eliminates a big barrier to rollout.
If this all sounds a bit familiar, and even dated, perhaps that’s because it is — Google tried to beam internet down from the stratosphere with its Loon project, before shutting it down in 2021. One of Loon’s major shortcomings was reliance on the shifting winds of the upper atmosphere, something the new generation of dirigible stations won’t have to worry about.
Of course, until the positive feedback loop of satellite collisions creating debris that begets yet more collisions that we call a Kessler Syndrome — which we’ve written about in arcade form, oddly enough–one could also use these HAPS stations as a bridge between space-based and ground-based networks.
2026-04-06 13:00:08
Not so long ago, e-ink devices were rare and fairly pricey. As they have become more common and cheaper, some cool form-factor devices have emerged that suffer from subpar software. [Concretedog] picked up just such a device, and that purchase led to the discovery of a cool open-source firmware project for this tiny gadget.
[Concretedog] described the process of loading the firmware, which is just about as easy a modification as one can make. You plug the e-ink display into your computer, visit a website, and can flash it right from there. Once the display is running the CrossPoint Reader firmware, it unlocks some new tricks on this affordable reader. The firmware lets you turn the device into a WiFi hotspot and upload books wirelessly, or it can connect to an existing network to add files that way. It also enables rotating the display and KOReader syncing if you have multiple devices you read from.
We love seeing the community step in and improve devices that are hardware-wise good, sometimes great, but come up lacking in the software or firmware department. Thanks [Concretedog] for sharing your experience with this device and the cool open-source firmware. Be sure to check out some other projects we’ve featured where a firmware tweak breathed new life into the hardware.
2026-04-06 10:00:15
For some reason, Markdown has not just become the format of choice for giving READMEs in GitHub repositories some flair, but also for writing entire websites and documents. In a recent rant, [Burak Güngör] covers all the ways in which Markdown is a good idea as a basic document formatting concept and how its implementation is absolutely atrocious.
Even without straying into the minefields helpfully provided by other Markdown dialects beyond CommonMark, there is already plenty here to indulge in. The very idea of Markdown as a ‘simple text formatting syntax’ breaks down the moment you look at the available formatting styles and how they translate into HTML. Worse, the sheer complexity of parsing Markdown makes it vulnerable to a regular expression denial-of-service (ReDoS) attack.
This is where the question arises of whether Markdown is truly a text formatting aid or trying to be a programming language that just happens to usually spit out HTML documents, as, at some point, you’re basically writing something that approaches a regular expressions engine in its nightmarish implications.
Where things really fly off the rails is with inline HTML in Markdown, as this also means that you have to add an HTML parser to your Markdown parser to be Fully Compliant
. All of which doesn’t even yet take into account the special tags and formatting that things like GitHub-Flavored Markdown add. Yet even without that baggage, we can already enjoy the pleasures that inline HTML-related CVEs bring, including XSS CVEs.
Ultimately, [Burak]’s argument is that Markdown could be a good, simple document formatting tool if it actually tried to be one, which is something with which we can only wholeheartedly agree. When a simple text document is often enough for something like a changelog, and HTML is better suited for more than the most basic of formatting, Markdown seems to have trouble picking what it wants to be.
Considering that it’s often much easier to use HTML tags in a ‘Markdown’ README file for things like tables and images, it’s hard to say exactly where Markdown fits. The skeptic might say that if you’re going to add inline HTML as a feature, you may as well skip the ‘Markdown’ part.
What do you think? How do you generate simple documents? Love Markdown? Hate it? Let us know in the comments. For real fun, try using Markup for graphics.
2026-04-06 07:00:57
Old shop tools have a reputation for resilience and sturdiness, and though some of this is due to survivorship bias, some of it certainly comes down to an abundance of cast iron. The vise which [Marius Hornberger] recently restored is no exception, which made a good stand indispensable; it needed to be mobile for use throughout the shop, yet stay firmly in place under significant force. To do this, he built a stand with a pen-like locking mechanism to deploy and retract some caster wheels.
Most of the video goes over the construction of the rest of the stand, which is interesting in itself; the stand has an adjustable height, which required [Marius] to construct two interlocking center columns with a threaded adjustment mechanism. The three legs of the stand were welded out of square tubing, and the wheels are mounted on levers attached to the inside of the legs. One of the levers is longer and has a foot pedal that can be pressed down to extend all the casters and lock them in place. A second press on the pedal unlocks the levers, which are pulled up by springs. The locking mechanism is based on a cam that blocks or allows motion depending on its rotation; each press down rotates it a bit. This mechanism, like most parts of the stand, was laser-cut and laser-welded (if you want to skip ahead to its construction, it begins at about 29:00).
Unlike locking caster wheels, this provides significant grip when the wheels are retracted; considering the heft of the vise [Marius] restored, this must be helpful. If you’re more interested in building a vise than a stand, we’ve seen that too.
Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip!
2026-04-06 04:00:49
When taking macro photographs, you often need just a tiny bit of controlled motion — so little that it’s tough to pull off by hand. To address this, [Salveo] designed a small open-source macro photography slider featuring an anti-backlash handle.
Macro photography gives you an extremely shallow field of view, sometimes under 1 mm of depth, in which subjects stay in focus. To combat this, it’s common to capture multiple images while sliding the camera forward or backward, then combine them for a much larger depth of field than a single shot provides. [Salveo]’s slider gives fine control over this focus-stacking process, with the knob even marked to show every 1 mm of linear travel.
The slider is built around a 150 mm linear rail, though it could easily be lengthened or shortened to suit your needs. A T8 leadscrew, paired with anti-backlash nuts, translates the knob’s rotation into smooth linear motion. The knob itself uses a custom-designed anti-backlash mechanism to ensure the slider works cleanly in either direction.
You can grab all the 3D-printable files as well as the full bill of materials from the project page. Be sure to check out [Salveo]’s build video below. Thanks [Tim L.] for sending in this awesome open-source slider. Be sure to check out some of the other macro photography projects we’ve covered, too.
2026-04-06 01:00:59
Despite a few high-profile cases in recent years with lawyers getting caught using LLM-generated documents and facing disciplinary action due to this, it would seem that this is not deterring many other lawyers from following them off this particular cliff, per reporting from NPR.
We reported back in the innocent days of 2023 about the amusing case of Robert Mata v. Avianca, Inc. In this case, the plaintiff’s lawyer decided to have ChatGPT ‘assist’ with the legal filing, which ended up being filled with non-existent cases being cited, despite the chatbot’s assurance that these were all real cases. Now it would seem that this blind trust in cases cited by LLM chatbots is becoming the rule, rather than the exception.
Last year a record number of lawyers fell into the same trap, with many lawyers getting fined thousands of dollars for confabulated case citations. According to a researcher at the business school HEC Paris, who is keeping a worldwide tally, the count so far is 1,200, of which 800 originate from US courts.
Unsurprisingly, penalties are also increasing in severity, with monetary penalties passing the $100,000 and some courts demanding that any use of ‘AI’ be declared up-front. Whether or not the popularity of LLM chatbots among US lawyers is simply due to the massive caseload that digging through cases in Common Law legal systems entails has not yet been addressed, but that undesirable shortcuts are being taken is undeniable.
Remember that it’s easy to point and laugh, but the next case could involve the lawyer handling your delicate situation.
