Ep 297: Prusa Eschews Open Source Hardware, The Lemontron Prints Upside-Down, and the vecdec Cyberdeck Does Minority Report
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You are and blue if they would take off.

主要是 hello.

welcome to the hacked day podcast and .

allied illian s.

Christina on us. This is episode two ninety seven pro is shoes open source hardware? The lemons on prints subside down and the veda cyber does minority report.

Well, this week in the news, I pick two things, their need to me, I hope they are need to you. First of all, I was add electronic, which is this huge electronics, mostly industry. But there are some needs small engineering companies there to trade show here in munich every two years.

The thing is absolutely dragani. It's held at muni e conference center main grounds, which is an old airport. And so it's like airplane hanger after airplane hanger after airplane hanger. And there are, I think, twenty something of these plane hangers. Full exhibits during electronics is absolutely mind bogglingly huge.

IT runs the game IT from like companies that make multilayer ceramic c capacity to the fancy est test equipment you've ever seen or some of you've never seen because they're so specially, they make the flying probe way for caster things or but one thing I wrote up just super quickly as a daily for haga because it's kind of timely is that I saw in russia pie booth a compute module five in the wild. And as far as I know, they haven't this thing existing yet. They haven't announced its on sale, but yes, so I took a picture of the thing and the IT wrote IT up on hagee.

We'll see if we get a nasty letter from their lawyers with something no, no, no. They put IT on display at the world's most attended electronics conference. They wanted people to see that.

I think it's got all the hallMarks of preproduction on IT. Still, it's got like some nasty mouse bites that haven't even been filed down. But yeah compute module fives out if you want one, if you need one, but I don't if you can get one.

Yeah and I didn't steal IT, so I don't have one. And the other thing going on this week, free cat version one point zero finally released. Free cat has been in various states of beta for the past ten years, fifteen years.

I wonder how long it's been. Actually, I ve been using IT for the past two or three, mostly because it's got some nice camp software in IT, so I can do the path planning for my cnc c that I need doing. And IT does IT all free and open source, and I like that.

But it's not without a take cups. It's gotto learning curve like all of the software. People who do that things for their day job will complain that it's not like their program of choice.

As far as I know, that's true. I don't know. That's not my industry. I'm just the guy free cat version one has been in released can did IT mode for a few months and so i've been playing with IT and IT looks like its solved a lot of the big problems, the topological naming problem, which is where if IT calls the surface face number one and a new cutting half IT has to call IT surface number one and surface number two.

And then if you like, put something over IT that was before attaching the surface number one. Now does IT attach to the right one. And if you go backwards in time and hit delete, you know, things got but all missed up.

You've mostly got that fixed, although yan w comes in the comments and points out that it's all fixed except if you have like chamfers that intersect each other and you delete the first one, can break the second ones, so you have to go back and redo both champfort. So if you're one of those people likes to put a chamfers r on every edge, just wait till you're done with your design and then do your champfort probably do that. And that was too much detail the news. So let's get on to what's .

that sound. This is a super cold on this week.

Usually when I go to find the sound, I know what i'm looking for this week, I had no idea, and I was just browsing around the internet for lazy sounds, and I found a sound that surprised even me. Not right.

So give you a listen. okay?

Oh, wow, that's pretty.

Isn't that crazy?

I kind of sounds like life support machines and concern.

Okay, I guess .

that's cause IT windles down to the be really sounds like.

oh, right to right.

Otherwise I I have no idea.

But IT starts off with that like crazy symphony or whatever. Yeah, yeah. I had no idea this was even a thing.

So you listening us out there. Take your best guess at what this is. Get down over the head day dot com flash podcast. Scroll down to what that sound. Click on the link, fill the form with your best guess your handle i'll reveal the answer next week and pick among the right answers to see who gets a hack a podcast .

t all will be revealed.

All right. I'd like to start off the hacks this week with, wow. This was a long foreign ece by tom, but I just wanted to talk about IT because it's both the hack and its news and its an opinion peace all.

And I think it's important for the kind of open source hardware movement and three d printers all in one with core one process, open source hardware dream quietly dies. And this is the kind of fortunate continuation of an arc. The preserve search the maker of pro printers has been going on.

And that is, they've started off as kind of hyper staunch defenders of open source hardware idealism and have in the past few years, been leasing lesson less to the public. And then last year, I guess Joseph put out a blog post saying, with all the competition they're facing from people copying them, they can't afford to maybe continue putting out open source hardware. And I say, but this represents a real change, I guess, from kind of their ethos.

And tom, who has a few precise inter and absolutely loves them, he both took IT kind of hard because he's also an open source hardware booster enthusiasts. But at the same time, he kind of appreciate what they do for what they are, which is they make printers that are easily capable on and reparable. And while they're not going to give you you the design files for this one, you know you can still you still buy replacement parts and you can still modify IT fairly easily because they are kind of to be, for lack of a Better word, hacker printers rather than hyper refined black box.

You can open a commercial offerings. There's kind of detention there where you know some of the things you want out of open source hardware that is its hackable on and you can play around with that is kind of still there. But at the same time, it's like they're not releasing the source files anymore.

That's not open source hardware anymore. And so it's kind of a little bit d to see them going down this road. Tom speculates in this article that is not just the open source ness of their printers that has made to their competition and in fact, that they haven't been innovating fast enough for an open source hardware company.

And I think that's a really thing take away actually in the comments this, I left a link to a talk that Nathan sidell from Spark fund gave a long, long time ago about how they managed to run an open source hardware company. And his points are that, a he gets clown anyway after three months or six months because anyone could buy the hardware and then just spend a little time looking at IT, and they can make their own version of IT. You know, they don't have any secrets, secrets anyway.

So why would you bother? nates? Other point was that foreign audience, like us, an audience of hackers having the source files and the full documentation and all that is such an attractive premise that will buy the things from him because they're well documented and because their easy to use.

And you if you have the source files for the pcb, you can throw that into your whatever CAD program and make make a housing for IT that exactly fits that. And so point, I think, was you get crowed anyway. You don't lose that much by giving them.

A few weeks had started by giving them the source file, but you gain so much because you give that to your audience, you give IT to the customers. And I think that's really interesting if you're gonna clown anyway, IT means you're always under pressure to innovate and you're always under pressure to come up with the next thing nate sees. Open source hardware is a good thing because you're kind of acknowledging this fact internally, but also to incorporate feedback from the open source hardware community into your next design.

And he points and his talk, he talks about one board that he made that got cloned by someone in china in cloning IT. They fixed up some things in the power voltage conversion section, and then Spark fun took that back into their design, of course, and issued a version too. And that's the one they sell this day.

Funny side note about, although the guy who clown them in china, eric pan, ended up founding seed studios and making his own open source hardware company. So I think at the time he gave that talk, seed wasn't yet founded. But I guess my rambling point here is that open source hardware, especially when you're in a market that's so easily longer has three d printers, is probably almost costless.

Like if Bruce gives out their design files, you could give him like a week's heads, start on cloning their machines. But again, none of the attack in three d printers these days is particularly unknown anyway, like all the kind of advances that go into modern, three printers came out of community development anyway. And people in the comments here talk about the bamboo printer.

But the bamboo is kind of a design for manufacturing version of the war on which is a community designed printer. I mean, they're kind of no new ideas under the sun and and all three printer designs are building on other ones and improving on them. And like tom, I guess I don't understand where pro is coming from on this.

I hope IT doesn't bite them in the bud. I hope that doesn't alienate their audience. That said, the printer actually looks pretty good. I mean, the thing that tom also says, but very quietly in his right up, is this is the printer that we've been waiting for process to come out with for the past five years and why they've been sitting on their old design, when kind of a three d printer open source enthusiasts community has been moving to correct, why does signs like this running on linear rails in a study box so that they can do fast acceleration? Kind of everything that process should have been learning from the community, you know, at least according to my timetable, should have done five years ago, is actually finally embodied in this printer.

And for that, IT comes out with a fair Price, and it's made by a company that has a good reputation of making good printers. So if the open source ness of IT all doesn't matter to so super much, IT actually looks like it's probably a pretty good printer. The irony of this all is that, in one way, this is the printer that they should have been making for the past five years.

It's just bizarre to tie IT up with this, turning their back on open source hardware. I think it's unfortunate. But you know, maybe this is going to the printer that's gna turn their business around and take them out to the next level.

Well, speaking of tom and something that is open source, tom spotted this glow type wearable, able display at super cn. And I wish I could have seen an in person, because that sounds like I was super awesome in person. Henner ziller calls this wearable, displayed the glow tape, like I said, which is a good name for him.

And IT uses a packed array of four hundred and five anomie ds and a long strip of glow in the dark tablet material to display whatever henner wants. But usually it's the current time of day and the date. As you might have guess, the L D, excite the glow in the dark tape and the image stays there for long enough to read.

Um you'll see in the articles main images that IT stay for long enough to take a picture, at least so so this is a scale down, spin off of honors glow, glow souls projects. And I saying that correctly, do you think? Yes, to be sure, or which be sure to check out that spooky skeleton in the video linked to below. Anyway, the wearable able display runs on an R P twenty forty, and everything is open source if you want to make one of these unusual time pieces for yourself, which you should, because it's cool and a little bit on the big side, but that's fine .

because it's very cool. He has really awesome. I actually did see this live and in person and talk, talk to hand about IT for a while.

I love this trick, which is if you hit glow in the dark material with the blue, or one of these kind of purple lasers, or lds, but I i've done with a bunch with laser IT leaves, IT charges IT up super well, and IT leads a really good glow. And this one was glowing for your minutes at a time. And he actually had, I don't know, you could see IT in the picture.

It's kind of a Green, transparent plastic over the top to actually kind of increase the contrast a little bit, actually dims IT down bit. Because I was so bright, it's really cool. What you can see from any these pictures is that the strip had printed along the backside a bunch of horizontal lines.

And the board, I guess this is explained in his up, but the board has a reflective sensor so I can tell how quickly you're pulling the tape through IT and expose IT accordingly. So you don't have to pull IT at a perfectly even speed. IT takes care of that for you OK.

That's really ool, yes, is a very cool mechanism that IT has the unintentional side effect that if you pushed up backwards through the tape reader, uh IT doesn't know which way the tapes going IT just knows bright dark, bright dark is because that the two rows of lds are staggered from each other and prints them in the wrong direction. If you push the tape through and IT actually kind of garbles everything up a little bit, it's kind of funny. He couldn't get the resolution he wanted by stacking the L S.

Next to each other because they're just not tight enough. So he does two rows of them that are by half the width of an L, D. So he had to get the timing just right between the top row.

And the bottom row is a surprisingly complicated project for something that looks so neat. And quote on, quote, simple. L, well, I seem to be on a three d printer kick this week.

My next tag comes from James. If life gives you lemons, build this lemon tron. And this is a rebuild slash reimagining of the crazy 3d printer we've ever seen。 And that would be the positive on by a crayon, although a link to that in the shown.

The short version of the positron is IT prints upside down. It's an X Y movement and the printer bed, instead of dropping down as IT prints, the object on IT actually rises up into the air and the novel prints up from underside. And the idea was to make a super compact folding printer that would fall down into a very small space.

Because of this, the positron had all sorts of wild innovations in, including to make the ultra flat core X, Y movement, he used synchro sh cables and to get IT to exclude upward. But with a very thin profile, the harden was actually bent at degrees. So the filming would come in on the side, and then the nazi would bend IT upwards and exclude the plastic upwards against the bed.

Anyway, James is spin on this. The lemon tron IT is documented in this video, but will soon be open source and documented on his github is going to be as much three d printed as possible version of the positron, with the aim of making IT a more hackable, but B A more affordable. He's worked on the budget and he's cutting all the corners he can, but it's still a really need design. And this is like version three or version for he's really getting close to being happy to release the files. And so i'm kind of excited to see IT, but this video goes over a lot of the clever design work that he's done to get this thing to work at all and to replace a lot of the customer and very difficult to get cnc ed metal pieces in the psyche to replace them with plastic wherever he can.

And his main trick to do this and still maintain the stiffness and rigidity of medal, is that he's embedding a lot of long screws in things to kind of, you know, sneak a little a bit of metal into the three d printed part, while at the same time you using the three d printed veness of IT for, you know, all the attachments and making sure everything square and having fit the funny shapes that needs to fit to have the number motors fit in there. If the positron is the crazy st. State printer you've ever seen, this is kind of A A really interesting and thoughtful riff on the crazy is three d printer you've ever seen. That alone is worth the cost of admission.

Would you see the pieces of the screws and stuff that are in there? Would you say the act like rebar?

Yeah, totally. yes. yeah. That's exactly the idea the bill played itself is held out on the Candy verd l shaped leg. And for instance, there he just has a hole in the third print and then he runs these super long thread rods through there and it's exactly right. It's it's like it's like rebar for the plastic.

Nice for my next tech. I chose vin scores. The vector ck cyperus ck is more than a pretty case. And this is another time right up. And as tom says, in the cybernetic world, functionality often takes about c to athletes tics.

But that is not the case with the the visual ergonomic computing device, which is not just another pretty face. So this elegant build is both useful and beautiful. Tom saw this one of john kn among a seat fruit books and think head.

And the project started when svan score caught the split keyboard bug yeah and couldn't go back to standard rectangles boo when score decided to build a parable machine around an ideal keyboard. This razed for power beauty has a lower train server for doing metastases. The go and IT also has an I to c connected gesture sensor between in the heads.

See, you can waive your way through documents and things like that. I think that's really cool. I also really like the wide screen.

Yeah I like .

how it's IT reminds me of the of the neo i'll a smart new yeah ah I could .

link to that. You could .

two new in the middle in this into picture yeah excuse me, this keyboard on the left. What is that? Do you know what that is? Is that an old compact?

God, I don't .

keys. They're like stepped really weird.

true. That's fundy angle.

I want remembers now I have .

to look at that gesture sensor. Yeah, that's going be something that IT is going to be much more accessible to our folks in the next few years as these kind of gesture sense things. I was one of things that came out of my electronic of visit. You know, the cheap ones are eight by eight and not more than enough to do like hand and motion detection and stuff. I I would be absolutely shocked if we don't see a lot more cool gesture sensors in hacker projects in the next couple of years.

nice. Maybe that's what the next posit looks like.

magic. If you're just scrolling up by waving your hand like that, right?

Like you're in minority report or something.

if you're reading a right long paper, it's kind of like a workout too. Well, my last hack is dial internet using the viking D L two hundred b telephone line simulator. And this is really funny.

I just had to put this in here. Mean, comes up with this idea to make a dialogue model network in his own home. Min finds a telephone line simulator super cheap at a flea market. What's a phone line simulator? You might ask.

IT is a box that when you plug in two of the kind of old school wired telephones, it's applies the toilful battery voltage to have a, so that you can have a conversation between the phones. IT detects off hooky ss and has a ring circuit in IT. So when you pick one up, the other one rings after a second or so to tell them that it's time to pick up.

It's like having your own tiny little phone network in a basically and means horrible idea here is to plug IT up to two old school dialog modems. One of them is on a windows X P. Computer that's also connected to the internet.

And he uses, that is a bridge to get dial up internet on the other laptop, which has a modem over old school phone lines, like it's nineteen and ninety four. This is absolutely hilarious. And this is one of those hats you do when you find a telephone line simulator for five books at market. I don't know if you would go out and buy one of these. I think actually Christinia, you and I have talked about wanting to set up phone home intercom systems.

yes. And I can't believe that this exists. And I want one right now. So I might be one of the people who goes out and buy one.

So this is exactly the device that does exactly that and it's you can still buy these, their horrendous ly. So if they're like two hundred box, I I think you could want to make one. I went to their website to see what the heck people are doing with these in the stand age.

And the answers include things like connecting dictation equipment to electronic key systems, program telecom products without a phone line, curtesy phones, connecting phone modems together. So this is actually one of the official suggested uses of this crazy thing. And of course, prison phone communications. So if you need to do that thing where you're behind glass when you're talking to the other person, this is the box is in between the two phones on either side of the glass screen. You wouldn't .

believe how often that comes up in my life.

Tell you what. But what's also really cool about this is in the comments, drone comes up with a Better solution, how to get a fake lines emulate. Here there are modules known as subscriber lying interface cards.

And these costs about ten bugs. You can buy them right now from digi. They plug into devices that you want, connect to the phone line.

So, you know, this used to be a module that would like go into a modem or whatever. And IT does all the things you want. So IT does the ringing for you, and IT does the line voltage.

And drone suggestion is that you could just get two of these and somehow hook them together so that you know one of them handles one phone, the other handles the other phone and their bridge together. I'm have to look at the data sheet to see, you know which wires go aware and figure that out. But that might actually be a really neat project because I think with very minimal wiring and kind of twenty bucks, you could make your own one of these line simulators if this works out. So I think that's actually a really promising idea, and that would be cheap enough that I would use IT for my home com.

Man, I need this so bad. I mean, I live in a, when they call IT a try level, like have to have to take half, fly the stairs to get anywhere in the house. At least one have a flight of stairs.

You know, I work way up in the attic and my husband works a full floor below me when there is a full floor of space below between us and I, I have an intercom system, but he doesn't use IT. I don't know, he, we just discord all day, but this is Better. I like this. I don't know if he would use IT, but I mean, if I if I can just like make IT ring.

you know he can't avoid IT. You can not ring for we've been wanting to do this in our house too. We have exactly the same set up well, except we both work in the same office is in the attic, which is functionally the third floor.

And so if someone's down the floor or down two floors were stuck like yellow down the stairway shaft, like so loud a solution, I can't even say so. We need this two in my house, although I think we might even need a phone on every floor, a couple phones scattered around. I don't know how we're gonna implement that, but that that be, that be pretty sweet.

We've got the copper in the walls, right, like this house is old enough that it's which I guess isn't all at all, but houses out of the ninety, we've got copper sitting in the walls. We actually use one pair for our phones and our internet. I'm talking to now over one one pair of these copper wires, but there are all the other ones, and they could be used for what for purposes we deem fit. Yeah, we're going out for looking into this.

either you do IT or do IT. Okay, for my last regular hacks, I chose AIDS, a cyberpunk pocket watch. Speaking of one thousand and ninety four, after a brief history of pocket watches, ab explains in this video that he was inspired to build a pocket watch that imagine the timeline where they were never suppleness the risc ch.

Yet he also takes inspiration from both the classic caso digital watches as well as the yellow SONY sport electronics of the eighties and nineties. And I think the cool is parasitic from how deef the case design is and how much thought and work, and put into IT and how cool looks over. Is that he designed the face to use segments, whatever possible, including where it's as A, M, P, M, depending on the time. And the cool thing is he just takes away the lower right leg of the a and IT becomes p and he sort of you have to maybe watch the video to see what I am talking about all the way, or just kind of picture m in P M and in seven seven segment forum, and then just picture that segment disappearing. But is very cool thing.

is a lovely piece of design and it's completely documented in his video like IT looks like it's this real weird retro watch thing but it's actually just one of those nice little round displays. You know we built the badge the year before last using these because they're just so cool looking you have to play with them. I mean, meant for risk watches, right? They're meant for smart watches.

But these little display yers are just so sexy, you really have to make something with them. And so I totally appreciate where he's coming from on this. And man, the drawn out seven segment display where IT lights up yellow and IT IT kind of fades into a different blue from the background.

So IT looks like it's actually a weird back lit. L, C, D. Something, something appa. IT just looks so good.

IT looks fantastic. My only complaint is I don't I can't decide where I land on the weathering of the case of the yellow, I don't know. I think you will look nicer in like bright, you know, sport yellow. But I suppose I mean, thirty, thirty years isn't that long ago as someone who remembers one thousand nine hundred ninety four IT wasn't that long ago.

But like A A SONY walkman of that .

I have a sport walkman. flux. great.

It's yellow plastic. There's no where possible. Yeah like it's not like you wear the paint off of IT. It's yeah yellow through and through.

right?

Yeah what great. This is an ncr onic. I I can't believe IT .

on back .

to the store exactly. I wanted to start off my quick hax this week with one from nate. It's a video stepping on lego for science. It's kind of a youtube video.

It's more funny than IT is science, but not the less he makes dummies out of cardboard and fake foot, out of bully stick jail and stops on legos for them in an attempt to settle the eternal argument of which lego peace is the most deadly to step on with your feet. The answer, by the way, is the discontinued wheel, one that actually has a metal axel and always lands with the little pokey metal axel straight up. And one half two millimeter mr.

Metal rod, always sticking straight up. Step on that to go straight. Your foot.

Safety of .

hospital trip next up, murray, sigh. Simple stack of fair rides shows how flux gate magnetometers work. And I know you were asking yourself, how does a flux of magnitude at her work, right?

Oh yeah, I still okay.

good. Well, here you go. The quick version is you have a sending coil and a receiving coil, and you put them on a common core.

So when you make one into an electro magnet, the common core is the magnetic field. Into the other one, you saturate the core, that is, you put as much magnetic flux into IT as I can handle. And then you alternate the magnetic field one way to the other to one way to the other.

And the subbed differences in how much induced magnetic field IT takes to saturate the core depends on how is facing in the earth's magnetic field. So the ideas you do IT one way, and then you do IT the other way. And the difference in saturation current between these two tells you something about how much magnetism from the earth is passing through this core.

And yeah, you can learn in that, and learn how to make your own in this linked project. I look that up the, you know, and coming up last, simple hydrogen generator makes bubbles and looks cool, is a project by maci. No voc.

I'm going be that guy. This is a water hydro sis project, basically bubbles and collects the bubbles. What comes off when you hyde zed water is, of course, hydrogen gas and oxygen gas. Luan the article by saying petts will note that this doesn't make hyo gen gas because IT doesn't separate the h two out from the o two. And i'm not peent.

I actually added an editorial note to the bottom of this one because and this is both a public safety notice and my personal experience, when you have the hydrogen and the oxygen mix together and exactly the right ratio to go back to water, it's an extreme. We've a mixture, and it's really ready to go off. And that stuff blues the bang.

Be very careful of oxy hydrogen, the stuff that comes out of this machine. It's actually a hell of a lot safer if you do separate the bubbles coming off the anode and the bubbles coming off cathode and just collect the hydrogen because pure hydrogen gas, I can't don't know if you've seen the hindon berg disaster. IT actually burns kinder slowly because IT can only burn as much as atmospheric xydis can mix with IT actually playing around with hydrogen gases, relatively non dangerous berny fun, where as playing around with oxy, hydrogen is a bomb ready to go off. Do not like IT if it's in a solid container, because that will turn, disrupt faster than you can say bang. Filling bullion's with hydrogen and then lighting the strings on fire and watching them float up into the air, then burst in fireball is actually hilarious.

Suddenly I have ninety nine love balloons in my head.

Makes a great fun noise, too.

For my first cake hack, I choose volos. E S P thirty two, host a USB keyboard in this type rider. Now you're all aware that the S P thirty two has a USB device mode, right, right? But did you know that you can also be a USB host? That's kind of the entire impetus of this fun word processor.

Anyway, the E S P thirty two can host human interface devices like keyboards, my track balls and so on. And this project here in particular, works because voice is using the U S P. U S P host are doing library and shows an ESP3 two L C D having dev board with a dull role。

U S B C port, which makes switching between devices quite easy on the software side, which is pretty cool. Volos used a forbid color pilot in order to save memory, which also force gives you a nice bit of retro flair. Next up is polymath roamed one hundred and ninety three.

Thinkpad tablet broke back from the brink. Police started with nineteen ninety three. Thinker, public terrible condition, found A V, C, F, that vintage computer festival probably too far gone for most people, but not for Polly. Met, there was hope, after all, because the pen touch based display is still responded.

The pen itself was still around, apparently, and the back that kind of worked after modeling a new frame, Polly man went ahead and model the whole thing in case someone else can use IT, and then went back and made IT fit the replacement L, C, D, which is also close to the, but not quite the same. This is a great video and an even greater restoration project. So go watch IT.

Oh, in the first comment here is that we have here is great. Apparently there's a landfill of these things pattabhi. Ts, in the neva desert.

And if he tracked down spot at john's Carter in roswell, l in the mico, he'll tell you where to go. And finally, we have boss with the barcode. Beast likes your cds. Now google, I do wonders, don't say, using cds in their cases to pull up spotify and play the tracks is one thing that you can do with google eyes. And that's what this does, this barcode beast cds by their barcode.

Internally, IT uses a pie pico w in a barcode scanner to read the barcode, call up, discouraged, find the tracks, and then use the spotify a to play the track home assistant forwards IT to a smart speaker. Now someone say, why not use local data? And I suppose that's what I would do, accept that some of my cds skipped these days.

So that's no good and I can't tell you all of the do. And I probably be surprised by a few that I didn't know we're skipping. So yeah.

All right, well.

that brings us to .

our camp mist articles. These are long foreign ece written by our fantastic a caa writing staff. And this week I had to feature luan is the great red box clean up. One company is halling away, america's last D V D key os's.

I know we'd covered the red box fiasco recently, which is there were all of these automated video rental dispensing machines, and they were all over the place the company goes out of business. What are we going to do with all of the physical boxes? And some people were thinking they might see if they could get them for free and hack on them.

Food managed to get her hands on one and looked at the data, which a lot of IT is customer records and is unencrypted on the red boxes. So they pretty much need to be cleaned up and removed even though the company is out of business there. Also, of course, taking up value people real state in front of the stores that they used to be deployed at luan managed to get in touch with a company that has a very large national contract to get rid of these things.

The company called junk luggers, and they do basically what you'd expect. What's really interesting about them is that they also try everything they can to recycle as much of the dispose machinery as they can. And so for instance, one of things they're doing is giving all of the videos inside a way to local charities to, like senior citizens homes, home, the shelter is veterans clinics, libraries, other community organizations.

They are also trying to save some of the electronics inside, some of the motors inside and make sure they get used as well. So as kind of a neat idea, they're actually getting paid to harvest these things and then they're trying to get as much value out of them rather than just pitch on wholesale into the landfills. So I think that's a really neat company.

What I also really liked about this is that lan actually manage to get first stand information, get a contacted junk loggers and talk to them about the whole the thing. And so he's talking to them about what all they're doing and how they're doing IT. And you hopefully they have a plan and for disposing of the hard drives on these things because that they should do, at least if other hacker reports are correct, that they should do very carefully because IT probably contains sensitive information like phone number s and credit card numbers and names and addresses.

Note yx and movie preferences .

and movie preferences, right? Yeah but they don't rent anything super scandalous at red box. So I you're pretty good, like their selections pretty dam mainstream.

I think the worst you can say about anyone who rents a movie at from a red boxes that they watch kind of Normal movies, oh, you watched Barbie. Oh yeah, totally. All you also watched open heima, really.

Oh, interesting. That tells us a lot about you. You, you're a person who watches movies on the other end. What this means is that those of you hackers out there who thought that would be cool to get a DVD dispenser for your hacker space, the is on there's also need comment from gary, who used to work at red box, who talks about how these machines work on the inside. The comment section here is just absolutely fantastic and full of both ideas for how you would misuse a box machine if you could pick one up before they get to IT and uh, some of the inside details for my.

can't this article, I choose my own boss by products. Cathy, tes are men made, caved. Weller, no, I don't know about you, but i'm having some fun with this series. In this fourth installment, I talk about Cathy tes, which are deposits that form in man made caves like parking ground, tunnels and minds.

So what happens is essentially a hyper l clinics solution, seeps through the structure, comes into contact with air on the underside, and forms these calcium carbonate deposits that resembles select tites. The leg mites flow stone and what have you? But how are they formed? Well, they originate from calcium oxx IDE in Simon.

When water is added, along with agreed to form concrete cause um oxide in the cement rein forms calum hydroid so this readily react with carbon dioxide to form calcium carbonate. But not all of the calcium had rex gets used. Some of the remains free inside the concrete in any external water source like rain that can ceive into the structure, will Carry this carbon hydrox side to the underside.

And when IT has the atmosphere, carbon dioxide defuses into the solution, and the small shapes delectus are formed over time. And then I go into the subject of growth. These grow a lot faster than natural cave spell, others spilling. Others ths, I don't know.

know.

These grow much faster. The natural caves bay, others like two hundred times as fast. There's an australian cover in calthorpe expert out there who recorded a calthorpe as growing two millimetres a day, which is roughly three hundred and sixty times faster caves billionths growth.

I think these things are really need. I didn't even beginning, but I do now. And like full gar rights and four, i'd like to have a piece for myself. Although one commentary who broke off a altimeter says they are quite bittle and fragile, so maybe i'll leave them where they are and just take pictures.

I had no idea that they grew so fast. But like the pictures here in the article, and actually also jose artwork minds me of the time. I used to live in washington, D.

C, because they have these huge concrete underground metro tunnels there, right? And they are leaking in places. And that red one is totally familiar to me.

I know that red one, but like orange, orange, red one that that is scary is people mentioned in the comments that it's not a good sign when you have rusty metal seeing through Simon because it's the rebar inside that's like rusting and that's a really bad. So yeah, take IT forward ard. It's work. I had no idea that they grew so fast either. That's really, really cool.

No, all of the flow road is just wrote.

These things are hauling in paris on mile's the day. Are you crazy? Yeah, I think now i'm gonna be a parking garage caver ool.

I'm i'm not going to keep my eyes for this. Thanks a lot. It's Better .

for the cluster holic true than regular case.

Well, that wraps up up for this week's hack day podcast. Thanks very much for listening. If you see anything cool or do anything cool, be sure to drop us again tips at hacked day dot com. And if follow all the links in today's shown notes, head on over to hack day out com slash podcast.

and until next week, keep on hacking.

A good singer about that.

I don't know how I feel about that. Then we will put you back in the right long after the show.

No strange things. No, nothing weird.

不， 不。

you say, yeah, i've cursed IT now. So yeah.

do you think they're just being midd west?

nice. I don't care if they are all east coast. Take advantage. We'll talk about what a telephone line simulator is in just a sag. But all right now.

oh, no, for hi.

i'm looking for it's about some more thing bad.