2026-05-04 07:00:20
Software that collects public data from the Internet and uses it to provide half-assed answers to your questions might seem like a modern craze, but today we bid farewell to a website that helped pioneer pretend conversations all the way back in 1997 — as of May 1st, Ask Jeeves is no more.
Well, technically they dropped the “Jeeves” part back in 2006. Since then it’s just been Ask.com, but as the name implies the idea was more or less the same. Rather than the relatively rigid parameters and keywords required by traditional search engines, you could ask Jeeves questions about the world using natural language. Early advertisements showed the virtual valet answering arbitrary questions like “How many calories in a banana?,” which of course today seems commonplace and utterly unimpressive, but was a pretty wild for the 1990s.
It might seem surprising that a site designed from day one to offer a human-like Q&A experience should fold right as such technology is becoming commonplace. But of course, that commonality is the problem. When Google can answer your questions just as well (or poorly…) as Jeeves or anyone else, what’s the benefit for the average Internet user to seek out another service? But it’s still somewhat ironic, which is probably why the farewell message on Ask.com ends with the line “Jeeves’ spirit endures.”
While on the subject of technology that’s potentially ahead of its time, MacRumors is reporting that Apple is giving up on their Vision Pro augmented reality googles. They haven’t been formally discontinued as of yet, but sources indicate that the internal development team for the entire product line has been disbanded and reassigned to other projects within the company. This comes after a October 2025 refresh of the hardware still failed to connect with consumers. Insiders have said that not only were sales sluggish on the ~$3,500 headsets, but that they were getting returned at a far higher rate than any of Apple’s other hardware products.
Now, we’re hardly Apple apologists here at Hackaday. It sort of goes without saying that the whole “Walled Garden” thing doesn’t really fit our ethos. But we can’t deny that the Vision Pro is an impressive piece of technology. After years of sticking our phones in crappy plastic headsets, or trying to force hardware designed for VR gaming to do literally anything else, the Vision Pro offered a practical way to put augmented reality to work. But even for a company known for producing expensive hardware, the price tag was just too much for most consumers.
We’ll go out on a limb here and predict that the Vision Pro will one day be looked back on like the Newton — a product that was too expensive and niche to be a commercial success when it came out, but still a technical milestone that gave us a glimpse into the shape of things to come.
Speaking of a technology that will inevitably become more common, the European Patent Office (EPO) released a report this week showing a seven-fold increase in the number of inventions intended for battery reuse and recycling over the last decade. Given our insatiable demand for rechargeable batteries, it should come as no surprise that there’s a huge push for new methods of squeezing more use out of cells. As noted several times by the EPO, it’s not purely about saving money either. Even if Europe produces the batteries domestically, they need to import the raw materials. Relying on foreign countries to provide critical infrastructure can be precarious in the best of times, and is likely to only become more politically onerous in the future.
Finally, we’ll leave you with a fun way to waste some time on a Sunday evening: Visible Zorker. Created by Andrew Plotkin, this website allows you to not only play through all three installments of Zork, but presents a debugger-style view of the source code as the game is running. Even if you’re not terribly interested in seeing how your responses are parsed, the map that shows your progress through the world is certainly handy. The project was actually started back in 2025, but Andrew just completed the trilogy by adding support for Zork III a couple days ago so now is the perfect time to check it out.
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.
2026-05-04 04:00:37
Triple monitor workstations are pretty common these days, particularly for those wishing to maximise screen space for greater productivity. [Will It Work?] has put together a sillier take on this concept, however, hooking the diminutive iPod Nano up to three monitors instead.
The 6th-generation iPod nano brought forth a new form factor – it’s the postage stamp-sized one that you could clip to your workout gear. It’s not typically what you’d call a productivity device, but there is a way to get more out of it. The trick is to grab a 30-pin Keyboard Dock, which allows access to the composite video signal from the iPod. It was originally designed for the iPad, but it works with the iPad nano too with a 30-pin spacer adapter – just don’t expect the keys to do anything. This setup also allows access to the 3.5mm four-pole jack, which handles audio input and output. With a bunch of additional cables and adapters, the iPod was able to be hooked up to three screens, a set of Apple Pro speakers, and three Sharp LCD monitors.
What can you do with this setup? Fundamentally, not a whole lot. You can’t use the keyboard with the iPod Nano, so you’re limited to interacting with the tiny touchscreen. There also aren’t exactly a lot of apps to run on the platform, either. You can basically listen to music, watch a slide show, or record voice memos, while looking at the iPod’s display spread identically across three TVs. Still, it’s a fun joke build, because at a glance it genuinely looks like you’ve set up a triple-monitor workstation running off a tiny iPod from over a decade ago.
If you want to blow the mind of your next podcast guest, consider recording your next episode on this rig. Alternatively, explore some of the other hacks we’ve seen for the platform. Video after the break.
2026-05-04 01:00:08
There’s a great reason 3D printers are made with things like extruded aluminum rails and other commodity, off-the-shelf parts. These things are designed not only for ease of construction and prototyping, but they’re also fairly strong especially given how modular they are. And they are excellent platforms for other projects as well. [CNCDan] has been using plenty of on-hand 3D printer parts to build a three-axis camera slider to film parts of his other projects, and this video documents his build and the latest upgrades to this platform.
After sorting out some issues with underpowered motors by improving their gear ratios, he found that many of the sizes and clearances on the existing platform changed enough that he needed to redo other parts of the carrier, including the mounting plate. He cut a new plate from steel and pressed bearings in, and then started putting together the other axes including a quick release mechanism for his camera. With a camera that weighs about 1.4 kg, getting the motors to move the camera smoothly was its own challenge. He re-worked all of his driver code over the course of a few weeks and eventually got his new system working much better than the original version.
With everything said and done, the camera slider can be controlled wirelessly with a GUI on another computer. Everything runs on an ESP32, and the slider can support other cameras besides his heavier one, including smartphones. He notes that this wasn’t the easiest way to build a project like this, but worked for him eventually because he had the parts and tools on hand to make it work. He’s also put the project files up on a GitHub page for anyone interested. Camera sliders like these have some niche uses as well; take a look at this high-speed camera slider for some examples.
2026-05-03 22:00:15
There are plenty of photos of the International Space Station out there on the Internet, but taking your own from ground level is a special challenge. [saveitforparts] recently decided to attempt this feat using a $15 thrift store lens.
The cool thing about the digital photography revolution is that there is a lot of old film gear that can be had for cheap. In this case, [saveitforparts] found a 400mm Sigma XQ lens with a 2x teleconverter for just $14.99. Paired with an adapter, it sat nicely on a Sony NEX-3 digital camera, ready to try and capture the ISS as it passed overhead. As you might imagine, aiming at the space station is not a point-and-shoot job. N2YO.com was used to figure out the best time to try and capture it. [saveitforparts] was able to capture the ISS as a white dot as it passed over, but couldn’t quite get enough zoom to really see the ISS in detail. [saveitforparts] was also able to repeat the feat with a Canon camcorder, too, but the image was still pretty blobby and didn’t show much. Later attempts involved capturing transits as the ISS passed by the Sun, though the ISS mostly appeared as a small speck.
[saveitforparts] did technically capture the ISS, just not closely enough to see much beyond a dot. It’s not the first time we’ve seen this attempted, though! If you try and capture the ISS with something truly ridiculous, like a Game Boy Camera or Kodak Charmera, you are honour-bound to tell us on the tipsline. Video after the break.
2026-05-03 19:00:22
Peristaltic pumps are a very simple and effect device for transferring fluids without said fluid ever coming into contact with any part of the pump mechanism. At their core they involve a mechanism squeezing fluids through compressible tubing, but there are various implementations of such a mechanism that all have their pros and cons. In a recent article by [T. K. Hareendran] over at EDN these types are discussed and when you’d want to pick one over the other.
Also known as a roller pump, these positive displacement pumps have been known since the 19th century, finding uses in industrial, medical, research, agriculture and many other fields. Each of these fields have different requirements with the use of a peristaltic pump as a dosing pump being a specific application whereby e.g. a stepper motor can be used to provide exact dosing.
For industrial settings the typical rollers that compress the tube are replaced with shoes that provide higher pressures and endurance, with overall a bewildering number of motor types and tubing materials available. Depending on what your project needs, you may opt for continuous flow, fine control over dosing, the ability to reverse the flow, etc.
Unless your project is particularly rugged, a roller-based mechanism should be fine, while silicone tubing is great for biocompatibility and PVC is a cheaper tube material option. If you intend to transfer certain kinds of chemicals that will react with each of these there are some more exotic tubing options available as well.
We have previously covered projects that use a peristaltic pump for rather interesting things, such as DIY pharmaceutics, in a home-grown flow battery, not to mention creating DIY peristaltic pumps from first principles.
2026-05-03 16:00:21
If you find yourself working with CANopen CC networks, you might find yourself in need of a tool for monitoring what’s happening on the wire. [Michael Fitzmayer] whipped up a piece of software to fulfil just that role.
CANopenTerm might be named after the CANopen standard, but it’s really a terminal-driven tool for working with CAN buses in general. The software is built for real-time use, allowing sniffing raw frames on the wire, tracing, and probing of nodes, all from within the console. It’s also possible to add scripting via Lua or Python for more advanced work, as well as do protocol-aware inspection if that’s relevant to your use case. The key idea of the software is to be fast and scriptable to suit a given need, rather than bogging everything down with a heavy GUI interface that’s slower to work with.
If you aren’t afraid of getting into the nitty gritty with CAN and like lightweight text-based interfaces, this might be the tool for you. We’ve also explored some other CAN visualization tools lately, as well. Ultimately, there is a lot of machinery out there running on some variant of CAN or other, so it pays to know how to work with it. If you’ve got your own projects cooking up in this space, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline!
