2026-02-27 00:30:15
[Steven K. Roberts] is the original digital nomad, having designed and built mobile computing for his own use since the 80s. His latest project is Bionode, a portable computing lab built into a hand truck that can accommodate a wide spectrum of needs for a person on the go.
Far more than just a portable computer with wheels and a handle, Bionode is an integrated collection of systems with power management, a sensor suite, multiple computers, NAS for storage, networking, video production tools, and even the ability to be solar charged. [Steven] also uses a laptop, and Bionode complements it by being everything else.
If one truly wishes to be mobile and modular as well as effective, then size and weight begins to be just as important as usability. Everything in Bionode has a purpose, and it currently contains a PC with GPU for local AI and machine learning work, a NAS with 14 TB of storage, an Ubuntu machine, a Raspberry Pi 5 running Home Assistant, another Raspberry Pi 5 for development work, a Raspberry Pi 3 for running his 3D printer, and a Raspberry Pi 4 for SDR (software-defined radio) work. A smart KVM means a single keyboard, mouse, and display can be shared among machines as needed and additional hardware in a thoughtful layout makes audio and video projects workable. Everything is integrated with sensors and Home Assistant with local AI monitoring, which [Steven] likes to think of as the unit’s nervous system.
Bionode is therefore more than just a collection of computers crammed into a hand truck; it’s a carefully-selected array of hardware that provides whatever [Steven] needs.
Give it a look if you want to see what such a system looks like when it’s been designed and assembled by someone who’s “been there, done that” when it comes to mobile computing. Bionode would complement something like a mobile workshop quite nicely; something [Steven] has also done before.
Thanks [Paul] for the tip!
2026-02-26 23:00:42
In theory having a single device that combines the features of multiple dedicated devices is a great idea, saving a lot of space, time and money. However, in reality it mostly means that these features now conflict with each other, force us to deal with more complex devices that don’t last nearly as long, and become veritable vampires for your precious attention.
Whereas in the olden days a phone was just used for phone calls, now it’s also a video and photo camera, multimedia computer, pager, and more, but at any point an incoming phone call can interrupt what you are doing. There’s also always the temptation of doom scrolling on one of the infinite ‘social media’ apps. Even appliances like televisions and refrigerators are like that now, adding ‘smarts’ that also vie for your attention, whether it’s with advertisements, notifications, or worse.
Meanwhile trying to simply do some writing work on your PC is a battle against easy distractions, leading people to flee to the digital equivalent of typewriters out of sheer desperation. Similarly, we increasingly see ‘dumb’ phones, and other single-task devices making a comeback, both as commercial options and as DIY projects by the community.
Are we seeing the end of the ‘everything device’ and the return to a more simple time?
In the before times, when the iPhones hadn’t yet flooded the planet and Facebooks weren’t even a twinkle yet in some bloke’s eye, your attention wasn’t nearly as much preyed upon as it is today. Spending time on the World Wide Web wasn’t that prevalent, people weren’t yet walking around with displays practically glued to their faces, and if you wanted to do any task it took real effort.
Although I learned to touch-type on an electric typewriter and briefly owned a Brother typewriter, I was already using PCs and word processor software most of the time. Of course, this was initially on MS-DOS with WordPerfect 5.1, running first on the family 286 PC and later the IBM PS/2 386SX system that my father’s work had sold off for a pittance. Back in the single-tasking MS-DOS days it meant that once you were running WordPerfect, or games like Stunts 3D or Doom, that was all you did.
Later I’d run Microsoft Office on Windows, but with only dial-up internet available the temptation from distractions were minimal. Not until the arrival of always-online broadband internet would you have to suffer through notifications from IRC, MSN, ICQ and whatever else you had running in the background, but even then you’d not be on the PC all the time.
When it came to entertainment, such as watching TV, playing a movie or music, it would be just that one thing with zero interruptions on the HiFi set, a Walkman or TV. Along with only landline phones that you were usually not within hearing distance of, it was easy to be ‘bored’ and do some quiet reading, drawing or prod at some small wildlife in a puddle outdoors. Even game consoles were still fully offline, so couch-based gaming – optionally with split-screen – was as multiplayer as things got.
Although even during the 1990s many people had email, you weren’t expected to check your mailbox more than once a week, perhaps a few times a day for serious nerds.
Much of the curse of the ‘everything device’ can be reduced to the fact that everything has to be connected to some remote service or a dozen. Just imagine not having internet on your smartphone, smart TV or PC, and how it almost instantly plummets you into chronic anxiety as only just about everything is connected to some online service, or depends on data stored on remote servers.
Getting away from all this is hard, as signing up for a dozen social media services is part of social pressure, and each of these services make sure to incessantly pull you in with updates and notifications. Then there are advertisements that have become the main financing model for websites and even online services in the 21st century, which ever more intrusively barge into whatever it is that you’re trying to do.
Here the term ‘chronically online‘ along with similar terms has previously been pitched and would seem to be rather apt. Ever more people have to check their smartphone for new notifications and updates, and are constantly occupied with what is happening on social media, rather than in the real world.
Worse, you’re no longer just taking snapshots on your photo camera or recording video on a camcorder, but everything goes straight into the Cloud
, from where you get pushed, harassed, and cajoled into sharing every single bit of content with everyone else, lest someone misses out on your Amazing New Experience.
The main problem with all of these chronically online everything devices is that you are never left alone with your thoughts, and thus never get ‘bored’. Everything wants a slice of your attention, with social media platforms being practically engineered to hoover up every last crumb of it, while counting on your inability to control your impulses and relying on your innate fear of missing out (FOMO), courtesy of you being a very social type of monkey.
For example, a 2021 study in Frontiers in Psychology by Christina Koessmeier and Oliver B. Büttner investigated the causes behind the distracting effect from social media in particular. FOMO is a big reason, as we are social monkeys who generally like to be part of the group rather than excluded. Self-regulatory issues are many, such as preferring to pop over to a social media app or site rather than complete an unpleasant or difficult task. It feeds the reward center of your brain, even if you’re not actually accomplishing the task you set out to do.
One could argue here that the demise of the third place alongside the rise of ‘everything devices’ like smartphones has led to a situation where being chronically online is a way to compensate for the lack of real-life connections, albeit in an environment that’s mentally rather toxic due to how social media in particular works. By providing a sense of belonging – whether false or not – these online places become an important part of our identity.
That a lot of unhealthy behavior is associated with such a chronically online existence ought to be self-evident. Meanwhile the push towards ‘everything devices’ like smartphones isn’t due to corporate benevolence, but rather to trap all of us into endless subscription services, accessed via a terminal device explicitly designed to siphon off every last drop of our attention, focus, and money.
Rather than hapless insects, caught in the slowly solidifying tree sap that will inevitably doom them, we humans like to brag about our intellect and ability to innovate. Thus, at least some of us are trying to get out of this veritable tar pit of FOMO and social manipulation, even as we try to figure out what exactly went wrong down this path of Future Technology.
The question is: how far exactly should we go back in time? This is a question that’s been on the minds of many, with a wide variety of solutions offered. The most extreme is of course the digital detox approach, whereby a person completely removes all smartphones and similar technology from their lives for a set period of time. Although showing positive effects on people’s mental health, this can of course only ever be a temporary intervention.
For many people the allure of switching away from smartphones and to feature phones (‘dumbphones’) is an appealing one. Personally this is a step that I have also taken, switching from a regular Android smartphone to a KaiOS-based TCL Flip 3 feature phone that’s slightly more full-featured than a Motorola Razr V3, but also equally as user-friendly and devoid of most non-phone functionality. Photos you take also are saved to internal memory, with no cloud storage unless you jump through serious hoops.
When you’re on a PC, it is of course much harder to escape the pull of FOMO and easy ‘rewards’ by doomscrolling or watching funny cat videos on YouTube. Here you can either focus on training your self-control, or by using a zero-distraction typing device that removes all temptation.
On the training side of things, the Pomodoro Technique can be done using a bog-standard kitchen timer to set the intervals, any of a number of online timers, special YouTube videos, or by building your own physical timer, with even just recently a few examples already popping up here on Hackaday.
It’s hard to argue with simply installing good ol’ WordPerfect 5.1 or equivalent on some DOS flavor in a system of your choice and typing away there. We have recently seen a SvarDOS-based environment that comes preloaded with a range of word processors and kin to get you started. Since you won’t even have networking, you won’t be distracted by anything. This can of course be replicated in a variety of freely available software, with FreeDOS and any word processor available from Archive.org being fair game.
You can also go down the ‘digital typewriter’ route, with some commercial options even being available here, such as the Zerowriter Ink. Alternatively you can go fully minimalistic with an ESP32-based writer deck, or opt for something vaguely more laptop-like. A lot here depends on how much you require in terms of formatting and editing features. Although sometimes you really just need to hammer out lots of words, in which case the portable equivalent of Notepad is fine, you may want to add at least some formatting.
Personally I’m quite the fan of the calming white-on-blue text with full word processing capabilities alongside the deafening noise of the buckle-spring keyboard of an IBM PS/2, but everyone has their own preferences. And maybe that is another benefit of breaking away from the Everything Device — you get to find out what works best for yourself.
2026-02-26 20:00:39
The USB-C port has become a defacto connectivity standard for modern devices, largely supplanting the ugly mess of barrel jacks and micro USB connectors that once cursed us. While their reliability is good, they don’t last forever, and can be a pain to replace in most devices if they do fail. However, a new part from JAE Electronics could change that.
The problem with replacing USB connectors in most hardware is that they’re soldered in place. To swap them out, you have to master both desoldering and soldering leads of a rather fine pitch. It’s all rather messy. In the interest of satisfying the EU’s new Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), JAE Electronics has developed a USB-C connector that’s easier to replace. Rather than being soldered in, the part is simply clamped down on to a printed circuit board with small screws. As the part is torqued down, small gold-plated contacts are compressed into pads on the PCB to make the necessary contact.
The connector is fully compatible with USB 4 version 2.0. (Don’t ask us how they number these things anymore.) It comes in single and dual connector versions, and is capable of USB PD EPR at up to 240 W (5A/48V). The part does have some drawbacks—namely, the footprint of the metal-shelled part is somewhat larger than most soldered USB C connectors. Whether this precludes its use is very much an application-specific matter for product engineers to decide.
In any case, if you find yourself designing hardware with heavily-used USB C ports, you might find this part useful. It’s not widely available yet, but some parts should be landing at Mouser in coming months. We’ve explored some of the ways USB-C connectors can be fouled and damaged before, too. Sound off with your opinions on this new part in the comments.
Thanks to [James] and [Nath] for the tip!
2026-02-26 17:00:55
The guitarist Jimi Hendrix had a unique sound which has influenced countless musicians over the decades. He achieved it through mastery not only of his instrument, but of the complex feedback relationship between amplifier, environment, and guitar — coupled with a series of effects pedals including some then-unique ones made for him. Musical commentators have pored over his work for decades, but a recent piece in IEEE Spectrum is particularly interesting as it examines things from a technical perspective.
It centers around an electrical simulation of Hendrix’s effects chain, and makes an assertion that’s obvious on consideration but not the usual take on a Hendrix performance; that in his hands it became a wave synthesizer rather than the instrument itself. Certainly for anyone with an interest in analogue audio electronics as they pertain to musical synthesis it helps in placing the influence of the different circuits on the sound, and in hearing the familiar performances in a new light.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen someone take a modelling approach to a guitar effects chain, indeed it’s obvious something missing from the work above is the guitar itself.
Header image: Gemeente Rotterdam (Stadsarchief) CC-0.
2026-02-26 14:00:55
Over the last few centuries, behavioral psychologists have documented all kinds of ways of modifying our actions and the actions of various animals. From the famous Skinner boxes to many modern video game mechanics, animals and humans alike can learn through the addition or subtraction of various rewards and punishments. And it doesn’t only impact simple actions either; [Everything is Hacked] took this idea to the extreme, using painful electric shocks to teach himself to avoid making blunders while playing chess.
This positive punishment system uses a medical device called transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) to deliver an electric shock to the skin. The electrical jolt is routed through a custom-built, conductive chess board where each square is isolated from the others and controlled by its own relay. The pieces are conductive as well, so if one is placed on a square where it shouldn’t go a relay will switch on to quickly provide the behavioral modification. The control logic is provided by a Raspberry Pi running the Stockfish chess engine, and it keeps track of the locations of the positions of all the pieces by using MX switches in the base of each square on the board.
This project took [Everything is Hacked] over a year to get into a working condition, including having to rebuild the entire project twice after mishaps with baggage handling at an airline. But he was able to demo the board to the Open Sauce tech festival and even took it to his local park to play chess with the local hustlers. Unfortunately, he reports that he spent more time reworking and rewiring his board over that year than he did improving his chess game, so unfortunately he still hasn’t been able to win any of his money back yet. Perhaps combining this project with a chess-playing robot would help.
2026-02-26 11:00:09
Way, way back in the days when men wore beards and wide-lapelled suits in exotic colors, only NASA had access to photovoltaics and ‘solar’ meant solar thermal. In those days of appropriate technology, it was thought that the ultimate in thermal mass was a phase-change material– a salt or wax that in melting and re-freezing could hold far more heat than plain rock or water, which were more often used. Well, now that it’s the 21st century, we’ve got something even better. As Ars Technica reports about a recent paper in Science Magazine, Molecular Solar Thermal (MOST) energy storage can blow that old stuff right out of the water.
Molecular energy storage? That’s where the sunburn comes in. A sunburn occurs because proteins in your skin are denatured– kinked, twisted, and knocked out of shape– by ultraviolet light. The researchers realized that those kinky proteins are pretty energetic: like a spring, they’re storing energy in their distorted structure. Even better, certain chemicals, like the pyrimidone in the study, don’t ‘relax’ the way a phase change material does. It’s not a matter of warming up and giving up the energy stored in the molecular structure when cooling down– the energy needs coaxed out, in this case by an acidic solution.
That poses problems for a closed-loop system, since you’d be continuously diluting the pyrimidone with heat-releasing acid and neutralizing base. On the other hand, 1.65 MJ/kg of energy storage is nothing to sneeze at, especially when you’re collecting it with nothing more technically advanced than a fluid running through clear tubing. Conveniently enough, researchers found a way to make this stuff liquid at room temperature.
Comparing the heat in this MOST storage material to electrical potential in a battery is a case of apples and oranges, but in terms of pure energy density the pyrimidone cooked up for the paper is in the same range as Li-Ion batteries. There is some self-discharge, in that the altered “dewar” state of the pyrimidone decays naturally, but with a half-life of upto 481 days, you could imagine storing up a tankful UV-altered pyrimidone all year round to provide your winter’s heat.
It’s not perfect. Right now you get about 20 “charge cycles” before the molecules break down, but then, if you’re using this for seasonal load-spreading, a two-decade service life is nothing to shake a stick at. It’s only collecting energy from the UV range of the spectrum, which is a tiny fraction of the energy from our sun. The quantum efficiency of the molecule is rather poor as well– it takes a lot of photons to get a dewar transition.
With solar photovaltaics being as cheap as they are, thermal builds are few and far between– even solar water heaters are powered by PV these days. Of course if you’re somewhere that doesn’t get much sun, you could always go for wind power instead.
Thanks to [zit] for the tip! If you’ve seen a bright idea in the wild, or have one yourself, our tips line is open rain or shine.
