Mysterious Files PH

A recent addition to mountain bikes is the dropper seat post. This invention is in the vein of office swivel chairs, allowing the seat height to be adjusted with a simple handlebar mounted lever. They are rather fascinating inventions ranging in complexity from simple mechanical systems, to electronic monstrosities actuated by Bluetooth. Inspired by the panoply of possibilities, [kane components] set forth to create such a home-built dropper post. 

Inspired by woodworking bar clamps, [kane’s] design utilizing angled plates binding against a rail inside the dropper post. Two pairs of plates sitting at opposite angles resist opposite forces from either the rider sitting on the post, or the return spring. A simple cable actuated cam moves the plates to a nonbinding position when the lever is actuated, and springs return the plates to a binding rest-state. The return is handled by an air spring pressurized against a piston at the bottom of the shaft.

Though 3D printing could be used for a cursory test the mechanism, properly machined parts are needed to handle the loads running through a typical seat post. But instead of machining everything from scratch, [kane] reused the lower post and bushings from a broken post. To fit everything together, the lower post got thread milled so the entire mechanism can be threaded into the seat post as a replaceable cartridge. The upper telescopic section consists of aluminum tubing and a custom machined seat clam mechanism press-fit together.

As is the case with all engineering projects, a number of issues came forth once the dropper post made it onto a bike. Issues ranged from the cable pull causing the seat post to move slightly, to all manner of mechanical jamming. Filing down the ball end of the cable so it didn’t rub against the outer-housing of the seat post fixed that particular issue. The two-piece upper design also proved problematic with the press-fit having a bad tendency to come apart.

Despite these particular issues, did it end up working? No, not consistently. The binding mechanism does not consistently produce enough force to keep the dropper post from falling under a rider’s weight. Regardless, we really enjoyed following along with [kane] for the journey of creating such a mechanically complicated bicycle component!

To our surprise, this isn’t the first dropper post hack we have come across. So make sure to check out this bodge of a fix for a far more complex (and expensive) dropper next!

For most people the term ‘DNA sequencing’ probably brings to mind large, expensive laboratory equipment in sterile rooms, but over the past decades technological progress really has had its way with it, to the point where it’s now just another small portable device. Something like the Oxford Nanopore MinION unit that [Mike] recently took to bits to ogle at the intricate insides.

This device was trialed in 2014 in a limited release before its commercial release in 2015, with this paper by [Miten Jain] et al. in Genome Biology detailing the workings of this nanopore sequencer. At a mere $2,000 it’s rather remarkable how affordable it is, though this comes with the caveat of the consumables, which are also shown in the video. These come in at a cool £690 per unit, can sequence either RNA or DNA and can be used at most a few times before they need to be replaced.

The main unit is fairly simple, featuring a Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA and a rather nice slim fan-based cooling solution. For the nanopore unit you get the typical microfluidics system, to guide the deposited fluid containing the genetic material to sequence over the nanopore system. In here we see the actual magic as well, in the form of the high-density pitch ICs on both sides of the PCB inside the consumable sequencer unit.

Although this particular unit got discontinued already, the consumables are still available for it if you are feeling the sequencing itch. Of course, we’re likely to see the costs for DNA and RNA sequencing to keep plummeting, as what were once complex chips get overtaken once again by the progress of technology.

If you’ve done much networking, you surely know the frustration of trying to connect to something, say a Raspberry Pi, that lives behind your consumer router. There are a number of solutions for this, ranging from opening ports on your router along with dynamic DNS. Or, you can operate a VPN server on your network. Modern Linux has a facility called Wireguard that lets you create secure network tunnels very easily, but it is a little difficult to set up. But there are tools like Tailscale that can do most of the work for you. There’s only one problem: Tailscale is sorta-kinda free, but not really. But it turns out, you can build your own Tailscale network, and it is easier than you might imagine.

In all fairness, Tailscale’s free tier is good and recently got even more generous, allowing unlimited nodes and up to six users. That’s plenty for most hackers. However, as we’ve seen before, what they can give they can also take away. Besides, there are some extra services you still have to pay for if you want them, but overall, the free tier is more than enough for most people.

On the other hand, no matter how great the free tier may be, some people don’t want to run things on other people’s hardware. Or you need that 7th user. Or you need paywalled features. No worries. Headscale is a self-hosted service that can do nearly everything the cloud portion of Tailscale does, and if you have a place to host it, you can be your own Tailscale server.

For the client side? That’s the best part. Headscale works seamlessly with the existing Tailscale clients. You simply have to point them to your server instead of the defaults.

The Original: An Overview

WireGuard itself is wonderfully simple. Each peer has a public/private key pair and a list of networks reachable through the peer. The difficulty isn’t WireGuard’s cryptography; it is managing a useful network of machines that move around. Each node gets a 100.x.x.x IP address and a DNS name that allows you to talk to it over an encrypted tunnel directly (at least, usually).

Suppose your laptop is at a coffee shop, your Raspberry Pi is behind your home router, and a server is sitting in a VPS somewhere. None necessarily has a convenient fixed public address. Both of them may be behind carrier-grade NAT. Their addresses may change. Somehow they need to discover one another, exchange enough information to establish secure connections, and update that information as circumstances change.

Tailscale operates what is usually called the control plane. The clients register with it, authenticate, learn which other machines they are allowed to see, and how to reach them. This distinction is important: your actual traffic does not flow through the Tailscale control server. The clients attempt to establish direct WireGuard connections to one another. Under normal circumstances, your data doesn’t go anywhere else.

If NAT or firewalls make that impossible, Tailscale can fall back to one of its DERP relay servers. DERP stands for Designated Encrypted Relay for Packets. The relay can pass your encrypted packets along, but it can’t decrypt them.

This architecture explains why Tailscale works so well. You get a private address for every participating machine and, with MagicDNS, convenient names instead of addresses. You can also designate a machine as an exit node (that is, route all network traffic through the remote node), advertise an entire LAN through a subnet router, control access with policies, SSH into a remote node, and do several other tricks.

With generous free limits, why bother standing up your own server? Most Hackaday readers can already answer that question. You can make any number of justifications for why you want to run your own DNS, mail server, or Git servers. Privacy. Extra features. Total control. But the truth is we just want to, and that’s ok.

Enter Headscale

Headscale describes itself as an open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server intended primarily for self-hosters and hobbyists. It supports the basic things you’d expect, including MagicDNS, IPv4 and IPv6, subnet routers, exit nodes, tags, ACLs, Tailscale SSH, and file sharing. It doesn’t reproduce every commercial Tailscale feature, so checking the compatibility list is worthwhile if you depend on something exotic.

You’ll also need somewhere to put it. The official documentation expects a Linux or BSD server with a public IP address and recommends making Headscale available over HTTPS on port 443. That sounds more intimidating than it is. A tiny VPS is ideal. If you already have a public server doing other jobs, Headscale can sit behind a reverse proxy such as Apache, nginx, or Caddy.

If you are really on a budget, consider using something like Oracle’s OCI Free Tier. Of course, now you are trading one free plan for another. And, in all fairness, Oracle just cut some free limits in half this month. But it is easy enough to change servers quickly if the need arises. You can just as well use a local machine with dynamic DNS and a port forward.

There is one wrinkle: the Tailscale control protocol uses a somewhat unusual WebSocket upgrade, so don’t assume that every arbitrary HTTP proxy configuration will work. The Headscale documentation provides working configurations for the usual suspects.

Installation is straightforward, particularly on Debian or Ubuntu, where official packages provide a user account, default configuration, and systemd unit. The important file is normally:

/etc/headscale/config.yaml

A basic installation will use SQLite, so no need for a big database package. You’ll need to create your first user:

headscale users create hackaday

The trick to connecting a client is to tell it to use your coordination server. For Linux:

tailscale --up --login-server https://your-server-url

Usually, it will bring up your browser for you to log in. You might notice you haven’t provided a password. To log in, you’ll get a command you have to run on the server. However, you can also create keys to preshare if that’s not feasible. There are also options to set up SSO with something like Google.

Even the Android client can take an alternative server, although it is tricky to find. In the accounts page, you have to open the “three dot” menu to reveal “use alternative server.”

What About DERP?

Even with this set up, you are still using the public DERP servers, or, at least, you might be. If you look at the status of an active connection, you’ll see something like this:

active; offers exit node; direct 158.61.222.64:41641, tx 428 rx 348

The direct keyword means your computer and that node are directly connected. In that case, you aren’t using any DERP server at all. It is possible to run your own DERP server, but that may or may not be a performance problem. If your cheap VPS is running halfway around the world, pushing packets back and forth could get slow. Keep in mind, the DERP servers only handle encrypted packets they can’t read, so for most people, you are probably better off at least starting with the public servers.

HeadPlane

Headscale itself is unapologetically server software. Administration is primarily through configuration files and the headscale command.

I don’t mind that, but Tailscale’s web dashboard is undeniably convenient. Headplane offers something similar. It is a separate open source project that provides a web administration interface for Headscale. It can display and manage machines, routes, users, ACLs, tags, DNS settings, and other parts of the network. It also supports OpenID Connect for authentication and can even provide browser-based SSH access.

If you’ve used the official Tailscale administration interface, Headplane makes a self-hosted installation feel much more familiar. The usual deployment is in a container. Headplane talks to Headscale using an API key, which you can generate as part of the install process.

Exactly how you set it up depends on how you have Headscale deployed, so the exact steps I took may or may not help you. And, of course, you probably want to secure the interface either behind https or keep it accessible only via the Headscale network.

One thing that Headplane can do is allow you to have a tailscale ssh session into a machine via the browser. This turns out to be a pain to set up, but it does work. If Headplane doesn’t suit you, there are other options.

Summary

If you want to experiment, I’d suggest this order. If you haven’t used Tailscale before, get a free account and try it out for a bit. If it isn’t for you, you’re done. If you don’t mind the free tier limits, you are, again, done.

But if you are like me, you’ll get the itch to do your own setup. Get your public server ready and install Headscale. Administer it with the command line. Make sure it is working for a bit. The biggest thing that I appreciated was having better control over my DNS setup, but there are other features you might appreciate if you use, for example, ACL security.

Then, if you don’t like the CLI, try headplane. Once you are bored, you can work on single sign-on and your own DERP servers, if you like.

Headscale a nice example of something Linux has always been particularly good at. Start with an application that hides a complicated technology behind an easy interface. Pull back one layer. Discover that the complicated part is actually composed of several understandable pieces. Replace one of those pieces with an open source implementation.

We’ve looked at wireguard and tailscale before.

When playing a game about Pocket Monsters, there’s one thing you can’t avoid using no matter what you do, and that’s a pokeball. Whether it’s a new or old game, you can’t avoid it. Many from different generations or spin-off games have their own fun spin, and that’s what [Kiara] wanted to explore with her custom made replication of an older style of ball.

While beautiful on the outside from [Kiara]’s fine maker skills, it stands out compared to anything your kids might have from the functionality. In game the ball is able to shoot out smoke and even jump after catching something. These are both elements that [Kiara] was able to bring into her own design. Even adding some auto-opening and closing features, the ball exhibits everything but the ability to actually catch your friends.

While this project might focus on bringing something from the digital world to the real world, Pokémon has had its hand in doing the same. However, what if that thing gets stuck in the real world and needs to be brought back? Well, you should see how another hacker saved their Pokémon from a PokéWalker into the game world!

If you didn’t live through it, it is hard to understand how excited the general public was about the race for the moon. You can capture some of it by watching “Lunar Bridgehead,” a film about JPL monitoring the Ranger spacecraft as it hit, rather hard, on the lunar surface.

The Ranger program had been plagued with problems. The first five didn’t make it to the moon. Ranger 6 hit the moon, but failed to start its cameras. Ranger 7 was the first successful mission. There would be two more successful missions before the end of the program.

Honestly, given the state of technology and computers in those days, it is a miracle they could do it at all. Even more sobering to think that a scant five years later, Neil Armstrong would set foot on the lunar surface. In fact, Ranger 8 would land in the Sea of Tranquility, just like Armstrong’s Eagle.

The video has a lot of cool shots of old tech: magnetic tape drives, teletypes, paper tape readers, and giant dish antennas. The six onboard cameras even had to warm up, something unfamiliar to those who have only used modern electronics.

Of course, the cameras didn’t survive the crash, and that was expected. By today’s standards, the images are crude, but in 1964, they were nothing short of amazing.

Turns out, landing on the moon is harder than people think. Even with modern tech.

Bad news for anyone who was hoping for some relief from the memory shortage — Digitimes is reporting that the production capacity of major players such as Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix has already been booked for 2027 due to record demand. Their industry sources indicate that what we’re experiencing currently is just a prelude to when things get really ugly, which is why customers are paying a premium to lock in their orders so far out.

Although there’s been no official word from either side of the transaction, the Digitimes article further points out that these sort of agreements are usually 3 to 5 year contracts. If that’s the case, and nothing changes in supply and demand equation, we could be in for a very rough ride. There’s a potential opportunity here for other manufacturers to step in and start producing DRAM, possibly even focusing on lower-performance offerings intended for the consumer market, but setting up those production lines isn’t going to happen overnight. It’s always possible the AI bubble could pop in the next couple of years, but we’re not sure we’d put money on it.

There’s a developing story this weekend about the breach of customer data over at Framework. The maker of modular and repairable computers has recently sent an email out to all customers that their names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses were leaked due to an upstream zero-day attack against database provider Metabase.

Metabase disclosed the breach on August 3rd, but we were mildly surprised to see that Framework doesn’t seem to have made any public acknowledgement of the event so far. As far as we can tell, the only reason there are copies of the email from them circulating online is because several customers posted it to social media. In their statements to sources such as TechCrunch, Framework reps were also hesitant to give hard details such as how many customers were impacted. While we’re fans of what Framework is trying to do in terms of hardware customization and repairability, we have to admit that being cagey about this sort of thing isn’t a good look.

If you’re looking to vent about this situation and others like it with similarly-minded folks, HOPE 26 will be the perfect place to do it. We’re just days away from the New York hacker con, and there are less than 150 tickets still available for anyone who’s still undecided about going. At this point, it seems likely there won’t be any ticket sales at the door.

Luckily, there’s no shortage of virtual tickets which will let you experience the event from the comfort of your own basement. Since their week-long marathon event during COVID, HOPE has offered a better virtual experience than most hacker cons, so ticket holders can look forward to more than just a YouTube link.

As reported by Neowin, developer Justin Marshall has ported Word for Windows 1.1a to Microsoft’s modern incarnation of the operating system on 64-bit hardware. Rather than running it in some emulator, Justin took the source code that Microsoft released back in 2014 and rewrote the bits that relied on the early 90s platform it was intended for.

While we’re not sure the lawyers in Redmond are going to lose much sleep over somebody hacking around with a 35 year old version of Word, it’s worth mentioning that the Microsoft Research License that the code was released under back in 2014 allows access to the source for personal use but specifically forbids redistribution.

To comply with the letter of the law on this one, our read on it is that this project should have been made public as a series of patches against that release rather than bundling in Microsoft’s own code. In other words, if you’re interested in this one, you might want to pull down a local copy now in the event it goes down the memory hole.

Finally, Word isn’t the only decades-old piece of software getting a new lease on life in 2026. This year marks the 30th anniversary of Quake, and to celebrate Bethesda has unveiled a new chapter for the seminal first person shooter. Titled Dawn of the Machine, the update was created by a group of developers within MachineGames, who have not only been responsible for the modern Wolfenstein games but also 2024’s critically-acclaimed Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

Although Quake may be 30 years young, it’s still available on pretty much everything, so you won’t need to break out your old DOS machine to get in on the action. The announcement page says the free update is available now for all current and previous-generation game consoles, as well as PC.

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line; we’d love to hear about it.

Sometimes you see a project just staring at you with proverbial puppy dog eyes and you just cannot look away. In the case of a once rather nice Sony TV it was the smooth 32″ Trinitron CRT that gave [Happychoice] that look when he came across it along the side of the road. Naturally he had to beg the owner of the junkyard to please let him adopt the pupp^Wjunked TV and attempted an ill-advised repair.

Some later sleuthing revealed that this poor TV had been sitting on the side of that road for at least six years, exposed to the worst that the Italian weather and local fauna could do to it, so it was no surprise that all he got out of it even after cleaning and some repairs was a sad triple-blink of the power LED. This indicated that something on the control board was very unhappy about the status of the power supply.

Over the course of a few months this project went correspondingly from careful optimism down to the depths of depression, through the fields of bargaining and into the blue skies of acceptance of a likely far more involved repair session than originally assumed. That said, the CRT itself looks to be in pretty good nick, as do the PCBs barring the few sketchy resistors that already got replaced.

We would like to congratulate [Happychoice] on the acquisition of a fun new repair project and wish him all the luck on bringing this beast of a TV back to life.