2026-04-07 19:00:38
There’s been a lot of virtual ink spilled in environmental circles about the cooling water requirements of data centers, but less consideration of what happens with all the heat coming out of these buildings. Naturally, it’s going to warm the surrounding environment, but how much? Around 2 C (3.6 F) on average, and potentially much more than that, according to a recent study on the data heat island effect.
It’s common sense, of course: heat removed from the data center doesn’t go away. That heat might go into a body of water if one is available, but otherwise it’s out into the atmosphere to warm up everybody else’s day. In some places — like a Canadian winter — that might not be so bad. In others, where climate change and urban heat islands are cranking up the summertime temperatures, it very much could be. Especially if you’re in the worst-case scenario micro-climate described by the paper, which saw a predicted increase of 9.1 C (16 F).
Now, these results are theoretical and need to be ground-truthed, but anyone who has huddled next to the air-exchange unit of a large building for warmth knows there’s something to them. Unfortunately there don’t seem to be before-and-after measurements available for existing data-centers — AI or otherwise — to show exactly what their heat output is doing in the real world, but the urban heat island effect from all the dark asphalt in our cities is well known. Cooling paint and green roofs can help with that, but they won’t do much for the megawatts being pumped out to keep your cousin’s AI girlfriend online.
Some would argue that all this heat wouldn’t be a problem if we could launch the data centers outside the environment — just have a care the front doesn’t fall off.
2026-04-07 16:00:36
In the mid 1970s there were a spate of movies depicting the romance and lifestyle of truck drivers in the southern half of the United States. Over on the other side of the Atlantic these were naturally received not as works of drama but as documentaries, and thus began a craze for British drivers to do up their Ford Capri so in the right light and with your eyes nearly closed, it almost looked like Burt Reynolds’ Pontiac Trans Am from Smokey and the Bandit.
Such a fine automobile was of course incomplete without a CB radio, highly illegal at the time, which led to an underground CB craze and its eventual legalization in 1981. [Ringway Manchester] is here with a tale from that era, of 934 MHz CB, an odd and underused allocation that was eventually phased out for commercial services.
When UK CB was eventually legalized by the government, it was very obvious that they really didn’t want to. Brits got 27 MHz as FM only with meager power and a weird set of frequencies that nobody else had, and a second band way up in the UHF range, at 934 MHz. We remember they originally tried to make a UHF band the only allocation on purpose because it was nearly useless for mobile operation, and Brits only got 27 MHz by fighting back in the political lobbying space.
The video below tells the story of the band, with relatively scarce and expensive equipment leading to it being an exclusive band more similar to the amateur bands, with little resemblance to its raucous 27 MHz counterpart. How much activity there was depended very much on where in the country you were, which of course wasn’t where your Hackaday scribe was as a teenager even if it had been affordable. Eventually the government saw the little flashing pound signs and grabbed it back for a mobile radio service that never materialized, and now the frequencies are part of the mobile phone spectrum.
Have a watch for an odd bit of UK radio nostalgia and some 2020s illegal CB’ers, and if you want more it’s a subject we’ve touched on before.
2026-04-07 13:00:41
The Pokéwalker is a gadget that was sold alongside the Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver games for the Nintendo DS, using which you could take a Pokémon of your choice with you on a walk. Not only would you earn points while walking, but you’d be able to find items, battle wild Pokémon, etc. The Pokémon inside the device is however linked to the game cartridge. This fact turned into tragedy when [Etchy] found his old Pokéwalker with a treasured Pokémon still on it, but was forced to erase the device as he had lost the cartridge over the years.
Although he had been told repeatedly by then that it was impossible to transfer such a digital pet to a new save file, this never felt right. Although it made some sense that a specific critter would be linked to a specific save file as a level of security, there’s also the question of whether all data of the Pokémon in question would be erased from said save file.
Fortunately, [Dmitry] has reverse-engineered the Pokéwalker already, including the infrared protocol that uses the IR transceiver in the cartridge itself. As it turns out, only some basic information is sent over to the device, while the Pokémon is simply hidden in the save file, including the data that isn’t sent to the device. Case closed, right?
It would be a sad ending for those who have lost Pokémon on these devices if it was that simple, fortunately. After some digging, [Etchy] found out that the device only checks for three pieces of information to ensure that it is being accessed from a valid game session: the version (HeartGold or SoulSilver), the region (NA, JP, etc.) and the training and secret IDs.
This thus means that if you try long enough, or use an RNG manipulation hack as demonstrated, you can get a new save file created that has the exact same IDs. As long as you after that make sure that your local critter’s details in terms of species and form are the same as on the device, there’s nothing really stopping the device from happily handing over the critter’s details.
Of course, the real thing that defines a single Pokémon is its ID (PID) that defines its properties, and this is only saved in the save file. The final answer is thus that there’s no way to rescue a trapped Pokémon, as it only really exists on the cartridge that may or may not still exist in some physical form.
2026-04-07 10:00:19
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.
2026-04-07 07:00:43
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.
2026-04-07 04:00:49
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.
