2026-02-06 00:30:25
Over the past couple of years with the Jenny’s Daily Drivers series, we’ve looked at a number of unusual or noteworthy operating systems. Among them has been ReactOS, an open source clone of a millennium-era Windows OS, which we tried back in November. It’s one of those slow-burn projects we know has been around for a long time, but still it’s a surprise to find we’ve reached the 30th anniversary of the first ReactOS code commit.
The post is a run through the project’s history, and having followed it for a long time we recognize some of the milestones from the various ISOs we downloaded and tried back in the day. At the end it looks into the future with plans to support more up-to-date hardware as well as UEFI, which we hope will keep it relevant.
When we tried it, we found an OS which could indeed be a Daily Driver on which a Hackaday article could be written — even if it wasn’t the slickest experience on the block. It doesn’t matter that it’s taken a while, if you’re used to Windows XP this has become a usable replacement. We came to the conclusion that like FreeDOS it could find a niche in places where people need a modern version of the old OS to run older software, but perhaps as it now moves towards its mature phase it will move beyond that. We salute the ReactOS developers for bringing it this far, and for not giving up.
You can read our Daily Drivers review of a recent ReactOS build here.
2026-02-05 23:00:12
It was January 25th of 1979, at an unassuming Michigan Ford Motor Company factory. Productivity over the past years had been skyrocketing due to increased automation, courtesy of Litton Industry’s industrial robots that among other things helped to pick parts from shelves. Unfortunately, on that day there was an issue with the automated inventory system, so Robert Williams was asked to retrieve parts manually.
As he climbed into the third level of the storage rack, he was crushed from behind by the arm of one of the still active one-ton transfer vehicles, killing him instantly. It would take half an hour before his body was discovered, and many years before the manufacturer would be forced to pay damages to his estate in a settlement. He only lived to be twenty-five years old.
Since Robert’s gruesome death, industrial robots have become much safer, with keep-out zones, sensors, and other safety measures. However this didn’t happen overnight; it’s worth going over some of the robot tragedies to see how we got here.
Perhaps the the most terrifying aspect about most industrial robots is that they are fairly simple machines, often just an arm containing a series of stepper motors and the electronics that strictly execute the tasks programmed into it when the manufacturing line was designed and assembled. This means a large metal arm, possibly weighing more than an adult human, that can swing and move around rapidly, with no regard for what might be in between its starting and end position unless designed with safeties in place.
This is what led to the death in 1981 of another factory worker, Kenji Urada, a maintenance worker, who was trying to fix a robotic arm. Although a safety fence had been installed at this Japanese plant that would disconnect the power supply of the robot when this fence was unhooked, for some reason Kenji decided to bypass this safety feature and hop over the fence. Moments later he would be dead, crushed by the robotic arm as it accidentally was activated by Kenji while in manual mode.
During the following investigation it was found that Kenji’s colleagues were unfamiliar with the robot’s controls and did not know how to turn it off by simply opening the fence. Subsequently they were unable to render him any aid and were forced to look on in horror until someone was able to power down the robot.
A similar accident occurred in the US in 1984, when a 34-year old operator of an automated die-cast system decided to cross the safety rail around the robot’s operating envelope to clean up some scrap metal on the floor, bypassing the interlocked access in the safety rail. In this case it wasn’t the arm that crushed the worker, but the back end, which the worker apparently had deemed to be ‘safe’. He had received a one-week training course in robotics three weeks prior.
When it comes to industrial robot safety rules, we have to consider a number of factors beyond the straightforward fact that getting crushed by one is a scenario that a reasonable person would want to avoid. The first is that industrial robots are quite expensive, which makes adding major fencing and other safety measures not much of a financial issue in comparison.
The second factor is that while humans are really quite versatile, they tend to have the annoying habit of bypassing safeties despite endless briefings and drills that are designed for their own protection. Let’s call this factor “human nature”. Kenji Urada’s gruesome death is an example of this, but other industries are rife with examples too, giving agencies like the US Chemical Safety Board a seemingly endless collection of safety rule violations to investigate and condense into popular YouTube videos of disaster sequences.
The final, third factor that ties all of this together is that we no longer live in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, where having a human worker getting caught with an arm between some gears, or crushed by a mechanism would only lead to some clerk rolling their eyes, crossing out a name and sending out an errand boy to post a fresh ‘help wanted’ note.
Ergo, we needed to find ways to human-proof industrial robots against humans and protect us against ourselves.
Although some nations have their own standards, the overarching international standard is found in ISO 10218, currently in its 2025 update. This standard comes in two parts, ISO 10218-1, which concerns itself with the robot’s individual parts and targets robot manufacturers, as well as ISO 10218-2, which looks at complete systems and the integration of robots.
There are a number of distinct types of hazards when it comes to working around industrial robots, the most obvious of which is the crushing hazard. To prevent this and similar hazards, we can install plentiful of safety fencing to ensure that the squishy human cannot get within the range of the unsuspecting robot.
In the case of an especially persistent human, or potentially a legitimate human maintainer or operator, it’s crucial to ensure that the robot is powered down or rendered harmless in some other way. For example, the safety fence that should have prevented Kenji Urada from losing his life was designed for this, but unfortunately could be bypassed.
Similarly, in the case of Robert Williams there was a tag in/tag out system in place for the robotics, but Robert had not been instructed in this and apparently unaware of the dangers. Being able to bypass such safeties gets us firmly sliding down the rabbit hole of the hierarchy of controls.
The most effective hazard elimination is basically that, but since the robots are rather needed, and we got no replacement for them other than forcing the humans to do all the work again, this step is no real option here.
Next we can try to make robots safer, by adding intrusion detection sensors to the robot’s hazard zone, or as Amazon trialed in 2019 by making the squishy humans in its warehouses wear a device that alerts the robots around them on the warehouse floor of their presence without relying on either machine vision or obstacle recognition.
The placing of physical barriers is next, as part of engineering controls. This effectively tries to prevent humans from wandering into the danger zone like a particularly big fly around a brightly lit up bug zapper. Theoretically by putting a sufficiently daunting barrier between the hazard and the worker will said worker not end up facing their doom.
In an ideal world this would be all that it’d take to guarantee a completely safe work floor, even in the case of some distracted wandering. Of course, this doesn’t help much if said robots are sharing a warehouse floor with humans. To patch up the remaining gaps we got safety training courses as part of the administrative controls, but if these were very effective then the USCSB would already be mostly out of a job.,
The final item in the hierarchy of PPE can easily be skipped in the case of industrial robots, other than perhaps steel-tipped boots, a hard-hat and safety glasses in case of dropped items and flying debris. If an industrial robot’s arm is headed your way, there’s no PPE that will save your skin.
At this point in time industrial robots are fairly safe from humans, though in the US alone between 1992 and 2015 at least 61 people died due to sharing the same physical space with such a robot or a similar unfortunate event. As the number of robots increases in industry, but also in construction and health care, the topic of safety becomes ever more important.
In the case of a stationary industrial robot it’s fairly easy to just put a big, tall fence around it, lock the only gate and force anyone who absolutely needs access to beg an audience with the maintenance chief. In the case of the thousands of robots rolling around in warehouses like Amazon’s, situational awareness on the part of the robots can help them detect and avoid obstacles.
As long as humans are more fragile and weaker than the robots that they find themselves working around, it’s probably reasonable to expect said humans to pay a modicum of respect to the Death Machine, as the engineers who built them can only add so many technological solutions to what ultimately ends up being a game of idiot-proofing. Because absolutely nobody would ever do these exact things to willingly endanger themselves and/or others.
2026-02-05 20:00:53
Everyone here can think of a cloud-connected product that was killed because the company that made it stopped supporting it. While these corporations have forgotten their products, the US PIRG Education Fund has immortalized them in their Electronic Waste Graveyard.
With an estimated “130,000,000 pounds of electronic waste” produced since 2014, the amount of wasted resources is staggering. The advent of the cloud promised us reduced waste as lightweight devices could rely on remote brains to keep the upgrades going long after a traditional device would have been unable to keep up. The opposite seems to have occurred, wreaking havoc on the environment and pocketbooks.
Of course, we can count on hackers to circumvent the end of companies or services, but while that gives us plenty of fodder for projects, it isn’t so great for the normal folks who make up the rest of the population. We appreciate PIRG giving such a visceral reminder of the cost of business-as-usual for those who aren’t always thinking about material usage and waste.
If PIRG sounds familiar, they’re one of the many groups keeping an eye on Right-to-Repair legislation. We’ve been keeping an eye on it too with places like the EU, Texas, and Washington moving the ball forward on reducing e-waste and keeping devices running longer.
2026-02-05 17:00:43
A quiet shift over the last couple of decades in many places has been the disappearance of the traditional copper phone line. First the corded landline phone was replaced by cordless, then the phone migrated to a mobile device, and finally DSL connections are being supplanted by fiber. This leaves copper-era infrastructure in houses, which [TheHFTguy] decided to use for Ethernet.
The hack here isn’t that he bought some specialized network boxes from Germany, though knowing they exist is useful. Instead it comes in his suggestion that they use the same technology as mains networking. Mains network plugs are a dime a dozen, but noisy power lines can make them of limited use. Our hacking curiosity is whetted by the question of whether a cheap mains networking plug can have its networking — in reality a set of RF subcarriers — separated from its mains power supply, and persuaded to do the same job at a fraction of the cost. Come on commenters – has anyone ever tried this?
2026-02-05 14:00:54
Although we do often see projects that take antiques and replace some or all of their components with modern equipment, we can also sympathize with the view that (when possible and practical) certain antique electronics should be restored rather than gutted. [David] has this inclination for his 1948 GE radio, but there are a few issues with it that prevented a complete, period-correct restoration.
The main (pun intended) issue at the start of this project was safety. The original radio had a chassis that was just as likely as not to become energized, with the only protection being the plastic housing. [David] set up an isolation transformer with a modern polarized power cable to help solve this issue, and then got to work replacing ancient capacitors. With a few other minor issues squared away this is all it took to get the radio working to receive AM radio, and he also was able to make a small modification to allow the radio to accept audio via a 3.5mm jack as well.
However, [David] also has the view that a period-correct AM transmission should accompany this radio as well and set about with the second bit of this project. It’s an adaptation of a project called FieldStation42 originally meant to replicate the experience of cable TV, but [Shane], the project’s creator, helped [David] get it set up for audio as well. A notable feature of this system is that when the user tunes away from one station, it isn’t simply paused, but instead allowed to continue playing as if real time is passing in the simulated radio world.
Although there are a few modern conveniences here for safety and for period-correct immersion, we think this project really hits the nail on the head for preserving everything possible while not rolling the dice with 40s-era safety standards. There’s also a GitHub page with some more info that [David] hopes to add to in the near future. This restoration of a radio only one year newer has a similar feel, and there are also guides for a more broad category of radio restorations as well.
2026-02-05 11:00:41
Helium is inert, which makes it useful in a lot of different industries. But helium’s colorless and odorless non-reactivity also means traditional gas sensing methods don’t work. Specialized detectors exist, but are expensive and fussy. Thankfully, researcher [Li Fan] and colleagues found a physics-based method of detecting helium that seems as elegant as it is simple.
The new sensor relies on a topological kagome structure, and doesn’t depend on any chemical reaction or process whatsoever. The cylinders in the structure are interconnected; air can flow in and speakers at the three corners inject sound.
Sound waves propagate through the air within the structure at a fixed rate, and as helium enters the sensor it changes how fast the sound waves travel. This measurable shift in vibration frequency indicates the concentration of helium. It’s stable, calibration-free, doesn’t care much about temperature, and resets quickly. Even better, the three corners act as separate sensors, making it directional. It’s even quite rugged. Just as a basket weaved in a kagome pattern is stable and resistant to damage or imperfections in the individual strips that make up the pattern, so too is this sensor only marginally affected by physical defects.
The sensor design has been tested and shown to work with helium, but could possibly be applied to other gases. More detail is available at ResearchGate, with some information about the math behind it all in a supplemental paper.
