In late 2024 Microsoft removed support for WMR (Windows Mixed Reality), and they didn’t just cease development. As of Windows 11 version 24H2, headsets like the HP Reverb and others by Acer, Samsung, Lenovo, and Dell stopped working at all. But the good news is developer [Matthieu Bucchianeri] created the Oasis driver for Windows Mixed Reality which allows WMR headsets (and their controllers) to work again.

Oasis is available as a free download from Steam and involves a few specific setup steps in order to get working, but once the headset and controllers are unlocked and room setup is complete, the hardware will be usable again. Note that while SteamVR is handy, one’s headset and controllers are not actually tied to SteamVR. Any VR application that uses OpenVR or OpenXR should work.

It’s an extremely well-documented project, and anyone willing to read and follow a short list of directions should be off to the races in no time.

Now that there’s a way for folks to dust off their WMR hardware and get back in the game, it’s a good time to mention that if you have ever suffered from VR sickness, we’ve covered ways to help deal with and adapt to it.

hackaday.com/2025/08/31/micros…

Back in March, we covered the story of Davis Lu, a disgruntled coder who programmed a logic bomb into his employers’ systems. His code was malicious in the extreme, designed as it was to regularly search for his Active Directory entry and fire off a series of crippling commands should it appear he had been fired. His 2019 sacking and subsequent deletion of his AD profile triggered the job, wreaking havoc on servers and causing general mayhem. Whatever satisfaction Lu drew from that must have been fleeting, because he was quickly arrested, brought to trial in federal court, and found guilty of causing intentional damage to protected computer systems.

Lu faced a decade in federal prison for the stunt, but at his sentencing last week, he got four years behind bars followed by three years of supervised release. That’s still a pretty stiff sentence, and depending on where he serves it, things might not go well for him. Uber-geek Chris Boden has some experience in the federal prison system as a result of some cryptocurrency malfeasance; his video on his time in lockup is probably something Mr. Lu should watch while he can. Honestly, we feel bad for him in a way because we’ve been there; we certainly toyed with the logic bomb idea when we were coding for a living, without actually ever doing it. Maybe he thought it would just get treated as a prank, but that was probably never in the cards; as we’re fond of telling our kids, the world just doesn’t have a sense of humor anymore.

Speaking of prison, when was the last time you had to use a floppy drive? Retrocomputer fans excepted, chances are good it’s quite a long time ago, unless you’re an inmate in the New Jersey State Prison, where USB drives are not allowed. Instead, prisoners working on appeals or continuing their education are forced to use 1.44-MB floppies to exchange data with the outside world. The New Jersey prison rules seem a bit anachronistic, since they allow a pretty generous stack of 3.5″ floppies — 20 diskettes — but disallow USB sticks. True, the USB form factor is more easily accommodated in the standard-issue prison wallet, but the materials in a stack of floppies seem like they could easily be fashioned into a shiv or shank.

We’ve said this before, but we’ve got to start hanging around a better class of dumpster. Were we to, we might get as lucky as a Redditor who reports finding a sextet of 1 TB solid-state drives in a bin. The lucky dumpster diver doesn’t say much about where they were found, perhaps wisely so, but other Redditors in the thread were quick to point out that they were probably in the trash for a reason, and that they might be a little clapped out if they came from a server array. Still, 6TB of free storage isn’t something one lightly passes up on, and even if the drives have seen better days, they’ll probably be adequate for non-critical applications. For our part, we’d love to find one of those mythical dumpsters that seem to spawn things like Selectric typewriters, supercontinuum lasers, or even all the makings of a semiconductor fab.

And finally, Brian Potter over at Construction Physics posted an excellent essay this week on the early history of the Ford Model T, the automobile that gave birth to America’s car culture, for better or for worse. Everyone seems to know the story of how Henry Ford invented the assembly line and drove the cost of a car down to around $400, making motoring accessible to the masses. And while that’s kind of true — Ford is said to have picked up the idea of moving the workpiece rather than the workers from slaughterhouses — it leaves out a lot of interesting details, which Brian picks up on. We were particularly struck by how late in the game Ford introduced assembly lines to Model T production; it wasn’t until 1913, and then only as a small-scale line to assemble the flywheel magnetos used in the ignition system. Once that line proved itself by reducing magneto assembly times by a factor of four, Ford’s process engineers began rolling out the concept across the plant. There are a ton of other tidbits in the article — enjoy!

hackaday.com/2025/08/31/hackad…

Ask a Hackaday scribe who’s helped run the lightning talks at one of our events, and they’ll tell you that keeping the speakers on time is a challenge. Conversely if the staffer is trying to indicate to the speaker how much time they have left, it must be difficult from the podium to keep track while delivering your talk. Fortunately there’s [makeTVee] waiting in the wings with a solution, a cube whose faces each have a custom 5×7 LED matrix on them. The countdown is clear and unambiguous, and should provide no distractions.

The brains behind it all is a XIAO nRF52840 Sense board using the Zephyr RTOS, the LEDs are WS2812s on their own PCBs, and the party piece is only revealed at the end of the countdown. A tilt mechanism triggered by a servo releases a ball bearing down a track, where it hits a telephone bell and provides a very audible reminder to the speaker. The result saw action during the lightning talks at the Hackaday Europe event earlier in the year, but it’s taken a while for the write-up to make it online.

youtube.com/embed/QMcRhnvGo9U?…

hackaday.com/2025/08/31/lightn…

PER LA TUA FIRMA PROSSIMO APPUNTAMENTO 2 SETTEMBRE AL SITO
Roma, Via Ardeatina Km 23.600

Qui il video di questo ultimo fine settimana agostano a raccogliere le vostre firme nelle piazze.

30/31 agosto 2025

Link al video su YouTube:
youtube.com/shorts/E3Tm-F4G9i8…

Stel je voor: de overheid zet standaard een afluisterapparaat in je woonkamer. Niet omdat je iets verkeerd hebt gedaan, maar omdat iemand, ergens, misschien ooit een misdrijf pleegt. Absurd? Toch is dat precies wat de Europese Commissie met Chatcontrole wil: al onze privéberichten laten scannen door algoritmes, permanent en zonder verdenking. Wat betekent dat concreet? […]

Het bericht Chatcontrole, Het einde van het briefgeheim verscheen eerst op Piratenpartij.

LA TUA FIRMA CONTRO L'INCENERITORE, BASTA POTERI SPECIALI!

Ad Albano piazza San Pietro fino alle 12.30, a Genzano Piazza Francioni fino alle 13 e a Tor San Lorenzo Piazza Falcone e Borsellino tutto il giorno (ore 20.00).

30 AGOSTO: SETTE ORE DI RACCOLTA, OLTRE 800 FIRME

youtu.be/d-0w-OrXD0g?feature=s…