Mysterious Files PH

Most end tables that you might find in a home are relatively static objects. However, [Peter Waldraff] of Tiny World Studios likes to build furniture that’s a little more interesting. Thus came about this beautiful piece with a real working railway built right in.

The end table was built from scratch, with [Peter] going through all the woodworking steps required to assemble the piece. The three-legged wooden table is topped with a tiny N-scale model railway layout, and you get to see it put together including the rocks, the grass, and a beautiful epoxy river complete with a bridge. The railway runs a Kato Pocket Line trolley, but the really neat thing is how it’s powered.

[Peter] shows us how a small gearmotor generator was paired with a bridge rectifier and a buck converter to fill up a super capacitor that runs the train and lights up the tree on the table. Just 25 seconds of cranking will run the train anywhere from 4 to 10 minutes depending on if the tree is lit as well. To top it all off, there’s even a perfect coaster spot for [Peter]’s beverage of choice.

It’s a beautiful kinetic sculpture and a really fun way to build a small model railway that fits perfectly in the home. We’ve featured some other great model railway builds before, too.

Curious about split keyboards, but overwhelmed by the myriad options for every little thing? You should start with [thehaikuza]’s excellent Beginner’s Guide to Split Keyboards.

Your education begins with the why, so you can skip that if you must, but the visuals are a nice refresher on that front.

He then gets into the types of keyboards — you got your standard row-staggered rectangles that we all grew up on, column-staggered, and straight-up ortholinear, which no longer enjoy the popularity they once did.

At this point, the guide becomes a bit of a Choose Your Own Adventure story. If you want a split but don’t want to learn to change much if at all about your typing style, keep reading, because there are definitely options.

But if you’re ready to commit to typing correctly for the sake of ergonomics, you can skip the Alice and other baby ergo choices and get your membership to the light side. First are features — you must decide what you need to get various jobs done. Then you learn a bit about key map customization, including using a non-QWERTY layout. Finally, there’s the question of buying versus DIYing. All the choices are yours, so go for it!

Via reddit

Is That a Bat In Your Pocket?

Need something ultra-portable for those impromptu sessions at the coffee shop (when you can actually find a table)? You can’t get much smaller than the 28-key Koumori by [fata1err0r81], which means “bat” in Japanese. Here’s the repo.

This unibody beauty runs on an RP2040 Zero using QMK firmware. That 40 mm Cirque track pad has a glass overlay, which is a really nice touch. It’s actually a screen protector for a smart watch, and the purple bit is some craft vinyl cut to size.

Protecting that glass overlay is a case with a handle and a magnetic lid. Both the PCB and the case were designed in Ergogen, which as you know, I really like to see people using.

As you might have guessed, those are Kailh V1 choc switches with matching key caps. If you want a bat for your pocket, the build guide is simple, and there aren’t even any microscopic parts involved.

The Centerfold: [arax20]’s Been Workin’ On the Railroader

Okay, before you do anything, go check out the image gallery to see this baby glowing and being worn like a katana or something. Yeah.

So [arax20] built this as a gift for an ex. She likes the ergonomics of splits, but didn’t want cables between the halves and feels the space between is otherwise wasted. Really? There’s so much you can put there, from cats to mice to coffee mugs.

Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad? Send me a picture along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!

Historical Clackers: the Mysterious Rico

Frustratingly little is known about the Rico, a 1932 index machine out of Nuremburg, Germany. But the Antikey Chop has over a dozen books on typewriters, and only two have any mention of the Rico: Adler’s Antique Typewriters, From Creed to QWERTY, and Dingwerth’s Kleines Lexikon Historischer Schreibmaschinen.

Adler calls it a “pleasant toy typewriter with indicator selecting letters from a rectangular index”, saying nothing more descriptive. Dingwerth’s volume both dates the Rico and lists the maker as Richard Koch & Co. of Nuremburg.

The Rico was ambitiously declared the No. A1 model, though there is no evidence of any other model in existence. It was made mostly of stamped tin, though the type element was made of brass. The type element looked like a tube cut in half lengthwise, and worked in a similar fashion to the Chicago typewriter with its type sleeve.

There are some interesting things about the Rico nonetheless. The platen could not accommodate paper wider than 4″, for one thing. There is also no inking system to speak of. Weirder still, this oversight isn’t mentioned in the original instructions. Most people just taped a couple inches of typewriter ribbon between the element and the platen and called it good .

To use the thing, you would move the center lever to the character you wanted. The lever has a pin in the bottom, and each character has a dimple in it for the pin to sit. The lever on the left side was used to pivot the carriage toward the type element in order to print. In total, the Rico typed 74 characters plus Space.

Finally, Someone’s Made a Braille Keyboard, and It’s Inexpensive

Once upon a time, New Jersey high schooler Umang Sharma saw an ad for a Braille keyboard. The price? A cool seven grand. For a keyboard. No problem, he thought. I can build my own.

The astute among you will notice that there’s a Logitech keyboard in the picture, with what look like key cap hats. That is exactly what’s happening here. Sharma starts with a standard keyboard base, one that is usually either donated or was previously discarded.

He then focuses on the most important accessibility layer, which is tactile Braille key caps that are both readable and durable. In 2022, Sharma launched the non-profit Jdable to bring affordable, accessible design to people with disabilities.

He designed the key caps himself, and uses a combination of 3D printing and other materials to create them in bulk. They’re printed using a combination of PETG for toughness, TPU for grippiness, and resin for definition. The key caps are attached to the standard set with a strong adhesive.

Sharma has a team of student volunteers that help him build the keyboards and distribute them, and they have reached nearly 1,000 blind or visually-impaired students in the U.S. and abroad.

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Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards? Help me out by sending in a link or two. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to email me directly.

Vibe coding is all the rage at the moment if you follow certain parts of the Internet. It’s very easy to dunk upon it, whether it’s to mock the sea of people who’ve drunk the Kool-Aid and want the magic machine to make them a million dollar app with no work, or the vibe coded web apps with security holes you could drive a bus through.

But AI-assisted coding is now a thing that will stick around whether you like it or not, and there are many who want to dip a toe in the water to see what the fuss is about. For those who don’t quite trust the magic machines in their inner sanctum, [jscottmiller] is here with Clix, a bootable live Linux environment which puts Claude Code safely in a sandbox away from your family silver.

Physically it’s a NixOS live USB image with the Sway tiling Wayland compositor, and as he puts it: “Claude Code ready to go”. It has a shared partition for swapping files with Windows or macOS machines, and it’s persistent. The AI side of it has permissive settings, which means the mechanical overlord can reach parts of the OS you wouldn’t normally let it anywhere near; the point of having it in a live environment in the first place.

We can see the attraction of using an environment such as this one for experimenting without commitment, but we’d be interested to hear your views in the comments. It’s about a year since we asked you all about vibe coding, has the art moved forward in that time?

In the 1970s, the USSR had an undersea cable connecting a major naval base at Petropavlovsk to the Pacific Fleet headquarters at Vladivostok. The cable traversed the Sea of Okhotsk, which, at the time, the USSR claimed. It was off limits to foreign vessels, heavily patrolled, and laced with detection devices. How much more secure could it be? Against the US Navy, apparently not very secure at all. For about a decade starting in 1972, the Navy delivered tapes of all the traffic on the cable to the NSA.

Top Secret

You need a few things to make this a success. First, you need a stealthy submarine. The Navy had the USS Halibut, which has a strange history. You also need some sort of undetectable listening device that can operate on the ocean floor. You also need a crew that is sworn to secrecy.

That last part was hard to manage. It takes a lot of people to mount a secret operation to the other side of the globe, so they came up with a cover story: officially, the Halibut was in Okhotsk to recover parts of a Soviet weapon for analysis. Only a few people knew the real mission. The whole operation was known as Operation Ivy Bell.

The Halibut

The Halibut is possibly the strangest submarine ever. It started life destined to be a diesel sub. However, before it launched in 1959, it had been converted to nuclear power. In fact, the sub was the first designed to launch guided missiles and was the first sub to successfully launch a guided missile, although it had to surface to launch.

Oddly enough, the sub carried nuclear cruise missiles and its specific target, should the world go to a nuclear war, was the Soviet naval base at Petropavolvsk.

By 1965, the sub had been replaced for missile duty by newer submarines. It was tapped to be converted for “special operations.” Under the guise of being a deep-sea recovery vehicle, the Halibut received skids to settle on the seabed, side thrusters, specialized anchors, and a host of electronic equipment, including “the Fish” a 12-foot-long array of cameras, sonar, and strobe lights weighing nearly two tons. The “rescue vehicle” on its stern didn’t actually detach. It was a compartment for deploying saturation divers.

An early mission was Operation Sand Dollar. Halibut found the wreck of the Soviet K-129, which the US would go on to recover in another top secret mission, looking for secrets and Soviet technology.

When it came time to deploy the listening device on an underwater cable, Halibut was perfect. It could park a safe distance away, deploy saturation divers, and recover them. If you want to see more about the Halibut, check out the [Defence Central] video below.

The Listening Device

This wasn’t a hidden microphone in a briefcase. It was a 20-foot, six-ton pressure vessel parked on the ocean floor. Details are murky, but there was another part, probably smaller, that clamped around the cable. Working inductively, it didn’t pierce the cable for fear the Soviets would notice that. In addition, if they raised the cable for maintenance, the device was made to break away and sink to the bottom.

Needless to say, tapping a cable on the ocean floor isn’t easy. First, they had to locate the cable. Luckily, there were signs at either end telling fishing vessels to avoid the area. That helped, but they still had to search for the 5-inch wide cables. They found them at least 400 feet below the surface, some 120 miles offshore.

Saturation diving was a relatively new idea at the time, and the Navy’s SeaLab experiments had given them several years of experience with the technology. While commercial saturation dives started in 1965, it was still exotic technology in 1971. The first mission simply recorded a bit of data on the submarine and returned it. Once it was proven, the sub returned with the giant tap device and installed it.

It took four divers to position the big tap. Even then, you couldn’t just leave it there. The device used tapes and required service once a month. So Halibut or another sub had to visit each month to swap tapes out. We couldn’t find out what the power source for the bug was, so they probably had to change the batteries, too.

The Soviets didn’t consider the cable to be at risk for eavesdropping, so much of the traffic on the cable was in the clear. It was a gold mine of intelligence information, and many credit the information gained as crucial to closing the SALT II treaty talks.

Secondary Mission

Most of the crews participating in Operation Ivy Bell didn’t have clearance to know what was going on. Instead, they thought they were on a different secret mission to retrieve debris from Soviet anti-ship missiles.

To keep the story believable, the crew actually did recover a large number of parts from the subject Soviet missiles. Turns out, analysis of the debris did reveal some useful information, so two spy missions for the price of one.

Presumably, the assumption would be that if the Soviets heard a sub was scavenging missile parts, it might qualify as a secret, but it would hardly be a surprise. They couldn’t have imagined the real purpose of the submarine.

Future Taps

Later undersea taps were created that used radioisotope batteries and could store a year’s data between visits that tapped other Soviet phone lines. Submarines Parche, Richard B. Russel, and Seawolf saw duty with some of these other taps as well as taking over for Halibut when it retired four years after the start of Operation Ivy Bell.

The original Okhotsk tap would have operated for many more years if it were not for [Ronald Pelton]. A former NSA employee, he found himself bankrupt over $65,000 of debt. In 1980, he showed up at the Soviet embassy in Washington and offered to sell what he knew.

He knew a number of things, including what was going on with Operation Ivy Bells. That data netted him $5,000 and, overall, he got about $35,000 or so. Oh, he also got life in prison when, in 1985, a Soviet defector revealed he had been the initial contact for [Pelton].

The Soviets didn’t immediately act on [Pelton’s] intel, but by 1981, the Americans knew something was up. A small fleet of ships was parked right over the device. The USS Parche was sent to retrieve it, but they couldn’t find it. Today, it (or, perhaps, a replica) is in the Great Patriotic War Museum in Moscow.

A surprising amount of the Cold War was waged under the sea. Not to mention in the air.

Disposable vapes aren’t quite the problem/resource stream they once were, with many jurisdictions moving to ban the absurdly wasteful little devices, but there are still a lot of slightly-smelly lithium batteries in the wild. You might be forgiven for thinking that most of them seem to be in [Chris Doel]’s UK workshop, given that he’s now cruising around what has to be the world’s only vape-powered car.

Technically, anyway; some motorheads might object to calling donor vehicle [Chris] starts with a car, but the venerable G-Wiz has four wheels, four seats, lights and a windscreen, so what more do you want? Horsepower in excess of 17 ponies (12.6 kW)? Top speeds in excess of 50 Mph (80 km/h)? Something other than the dead weight of 20-year-old lead-acid batteries? Well, [Chris] at least fixes that last part.

The conversion is amazingly simple: he just straps his 500 disposable vape battery pack into the back seat– the same one that was powering his shop–into the GWiz, and it’s off to the races. Not quickly, mind you, but with 500 lightly-used lithium cells in the back seat, how fast would you want to go? Hopefully the power bank goes back on the wall after the test drive, or he finds a better mounting solution. To [Chris]’s credit, he did renovate his pack with extra support and insulation, and put all the cells in an insulated aluminum box. Still, the low speed has to count as a safety feature at this point.

Charging isn’t fast either, as [Chris] has made the probably-controversial decision to use USB-C. We usually approve of USB-Cing all the things, but a car might be taking things too far, even one with such a comparatively tiny battery. Perhaps his earlier (equally nicotine-soaked) e-bike project would have been a better fit for USB charging.

Thanks to [Vaughna] for the tip!

 

This week Jonathan chats with Philippe Humeau about Crowdsec! That company created a Web Application Firewall as on Open Source project, and now runs it as a Multiplayer Firewall. What does that mean, and how has it worked out as a business concept? Watch to find out!

• https://github.com/crowdsecurity/crowdsec
• https://crowdsec.net
• https://www.linkedin.com/company/53443483

Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on our YouTube Channel? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or have the guest contact us! Take a look at the schedule here.

Direct Download in DRM-free MP3.

If you’d rather read along, here’s the transcript for this week’s episode.

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Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

If you’ve used Linux for a long time, you know that we are spoiled these days. Getting a new piece of hardware back in the day was often a horrible affair, requiring custom kernels and lots of work. Today, it should be easier. The default drivers on most distros cover a lot of ground, kernel modules make adding drivers easier, and dkms can automate the building of modules for specific kernels, even if it isn’t perfect.

So ordering a cheap WiFi dongle to improve your old laptop’s network connection should be easy, right? Obviously, the answer is no or this would be a very short post.

Plug and Pray

The USB dongle in question is a newish TP-Link Archer TX50U. It is probably perfectly serviceable for a Windows computer, and I got a “deal” on it. Plugging it in caused it to show up in the list of USB devices, but no driver attached to it, nor were any lights on the device blinking. Bad sign. Pro tip: lsusb -t will show you what drivers are attached to which devices. If you see a device with no driver, you know you have a problem. Use -tv if you want a little more detail.

The lsusb output shows the devices as a Realtek, so that tells you a little about the chipset inside. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell you exactly which chip is in use.

Internet to the Rescue?

My first attempt to install a Realtek driver from GitHub failed because it was for what turned out to be the wrong chipset. But I did find info that the adapter had an RTL8832CU chip inside. Armed with that nugget, I found [morrownr] had several versions, and I picked up the latest one.

Problem solved? Turns out, no. I should have read the documentation, but, of course, I didn’t. So after going through the build, I still had a dead dongle with no driver or blinking lights.

Then I decided to read the file in the repository that tells you what USB IDs the driver supports. According to that file, the code matches several Realtek IDs, an MSI device, one from Sihai Lianzong, and three from TP-Link. All of the TP-Link devices use the 35B2 vendor ID, and the last two of those use device IDs of 0101 and 0102.

Suspiciously, my dongle uses 0103 but with a vendor ID of 37AD. Still, it seemed like it would be worth a shot. I did a recursive grep for 0x0102 and found a table that sets the USB IDs in os_dep/linux/usb_intf.c.

Of course, since I had already installed the driver, I had to change the dkms source, not the download from GitHub. That was, on my system, in /usr/src/rtl8852cu-v1.19.22-103/os_dep_linux/usb_intf.c. I copied the 0x0102 line and changed both IDs so there was now a 0x0103 line, too:

 {USB_DEVICE_AND_INTERFACE_INFO(0x37ad, 0x0103, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff), .driver_info = RTL8852C}, 
/* TP-Link Archer TX50U */

Now it was a simple matter of asking dkms to rebuild and reinstall the driver. Blinking lights were a good sign and, in fact, it worked and worked well.

DKMS

If you haven’t used DKMS much, it is a reasonable system that can rebuild drivers for specific Linux kernels. It basically copies each driver and version to a directory (usually /usr/src) and then has ways to build them against your kernel’s symbols and produce loadable modules.

The system also maintains a build/install state database in /var/lib. A module is “added” to DKMS, then “built” for one or more kernels, and finally “installed” into the corresponding location for use by that kernel. When a new kernel appears, DKMS detects the event — usually via package manager hooks or distribution-specific kernel install triggers — and automatically rebuilds registered modules against the new kernel headers. The system tracks which module versions are associated with which kernels, allowing parallel kernel installations without conflicts. This separation of source registration from per-kernel builds is what allows DKMS to scale cleanly across multiple kernel versions.

If you didn’t use DKMS, you’d have to manually rebuild kernel modules every time you did a kernel update. That would be very inconvenient for things that are important, like video drivers for example.

Of course, not everything is rosy. The NVidia drivers, for example, often depend on something that is prone to change in future Linux kernels. So one day, you get a kernel update, reboot, and you have no screen. DKMS is the first place to check. You’ll probably find it has some errors when building the graphics drivers.

Your choices are to look for a new driver, see if you can patch the old driver, or roll back to a previous working kernel. Sometimes the changes are almost trivial like when an API changes names. Sometimes they are massive changes and you really do want to wait for the next release. So while DKMS helps, it doesn’t solve all problems all the time.

Extras and Thoughts

I skipped over the part of turning off secure boot because I was too lazy to add a signing key to my BIOS. I’ll probably go back and do that later. Probably.

You have to wonder why this is so hard. There is already a way to pass the module options. It seems like you might as well let a user jam a USB ID in. Sure, that wouldn’t have helped for the enumeration case, but it would have been perfectly fine to me if I had just had to put a modprobe or insmod with a parameter to make the card work. Even though I’m set up for rebuilding kernel modules and kernels, many people aren’t, and it seems silly to force them to recompile for a minor change like this.

Of course, another fun answer would be to have vendors actually support their devices for Linux. Wouldn’t that be nice?

You could write your own drivers if you have sufficient documentation or the desire to reverse-engineer the Windows drivers. But it can take a long time. User-space drivers are a little less scary, and some people like using Rust.

What’s your Linux hardware driver nightmare story? We know you have one. Let us hear about it in the comments.