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Open Hardware/Modding: GNU-like Mobile Linux, Pi-hole, and More
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Linux On Mobile ☛ 2026-08-22 [Older] Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (34/2026): Amazing Progress
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Connor Tumbleson ☛ Pi-hole: 8 years later
In 2017 I installed a Pi-hole into my network and routed all my DNS traffic through it. Today is August 30, 2026 and I've been running it ever since. While I've lost the consistency of blogging exactly every year, this grows the collection of pi-hole posts on this blog.
We ended the last blog post on the release of version 6 of Pi-hole, which was followed by lots of patches still living under the v6 tag. My versions now reported at the footer are: Core (v6.4.3), FTL (v6.7) and Web (v6.6). Things generally have their own tags now between the FTL software, the Core and the Web. So it became a bit more difficult to summarize a changelog of them all. Roughly summarizing each release into a few words to catch us up over the last year.
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Hackaday ☛ Giving The NES An Optical Data Storage Add-On
There’s also an accompanying video containing typical hijinks and a demonstration of this system. Initially [Throaty Mumbo] was going to make a SNES CD add-on to match that console’s initial prototype, but doing it for the NES seemed more fun. Obviously, since the NES is quite limited hardware-wise it was always going to be a struggle, even if the original front-loading NES conveniently has a mostly unused expansion slot.
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Hackaday ☛ Get Your Monitor Transmitting VHF With A Browser Tool
The concept is straightforward—[Efe]’s tool manipulates pixel clocks in order to create spurious transmissions from your computer’s graphics hardware. The math pencils out pretty easily—multiply the horizontal resolution by the vertical resolution by the refresh rate, while paying attention to the precise timing of the video standard your monitor is using, and you’ve got your transmission frequency. For example, for a screen displaying 1080p at 60 Hz, with the CEA-861 timing standard, your horizontal and vertical resolutions are 2200 and 1125 respectively when paying attention to the requisite blanking intervals. Multiply those by 60 hz, and you’ll find you’re creating a signal at 148.500 MHz. Leverage this by displaying the right pattern of black and white pixels to maximise changes in voltage state on the HDMI or DisplayPort lines, and you might create a strong enough signal that you can actually pick something up. [Efe] created a tool to display these patterns to send simple Morse code messages over VHF just by flickering your screen just right.
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Matt Godbolt ☛ Recreating a 2010 Experiment — Matt Godbolt’s blog
I was trying to replicate this at home but sadly Google no longer supports non-JS browsers like lynx (I guess I could find another one that does?). But I did see that DuckDuckGo has a “lite” mode. After an enormous amount of fiddling I was able to recreate something similar: [...]
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Ken Shirriff ☛ Cores in space: The core memory module from a 1980 Spacelab computer
Spacelab was a reusable laboratory that could be carried in the Space Shuttle's cargo bay, providing lab space for astronauts and experiments. Because Spacelab was a European project, it used a French-built minicomputer, the Mitra 125 MS,2 rather than the Shuttle's main computers, IBM-built AP-101 systems. For storage, the Spacelab computer contained 128 kilobytes of RAM. Rather than silicon memory, the computer used magnetic core memory, with each bit stored in a tiny ferrite ring. In this article, I take a close look at this computer's core memory system.
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Hackaday ☛ The Mactini: A Computer That Does Almost Nothing
Recently [Tucker Osman] brought to life what once was just a meme created by the BBC as it poked fun at Apple’s push for ever smaller devices that also dropped many features along the path towards questionable innovation. This ‘Mactini’ was a super-small laptop, with just a single button that did everything, befitting the overpriced more-money-than-sense status symbol vibe that [Jony Ive] brought to Apple.