2026-04-25 13:00:10
Recently Haiku has become a bit of a popular subject of articles and videos, owing perhaps to how close it currently is to be a daily-driver OS and fulfilling the dream that BeOS set out with. That said, there are still quite a few hurdles before that glorious era can fully commence, with a video by [Ex-IT guy] on YouTube demonstrating some of the major hurdles by installing Haiku on Ryzen 3-based MiniPC that only supports UEFI boot.
Installing the UEFI bootloader is still a very much manual process with the user required to create UEFI boot and OS partitions before copying the bootloader into UEFI boot partition. After this Haiku can be installed as normal. The other variation of multi-boot is demonstrated in the video, with Haiku installed alongside Windows and Linux. This requires a more complex directory layout in the UEFI boot partition.
The other major hurdle with Haiku comes after the system boots into the OS following installation, with no driver available for the Vega-based iGPU as AMD GPU support peters out around the GCN 2 era for now. Without accelerated graphics the utility of an OS is quite diminished, but fortunately this seems to be a fixable issue considering that Linux has the appropriate GPU support.
Meanwhile features like sound worked out of the box, which makes it arguably a more pleasant experience than installing Haiku on a 2009 Mac Mini. It’s also very easy to port software from Linux to Haiku, often with very few changes since it has all the typical POSIX things.
2026-04-25 10:00:49
Sometimes, a major discovery is exactly what you were hoping not to find. That’s the case with a team at Penn State who seem to have recently closed the door on any new physics stemming from a longstanding discrepency in the magnetic moment of the muon. It turns out, the model was fine, and we just needed better calculations.
The Muon is a heavier cousin to the electron. Like the electron, it has an intrinsic magnetic moment, but the traditional methods to calculate it did not quite match experiments, which was very exciting because it made us hope our models could be improved. Rather than try the traditional approximation methods for the unsolvable equations, the group at Penn State set up what you can think of as the Quantum Chromodynamic equivalent of a Finite Element Model (FEM) simulation–a grid of discrete steps in space and time. Tiny ones, of course, because the muon, like the electron, is a point-like particle with no lower size limit. In any case, according to their paper in Nature, after a decade of refinement and increasingly expensive supercomputer runs, the mystery can be put to bed. Instead of the discrepancy that so exited physicists 25 years ago when it was first found, theory and experiment now match to 11 digits, or a 0.5 sigma discrepancy, if you prefer.
Statistically, the Standard Model works– and that kind of sucks. It sucks, because it’s the gaps in the model where new physics are possible, and everyone has been pushing at those few gaps for the last 50 years to try and find what might be behind the standard model. Even [Zoltan Fodor], the principle investigator behind this project, is sad to see it work out. Sure, it’s a feather in his cap to get the calculations right at last–but ask anybody in the field, and they’d rather keep the door open to new physics than be right. We were certainly hoping it was something novel, last time the topic came up.
You might think muons are the last thing a hacker would ever encounter, but since there’s a steady rain of them from the sky in the form of cosmic rays, it’s not only easy to interact with them, you can actually put them to practical use– like muon tomography, or navigation indoors and underground.
Header Image Credit: Dani Zemba / Penn State
2026-04-25 07:00:10
The humble cathode ray tube (CRT) was once the technology behind almost all of our televisions and computer displays. Its replacements, from LCD screens to OLED and others, are generally cheaper to make and better to look at. Old televisions were comparatively large as well, but their size can be an advantage for people like [ManicMods] aka [Jeff]. His latest build ditches the CRT from an old Bently portable TV and uses the huge space available in the case for a hi-fi audio system and some other parts that turn it into an impressive portable home theater system.
After removing most of the internals of the TV, the first part to go in is the stereo and subwoofer combo as it takes up the most amount of space. The subwoofer section points downward and the two stereo speakers are mounted to the sides. To free up the most space inside, the new display is mounted forward of the original bezel, with a new 3D printed one helping to hold it in place. Behind it goes a Raspberry Pi, loaded with the moOde audio player, a high quality DAC for audio output, and a 1 TB SSD with [Jeff]’s uncompressed audio library. Most of the ports are extended out to the case including the SD card slot so other operating systems can be loaded on the Pi, and there are a ton of options for hooking up external speakers and displays as well, making it an extremely modular and expandable portable media center.
Also added to the finished product are a few small game controllers, since the Pi is perfectly capable of playing retro games, as well as a small wireless keyboard and trackpad combo. Although the CRT’s demise will be felt harder by some than by others, the original look of the case is preserved somewhat by keeping the original tuning display and locations of the original control buttons and knobs. If preserving the CRTs are of upmost importance, though, this build used a pair of them in a VR headset.
2026-04-25 04:00:56
Many HVAC systems in North America operate off 24V systems, which can be readily upgraded with off-the-shelf smart thermostats quite easily. However, there are many people living in buildings with 120-volt fan coil units who aren’t so lucky. [mackswan] is one such individual, who set about building a smart thermostat to work in these situations.
The build is based around an ESP32 running ESPHome firmware. It rocks a 2.42″ OLED screen with automatic brightness adjustment for showing temperature and control parameters. There’s a rotary encoder on the front with an integrated button for control, with [mackswan] building the physical device to look as clean and neat as possible. The device uses a relay to switch the fan coil system on and off to heat or cool as needed, with an SHTC3 temperature and humidity sensor used to monitor current conditions in the home.
If you’re in an apartment building or live in a condo with this kind of setup, [mackswan’s] build might be just what you’re after to improve your HVAC control. We’ve featured plenty of other DIY thermostat hacks over the years, too. Meanwhile, if you’re finding creative ways to better heat and cool your living space, we’d love to hear about it on the tipsline!
2026-04-25 02:30:35
As we learn more about all the nasty stuff floating in the air, it becomes more compelling to monitor the air for pollution levels. [Aleksei Tertychnyi] does just that with pollutagNode2, a solar-powered pollution sensor.
The device uses a Seeed Studio Wia-E5 module for its built-in LoRa low power long-range communication capabilities. Pair that with a cheap 2 watt solar panel and a Li-ion battery, and you have a monitoring device that can stay up indefinitely — or until harsh weather gets the better of it. Even if the solar panel were to be omitted, a full charge would last you about two weeks!
It comes on an open-hardware PCB; no need for giant wire messes, just solder the solar panel, battery, sensor, and anything else you want onto the convenient pads on the side. It also integrates into the existing sensor community nicely via existing LoRa infrastructure. All this combined makes it easy for anyone to deploy one.
2026-04-25 00:10:07
When Elliot Williams and Al Williams compare their notes on the week in Hackaday, you know you’ll get at least one or two bad puns. How bad? Tune in and find out.
This week, Tom Nardi visits several in-person events, and Elliot and Al talk about smart buttons, Itanium, ejecting things from a rocket, and the infinite pickle. Will Elliot build the coin flipper? Will Al use plasma at his next cookout? Hard to say.
For the can’t miss articles, this week, Al swept the category with a post on splices and another on what human junk is still sitting on the moon.
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