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2025: As The Hardware World Turns

January 5, 2026 by 18 Comments

If you’re reading this, that means you’ve successfully made it through 2025! Allow us to be the first to congratulate you — that’s another twelve months of skills learned, projects started, and hacks….hacked. The average Hackaday reader has a thirst for knowledge and an insatiable appetite for new challenges, so we know you’re already eager to take on everything 2026 has to offer.

But before we step too far into the unknown, we’ve found that it helps to take a moment and reflect on where we’ve been. You know how the saying goes: those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. That whole impending doom bit obviously has a negative connotation, but we like to think the axiom applies for both the lows and highs in life. Sure you should avoid making the same mistake twice, but why not have another go at the stuff that worked? In fact, why not try to make it even better this time?

As such, it’s become a Hackaday tradition to rewind the clock and take a look at some of the most noteworthy stories and trends of the previous year, as seen from our rather unique viewpoint in the maker and hacker world. With a little luck, reviewing the lessons of 2025 can help us prosper in 2026 and beyond.

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How Wind Nearly Took Down Boulder NTP

December 29, 2025 by 26 Comments

NTP is one of the most interesting and important, but all too forgotten, protocols that makes the internet tick. Accurate clock synchronization is required for everything ranging from cryptography to business and science. NTP is closely tied around a handful of atomic clocks, some in orbit on GPS satellites, and some in laboratories. So the near-failure of one such atomic clock sparked a rather large, and nerdy, internet debate.

On December 17, 2025, the Colorado front range experience a massive wind storm. The National Center for Atmospheric Reassure in Boulder recorded gusts in excess of 100 mph (about 85 knots or 160 kph). This storm was a real doozy, but gusts this strong are not unheard of in Boulder either. That is no small reason the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (now the National Laboratory of the Rockies) has a wind turbine testing facility in the neighborhood.

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Surviving The RAM Apocalypse With Software Optimizations

December 23, 2025 by 107 Comments

To the surprise of almost nobody, the unprecedented build-out of datacenters and the equipping of them with servers for so-called ‘AI’ has led to a massive shortage of certain components. With random access memory (RAM) being so far the most heavily affected and with storage in the form of HDDs and SSDs not far behind, this has led many to ask the question of how we will survive the coming months, years, decades, or however-long the current AI bubble will last.

One thing is already certain, and that is that we will have to make our current computer systems last longer, and forego simply tossing in more sticks of RAM in favor of doing more with less. This is easy to imagine for those of us who remember running a full-blown Windows desktop system on a sub-GHz x86 system with less than a GB of RAM, but might require some adjustment for everyone else.

In short, what can us software developers do differently to make a hundred MB of RAM stretch further, and make a GB of storage space look positively spacious again?

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Internet-Connected Consoles Are Retro Now, And That Means Problems

December 22, 2025 by 25 Comments

A long time ago, there was a big difference between PC and console gaming. The former often came with headaches. You’d fight with drivers, struggle with crashes, and grow ever more frustrated dealing with CD piracy checks and endless patches and updates. Meanwhile, consoles offered the exact opposite experience—just slam in a cartridge, and go!

That beautiful feature fell away when consoles joined the Internet. Suddenly there were servers to sign in to and updates to download and a whole bunch of hoops to jump through before you even got to play a game. Now, those early generations of Internet-connected consoles are becoming retro, and that’s introduced a whole new set of problems now the infrastructure is dying or dead. Boot up and play? You must be joking!

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Chinese Regulators May Kill Retractable Car Door Handles That Never Should Have Existed

November 26, 2025 by 157 Comments

Headlights. Indicators. Trunk releases. Seatbelts. Airbags. Just about any part of a car you can think of is governed by a long and complicated government regulation. It’s all about safety, ensuring that the car-buying public can trust that their vehicles won’t unduly injure or maim them in regular operation, or in the event of accident.

However, one part of the modern automobile has largely escaped regulation—namely, the humble door handle. Automakers have been free to innovate with new and wacky designs, with Tesla in particular making waves with its electronic door handles. However, after a series of deadly incidents where doors wouldn’t open, regulators are now examining if these door handles are suitable for road-going automobiles. As always, regulations are written in blood, but it raises the question—was not the danger of these complicated electronic door handles easy to foresee?

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Why Samsung Phones Are Failing Emergency Calls In Australia

November 19, 2025 by 66 Comments

We’re taught how to call emergency numbers from a young age; whether it be 911 in the US, 999 in the UK, or 000 in Australia. The concept is simple—if you need aid from police, fire, or ambulance, you pick up a phone and dial and help will be sent in short order.

It’s a service many of us have come to rely on; indeed, it’s function can swing the very balance between life or death. Sadly, in Australia, that has come to pass, with a person dying when their Samsung phone failed to reach the Triple Zero (000) emergency line. It has laid bare an obscure technical issue that potentially leaves thousands of lives at risk. Continue reading “Why Samsung Phones Are Failing Emergency Calls In Australia” →

Expert Systems: The Dawn Of AI

October 29, 2025 by 19 Comments

We’ll be honest. If you had told us a few decades ago we’d teach computers to do what we want, it would work some of the time, and you wouldn’t really be able to explain or predict exactly what it was going to do, we’d have thought you were crazy. Why not just get a person? But the dream of AI goes back to the earliest days of computers or even further, if you count Samuel Butler’s letter from 1863 musing on machines evolving into life, a theme he would revisit in the 1872 book Erewhon.

Of course, early real-life AI was nothing like you wanted. Eliza seemed pretty conversational, but you could quickly confuse the program. Hexapawn learned how to play an extremely simplified version of chess, but you could just as easily teach it to lose.

But the real AI work that looked promising was the field of expert systems. Unlike our current AI friends, expert systems were highly predictable. Of course, like any computer program, they could be wrong, but if they were, you could figure out why.

Experts?

As the name implies, expert systems drew from human experts. In theory, a specialized person known as a “knowledge engineer” would work with a human expert to distill his or her knowledge down to an essential form that the computer could handle.

This could range from the simple to the fiendishly complex, and if you think it was hard to do well, you aren’t wrong. Before getting into details, an example will help you follow how it works.

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