The cool part about science is that you can ask questions like what happens if you stick some moss spores on the outside of the International Space Station, and then get funding for answering said question. This was roughly the scope of the experiment that [Chang-hyun Maeng] and colleagues ran back in 2022, with their findings reported in iScience.

Used as moss specimen was Physcomitrium patens, a very common model organism. After previously finding during Earth-based experiments that the spores are the most resilient, these were subsequently transported to the ISS where they found themselves placed in the exposure unit of the Kibo module. Three different exposure scenarios were attempted for the spores, with all exposed to space, but one set kept in the dark, another protected from UV and a third set exposed to the healthy goodness of the all-natural UV that space in LEO has to offer.

After the nine month exposure period, the spores were transported back to Earth, where the spores were allowed to develop into mature P. patens moss. Here it was found that only the spores which had been exposed to significant UV radiation – including UV-C unfiltered by the Earth’s atmosphere – saw a significant reduction in viability. Yet even after nine months of basking in UV-C, these still had a germination rate of 86%, which provides fascinating follow-up questions regarding their survivability mechanisms when exposed to UV-C as well as a deep vacuum, freezing temperatures and so on.

hackaday.com/2025/11/24/testin…

Some people are not merely satisfied with functionality, or even just good looks. These persnickety snoots (I am one of them) seek something elegant, a true marriage of form and function.

Image by [YANG SHU] via Hackaday.IOShould such a person be in the market for a macro pad (or ‘macropad’ if you prefer), that snoot should look no further than [YANG SHU]’s 8-key programmable stream deck-like device.

The main goal here was the perfect fusion of display and feel. I’m not sure that an FDM-printed, DIY macro pad can look any better than this one does. But looks are only half the story, of course. There’s also feel, and of course, functionality.

Yes those are (hot-swappable) mechanical key switches, and they are powered by an ESP32-S2. Drawn on the 3.5″ LCD are icons and text for each switch, which of course can be easily changed in the config app.

There’s a three-direction tact switch that’s used to switch between layout profiles, and I’m sure that even this is satisfying on the feel front. Does it get better than this? Besides maybe printing it in black. I ask Hackaday.

KeebDeck Keyboard Gets Two Thumbs Up

Did you make it to Supercon this year? If so, you hold a badge with a special keyboard — a custom job by Hackaday superfriend [Arturo182], aka Solder Party. Were you wondering about its backstory?

Image by [Arturo182] via Solder PartyUnsatisfied with having to rely on a dwindling stock of BBQ20 keyboards, [Arturo182] created a fantastic replacement called the KeebDeck Keyboard.

This 69-key alphanumeric silicone number has all the keys a hacker needs, plus a rainbow of extras that can be used for macros. According to [Arturo182], the keyboard has a tactile feel thanks to a snap dome sheet underneath the keys, and this makes it more comfortable for long thumb-typing sessions.

Be sure to check out the teasers at the bottom of the KeebDeck page, because there is some really exciting stuff. If you want to build one, GitHub is your friend, pal.

Thanks for the tip, [Wim Van Gool]!

The Centerfold: Controlled Chaos

Image by [Tardigradium] via redditDon’t you just love the repeated primary colors throughout this centerfold? I do, and I think this whole arrangement shows amazing restraint. Controlled chaos, if you will. That’s what [Tardigradium]’s wife calls it, anyway.

Here’s what I know: That’s a Nulea m512 mouse, the keyboard is a KBD Craft Sachiel LEGO number, and that there is a Cidoo macro pad. Best of all, [Tardigradium] hand-painted the speakers. Neat-o!

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 Gerda Typewriter Was One of Accessibility

Some of us (okay, I) would have thought that most accessibility inventions are fairly recent, say, from the 1960s onward. But consider the Gerda typewriter, which was created in 1919 to enable blind and one-armed victims of WWI to become employable typists.
Image via The Antikey Chop
According to the Antikey Chop, it’s quite possible that the German government helped grease the wheels of this project so that these soldiers would have a usable typewriter with which to get on with life.

Three versions of this index typewriter were produced: a two-handed Gerda, one with a Braille index, and one with an English index. All entered the market the same year, and were produced for a total of three years.

The Gerda’s typewheel was quite like Blickensderfer, and some even had the DHIATENSOR layout. More expensive than last week’s Clacker (75 Marks), the Gerdas for blind and sighted people with two hands cost 195 Marks, and the one-handed edition was 205 Marks. Some of the two-handed models had rectangular, wooden key-tops, and others had round, glass-topped keys.

Finally, Module-Based Keyboard Is a Sensory Nightmare

Image by Future via Games Radar
I’ve been an early adopter of keyboards in the past. This is usually to bring them to your attention, either before they’re released, or just as they’ve come out. And never have I ever had this poor of an experience.

Games Radar recently reviewed a surprisingly not-failed Kickstarter keyboard that actually shipped, the Naya Create. It may not look like it, but the Create is supposed to be a gaming keyboard. What it does look like is mouse-focused, or at least mouse-forward. And that’s the point of it. Evidently.

Those big modules are interchangeable, and there are four of them so far: the Touch (a trackpad), Track (a trackball that falls out reliably), the Tune (a dial), and the Float, which is designed for space mousing around. They sound cool enough, and might actually be the best part of this whole setup.

To fully illustrate my poit I hvemt’t corrected any of the typos experieved typim this semtemve with the Naya Create while tryig to maintain my usual speed.

But according to Games Radar, the Naya Create is so not worth the $850 (!) asking price. It has ‘mushy, low-profile switches’ and clammy caps, and although the reviewer complains about the non-staggered keys, y’all know that those are my preference at this point.

And apparently, by default, Backspace is mapped to the left side. What? Of course, you can remap any key, whenever the software decides to work. Whenever the reviewer tried to save changes, the software would say that the keyboard is disconnected. Wonderful.

Despite these shortcomings, Games Radar says the keyboard is rock-solid aluminium with good hinges. So there’s that. Just, you know, swap out the switches and keycaps, and wait for software updates, I guess.

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.

hackaday.com/2025/11/24/keebin…

Medium format cameras have always been a step up from those built in the 35 mm format. By virtue of using a much larger film, they offer improved resolution and performance. If you want a medium format film camera, you can always hunt for some nice vintage gear. Or, you could build one from scratch — like the MRF2 from [IDENTIDEM.design.]

The MRF2 might be a film camera, but in every other way, it’s a thoroughly modern machine. It’s a rangefinder design, relying on a DTS6012M LIDAR time-of-flight sensor to help ensure your shots are always in sharp focus. An ESP32 is responsible for running the show, and it’s hooked up to OLED displays in the viewfinder and on the body to show status info. The lens is coupled with a linear position sensor for capturing accurate shots, there’s a horizon indicator in the viewfinder, and there’s also a nice little frame counter using a rotary encoder to track the film.

Shots from a prototype on Instagram show that this camera can certainly pull off some beautiful shots. We love a good camera build around these parts. You can even make one out of a mouse if you’re so inclined.

youtube.com/embed/_sIWXoqOFIU?…

hackaday.com/2025/11/24/build-…

In the closing hours of JawnCon 0x2, I was making a final pass of the “Free Stuff for Nerds” table when I noticed a forlorn Kindle that had a piece of paper taped to it. The hand-written note explained that the device was in shambles — not only was its e-ink display visibly broken, but the reader was stuck in some kind of endless boot loop. I might have left it there if it wasn’t for the closing remark: “Have Fun!”

Truth is, the last thing I needed was another Kindle. My family has already managed to build up a collection of the things. But taking a broken one apart and attempting to figure out what was wrong with it did seem like it would be kind of fun, as I’d never really had the opportunity to dig into one before. So I brought it home and promptly forgot about it as Supercon was only a few weeks away and there was plenty to keep me occupied.

The following isn’t really a story about fixing a Kindle, although it might seem like it on the surface. It’s more about the experience of working on the device, and the incredible hacking potential of these unassuming gadgets. Whether you’ve got a clear goal in mind, or just want to get your hands dirty in the world of hardware hacking, you could do far worse than picking a couple of busted Kindles up for cheap on eBay.

If there’s a singular takeaway, it’s that the world’s most popular e-reader just so happens to double as a cheap and impressively capable embedded Linux development environment for anyone who’s willing to crack open the case.

Getting Connected

We start with what’s essentially Hardware Hacking 101: the hidden serial debug port. It’s the sort of thing you learn to look for when taking apart a new gadget, and unsurprisingly, it’s also at the heart of Kindle hacking. While there’s plenty of software modifications you can do depending on the age and version of your particular Kindle, opening up the case and tapping into the serial port is always the most direct way to gain access to the system.

From my research, every Kindle (with the possible exception of the very latest models from the 2020s) have an unpopulated serial port on the board. In the case of this Kindle Paperwhite 2 from 2013, it’s even labeled. I simply soldered on some jumper wires and ran them out to a pin header to make connecting to it a little less fiddly. The only thing to watch out for is the voltage; it seems that the serial port on the majority of Kindles is 1.8 V, and connecting up a higher voltage USB-serial adapter without a level shifter could release the Magic Smoke.

With the hardware connected and my favorite serial communications tool running, it was easy to see what ailed this particular Kindle. As evidenced by the final few lines of the kernel messages, a failure of one of the voltage regulators in the MAX77696 — a power management IC designed specifically for e-ink readers — was preventing the driver module from loading fully. This in turn was triggering a reboot, presumably because some sort of watchdog routine was in place to bail out if any critical hardware issues were detected.

On the Hunt

Coming from the “normal” Linux world, the solution seemed easy enough. Since the screen was toast anyway, all I needed to do to get the Kindle booting was to prevent the kernel module from loading. That way I could at least use it for something, perhaps an energy efficient minimalist server.

But according to the MAX77696 datasheet, the chip was responsible for quite a bit more than simply driving the e-ink panel. If I pulled the kernel module entirely, there was a good chance I’d also lose features like the real-time clock and the ability to read the battery voltage as well. So I decided to change tactics: rather than keeping the driver from loading, I’d take out the watchdog that was forcing the system to reboot. But where was it?

Amazon makes it easy to manually download the latest firmware for each member of the Kindle family, and the aptly named KindleTool lets you manipulate them. In this case I used the extract function to pull out the root filesystem image, which I could then locally mount as a basic EXT3 volume.

That was refreshingly straightforward, but unfortunately didn’t get me where I needed to go. Using grep to search all the files within the filesystem for the string “failed to load eink driver” showed no hits. If the watchdog wasn’t in the root filesystem, then where was it?

Unpacking the firmware update with KindleTool also got me the kernel image, and running Binwalk against it showed there was a compressed filesystem at 0x466C. I reasoned this must be an initramfs — essentially a minimal Linux system that lives in RAM and gives the kernel a place to work as it brings up the rest of the system. If the system has some self-check capability, it’s reasonable to assume that’s where it lives.

After drilling down a few times with Binwalk’s extract function, I was able to get to the contents of the initramfs. Sure enough, another search for the error message revealed our sentinel: /bin/recovery-util.

New Kernel, Who Dis?

I had considered trying to simply remove the recovery-util program from the kernel image, but since I wasn’t 100% sure how the whole watchdog system functioned, there was no guarantee that would have worked without more trial and error. So, emboldened by how well this was all going for me so far, I took the nuclear option and decided to rebuild the kernel with my own initramfs.

It’s here that the Kindle software environment, and the community around it, really started to shine. Once again, Amazon made it ridiculously easy to get the source code for the exact firmware I was working with, and the community provided an actively maintained toolchain to build it with. A little more searching even pulled up some pre-compiled builds that were ready to use.

Actually building the kernel for the Kindle was essentially the same process as doing it on my desktop computer, with the notable addition of supplying the location of the cross compiler into each make command. But if I ever got off track, there were plenty of write-ups online to reference. I even found one that went over building a custom initramfs with BusyBox that doesn’t include any of Amazon’s programs.

But perhaps the best part was that, once I had compiled Amazon’s modified kernel and built my initramfs, installing it on the Kindle was as simple as using a modified version of Android’s fastboot command. There were no cryptographic hoops to jump through, you just give it the new kernel and away it went. It’s my understanding that newer Kindles might not be so understanding, but with at least the hardware of this vintage, there’s nothing stopping you from doing whatever you want.

Pocket Penguin Playground

With the source code, tools, and knowledge floating around out there, I was able to build my own kernel and initramfs that lets me boot into a full Linux environment on what was previously a non-functional Kindle. There are a few things I haven’t gotten to work yet, but I believe that’s largely because I’m still using the root filesystem provided by Amazon.

Now that I know how easy it is to work with Linux on the Kindle, I’m looking to push further and put together my own stripped-down environment without any of Amazon’s frameworks installed. Given how ridiculously cheap early Kindles are on the second hand market — especially if they have a busted screen — there are all sorts of tasks that I could see them performing if I had a solid base to build on.

Make no mistake, I’m greatly appreciative of the fact that we now have mature single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi available for a reasonable cost. But taking what’s essentially consumer e-waste and turning it into a useful platform for learning and experimentation is the true hacker way. So whether you’ve got a Kindle collecting dust somewhere at home, or end up grabbing a few off of eBay for a song, I invite you to bust out the USB-serial adapter and start exploring.

Il lavoro da remoto ha dato libertà ai dipendenti, ma con essa è arrivata anche la sorveglianza digitale.

Ne abbiamo parlato qualche tempo fa in un articolo riportando che tali strumenti di monitoraggio stanno arrivando anche all’interno di Microsoft teams. Pertanto, al posto dello sguardo fisso del capo, questo ruolo verrà sempre più svolto dagli “algoritmi” che monitoreranno per quanto tempo le applicazioni rimangono aperte, quali siti web vengono visitati e con quanta attività viene mosso il mouse e premuto i tasti.

Sistemi avanzati analizzano persino le espressioni facciali e il modo in cui i dipendenti camminano davanti a una webcam. Ma questi strumenti sottolineando al tempo stesso i limiti intrinseci della raccolta di dati personali.

Tuttavia, per molti lavoratori, tale monitoraggio non è visto come una preoccupazione, ma come una sfiducia e una violazione della privacy. Sondaggi e dati dell’American Psychological Association collegano la sorveglianza costante a un aumento dello stress, a un peggioramento del benessere psico-emotivo e al desiderio di lasciare il lavoro.

La necessità di trasmettere immagini da webcam o informazioni mediche sensibili è particolarmente pressante. Le persone chiedono spiegazioni chiare sul motivo per cui i dati vengono raccolti e con chi possono essere condivisi.

Lo sguardo gelido degli algoritmi non è meno pericoloso. I programmi mancano di contesto e scambiano facilmente telefonate o documenti per inattività. Questo porta i dipendenti a fingere un’attività frenetica per il bene degli indicatori di performance, e gli esperti del National Employment Law Project degli Stati Uniti hanno documentato casi di sanzioni ingiustificate e difficili da contestare quando la decisione viene effettivamente presa dal sistema.

Nei magazzini e nella logistica, dove ogni movimento è digitalizzato, la pressione è particolarmente intensa: la fretta di rispettare gli standard si traduce in dolore fisico, affaticamento e burnout. Secondo NELP, la sorveglianza digitale ha anche un impatto sui diritti dei lavoratori, ostacolando l’organizzazione dei lavoratori e fornendo alle aziende uno strumento per la rilevazione precoce dell’attività sindacale, con il pretesto di analizzare altri parametri.

Le regole del gioco stanno cambiando lentamente. Negli Stati Uniti, i datori di lavoro sono tenuti a fornire un avviso sulla raccolta dei dati, ma questi requisiti sono limitati, quindi gli stati stanno cercando di introdurre misure di salvaguardia proprie. La California sta discutendo di vietare i sistemi che riconoscono emozioni, andatura o espressioni facciali e trasmettono dati a terzi.

Nel frattempo, il Massachusetts sta promuovendo una legislazione che proteggerebbe i lavoratori dall’abuso della sorveglianza digitale. Nel frattempo, le autorità federali stanno cercando un approccio unificato alla regolamentazione dell’intelligenza artificiale, il che potrebbe indebolire le iniziative locali. Pertanto, l’interesse per la contrattazione collettiva come mezzo valido per combattere la sorveglianza eccessiva sta crescendo.

I sostenitori di un approccio più cauto insistono sul fatto che tali strumenti siano significativi solo quando aiutano a identificare le tendenze generali e a migliorare i processi, piuttosto che trasformare le persone in parametri. Dove rispetto, autonomia e condizioni di lavoro sicure permangono, la produttività emerge in modo naturale, senza una telecamera onnipresente che controlla ogni mossa.

L'articolo La Sorveglianza Digitale sui Lavoratori sta Arrivando: Muovi il Mouse più Veloce! proviene da Red Hot Cyber.

Partono le prenotazioni della campagna “Arance di natale arance per la vita” 2025. C’e’ tempo fino al 3 dicembre!

La finalita’ e’ la ripresa dei lavori per il completamento dell’ospedale di Duhla, lavori che attualmente sono fermi per mancanza di fondi.
IBAN dell’Associazione Verso il Kurdistan: IT17 Q030 6909 6061 0000 0111 185 Causale: Campagna arance 2025

Prenotazioni entro il 3 dicembre.

Per info: Antonio 335 7564743 – Lucia 333 5627137

Per chi volesse dare un contributo liberale, la causale è: contributo volontario.

Associazione Verso il Kurdistan Odv

L'articolo Campagna “Arance di Natale, arance per la vita” proviene da Retekurdistan.it.