Last October we showed you a video from [LiamTronix], in which he applied an electric conversion to a 1960s Massey-Ferguson 65 which had seen better days. It certainly seemed ready for light work around the farm, but it’s only now that we get his video showing the machine at work. This thing really can farm!

An MF 65 wasn’t the smallest of 1960s tractors, but by today’s standards it’s not a machine you would expect to see working a thousand acres of wheat. Instead it’s a typical size for a smaller operation, perhaps a mixed farm, a small livestock farm, or in this case a horticulture operation growing pumpkins. In these farms the tractor doesn’t often trail up and down a field for hours, instead it’s used for individual smaller tasks where its carrying or lifting capacity is needed, or for smaller implements. It’s in these applications that we see the electric 65 being tested, as well as some harder work such as hauling a trailer load of bales, or even harrowing a field.

In one sense the video isn’t a hack in itself, for that you need to look at the original build. But it’s important to see how a hack turned out in practice, and this relatively straightforward conversion with a DC motor has we think proven itself to be more than capable of small farm tasks. Its only flaw in the video is a 30 minute running time, something he says he’ll be working on by giving it a larger battery pack. We’d use it on the Hackaday ancestral acres, any time!

The video is below the break.

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hackaday.com/2025/01/23/an-ele…

QR codes are designed with alignment and scaling features, not to mention checksums and significant redundancy. They have to be, because you’re taking photos of them with your potato-camera while moving, in the dark, and it’s on a curved sticker on a phone pole. So it came as a complete surprise to us that [Christian Walther] succeeded in making an ambiguous QR code.

Nerd-sniped by [Guy Dupont], who made them using those lenticular lens overlays, [Christian] made a QR code that resolves to two websites depending on the angle at which it’s viewed. The trick is to identify the cells that are different between the two URLs, for instance, and split them in half vertically and horizontally: making them into a tiny checkerboard. It appears that some QR decoders sample in the center of each target square, and the center will be in one side or the other depending on the tilt of the QR code.

Figuring out the minimal-difference QR code encoding between two arbitrary URLs would make a neat programming exercise. How long before we see these in popular use, like back in the old days when embedding images was fresh? QR codes are fun!

Whether it works is probably phone- and/or algorithm-dependent, so try this out, and let us know in the comments if they work for you.

Thanks [Lacey] for the tip!

hackaday.com/2025/01/23/this-q…

With ready availability of single board computers, displays, keyboards, power packs, and other hardware, a home-made laptop is now a project within most people’s reach. Some laptop projects definitely veer towards being cyberdecks while others take a more conventional path, but we’ve rarely seen one as professional looking as [Byran Huang]’s anyon_e open source laptop. It really takes the art to the next level.

The quality is immediately apparent in the custom CNC-machined anodised aluminium case, and upon opening it up the curious user could be forgiven for thinking they had a stylish commercial machine in their hands. There’s a slimline mechanical keyboard and a glass trackpad, and that display is an OLED. In fact the whole thing had been built from scratch, and inside is an RK3588 SoC on a module sitting on a custom-designed motherboard. It required some effort for it to drive the display, a process we’ve seen cause pain to other designers, but otherwise it runs Debian. The batteries are slimline pouch cells, with a custom controller board driven by an ESP32.

This must have cost quite a bit to build, but it’s something anyone can have a go at for themselves as everything is in a GitHub repository. Purists might ask for open source silicon at its heart to make it truly open source, but considering what he’s done we’ll take this. It’s not the first high quality laptop project we’ve seen by any means, but it may be the first that wouldn’t raise any eyebrows in the boardroom. Take a look at the video below the break.

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byran.ee/posts/creation/

hackaday.com/2025/01/23/this-h…

If hacking on consumer hardware is about figuring out what it can do, and pushing it in directions that the manufacturer never dared to dream, then this is a very fine hack indeed. [Portasynthica3] takes on the Yamaha PSR-E433, a cheap beginner keyboard, discovers a shell baked into it, and takes it from there.

[Portasynthinca3] reverse engineered the firmware, wrote shellcode for the device, embedded the escape in a MIDI note stream, and even ended up writing some simple LCD driver software totally decent refresh rate on the dot-matrix display, all to support the lofty goal of displaying arbitrary graphics on the keyboard’s dot-matrix character display.

Now, we want you to be prepared for a low-res video extravaganza here. You might have to squint a bit to make out what’s going on in the video, but keep in mind that it’s being sent over a music data protocol from the 1980s, running at 31.25 kbps, displayed in the custom character RAM of an LCD.

As always, the hack starts with research. Identifying the microcontroller CPU lead to JTAG and OpenOCD. (We love the technique of looking at the draw on a bench power meter to determine if the chip is responding to pause commands.) Dumping the code and tossing it into Ghidra lead to the unexpected discovery that Yamaha had put a live shell in the device that communicates over MIDI, presumably for testing and development purposes. This shell had PEEK and POKE, which meant that OpenOCD could go sit back on the shelf. Poking “Hello World” into some free RAM space over MIDI sysex was the first proof-of-concept.

The final hack to get video up and running was to dig deep into the custom character-generation RAM, write some code to disable the normal character display, and then fool the CPU into calling this code instead of the shell, in order to increase the update rate. All of this for a thin slice of Bad Apple over MIDI, but more importantly, for the glory. And this hack is glorious! Go check it out in full.

MIDI is entirely hacker friendly, and it’s likely you can hack together a musical controller that would wow your audience just with stuff in your junk box. If you’re at all into music, and you’ve never built your own MIDI devices, you have your weekend project.

youtube.com/embed/u6sukVMijBg?…

Thanks [James] for the gonzo tip!

hackaday.com/2025/01/23/shellc…

THIS IS ANOTHER BONUS EDITION of Digital Politics. I'm Mark Scott, and I've been scratching my head about the United Kingdom's stance on tech — ever since the new government, under the Labour Party's Keir Starmer, took over in July, 2024.

I'll be unpacking that and a whole bunch more on Jan 30 when Ben Whitelaw (from the Everything in Moderation newsletter), Georgia Iacovou (and her Horrific/Terrific newsletter) and I host a discussion/drinks in central London.

If that sounds like your cup of tea (see what I did there?), please RSVP here.

What's clear is that London is taking a 'cake and eat it' approach to everything from platform governance to artificial intelligence oversight. That's not a strategy that will stand the country in good stead in the years to come.

Click here for my take on France and here for my views on Germany. I'll be in Washington in March, so expect another postcard from the Beltway then.

Let's get started:

What does the UK government want from tech?

EVEN THOUGH I LIVE IN LONDON, I feel like an outsider when it comes to UK tech policy. In truth, much of what has happened in the country — from its Online Safety Actto its Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act to its attempt to rewrite the UK's General Data Protection Regulation — has been overshadowed by developments in both the European Union and the United States. That's no shade on what London wants to do on tech. It's just the realpolitik for a country no longer viewed as part of the top geopolitical tier.

The new(ish) Labour government has now been in power for seven months. Its priorities, above all, are to turn around a sluggish domestic economy to meet local politicians' pledge to make it the fastest growing of any G7 country. A stuttering national health service – still on its knees in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic — and an increasingly polarized electorate — spurred on, to a degree, by Elon Musk — have captured much of Westminster's attention. In short, tech, and tech policy, has barely resonated.

That's starting to change. Earlier this month, the UK government unveiled an "AI Opportunities Action Plan" aimed at harnessing the emerging technology to bolster the country's economy and well-being. That included plans to double down on domestic technical infrastructure; open up public datasets for commercial use (cue: heckles about data protection abuses); and train a new generation of scientists to commercialize these new-founded "AI opportunities."

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I read these statements and couldn't help but ask: what is the UK trying to achieve? I've covered global tech policy for more than a decade, and I have always viewed the country's approach to digital very much similar to that of Israel. And that is, above all, to direct as much foreign direct investment into the local tech industry — still one of the largest globally, see charts below — as possible.

Questions around the need for further regulation, online safety provisions and digital competition safeguards often capture the public's (and politicians') imagination. But I've never understood what is the guiding principle for London when it comes to tackling these often complex and thorny issues. This goes beyond domestic partisan politics. I would say the same for the previous Conservative Party-led government as I would for the new Labour one.

In short: what is the UK trying to achieve when it comes to digital policymaking?

The UK remains Europe's largest tech player

Source: DealRoom

A country without a vision

On that question, I hold up my hands and say 'I don't know.' London has passed some of the most progressive digital rules across the West, especially when it comes to digital competition. But just as you think there's a groundswell of political buy-in to do something innovative and forward-looking, the UK government shifts gears in ways that undermine what it has already achieved.

Let's take the country's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), or local competition regulator. On Jan 14, the agency started an investigation into Google under new powers that allow it to give certain tech giants a so-called "strategic markets status designation." If a company is deemed to meet such a threshold (basically, confirming it holds a dominant position), then the CMA can subsequently develop a bespoke ex ante oversight regime — in this case, for Google — to ensure the search giant doesn't subsequently abuse its existing powers.

It's a middle ground between the EU's one-size-fits-all approach, under the bloc's Digital Markets Act, and the let-the-courts-decide strategy in the US. For me, it's a smart way to tackle a difficult policy area. If done well, it could position the UK as a global regulatory leader and incentivize other countries to follow suit.

But then, only days later, the agency announced it had appointed Doug Gurr, a former Amazon executive, as its interim chair with a mandate to "support growth for the UK." I don't know Gurr personally — he was previously the tech giant's UK country manager and one-time president of Amazon China. But his appointment came after Rachel Reeves, the UK's finance minister, or Chancellor, suggested Gurr's predecessor, Marcus Bokkerink, did not share "the strategic direction this government is taking."

Translation: the CMA's previous leadership was not signed up to boosting economic growth, above all. Time will now tell if a former Amazon executive is willing to use all the powers available to the agency, under the UK's new digital competition regime, to stop digital anticompetitive practices.

The list goes on. The country's newly-minted AI Safety Institute — the first of its kind, and aimed at providing quantifiable oversight to the most advanced foundation models — was met with great fanfare when it was announced during the UK's AI Safety Summit in 2023. With an initial multi-million dollar budget, the agency had great hopes of testing the latest wares of the likes of Google's Deepmind, OpenAI and others before they were released to the public.

Yet a mixture of limited actual powers (few AI companies signed up for oversight); a shifting political landscape (which moved from AI safety to AI innovation); and no clear legislative agenda to pass AI-related rules has left the UK's AI Safety Institute in a difficult position. It hired world-leading experts — and is still hiring now. But it's mostly beholden to its US namesake whose ability to bring the biggest American AI companies to the table is just not something its British counterpart has any power to do.

UK's Online Safety Act: what comes next

Source: Ofcom

What London should do on digital policy

WHEN I TALK TO OFFICIALS, POLITICIANS and others within the UK's tech policy scene, there remains a disconnect between the short-term policy objectives around the country's litany of new digital rules and the lack of a long-term strategy about what the actual point of these efforts are. There are a lot of well-meaning policymakers beavering away. But there's no political leadership to frame the UK's ambitions on tech.

My fear, given the shifting geopolitical winds and London's traditional willingness to bend to whatever Washington's agenda may be, is that the country's new generation of digital rules — borne out of a desire to offer greater online protections, akin to those of the EU, but with greater Anglo-Saxon flexibility — are sacrificed on the altar of transatlantic relations.

But here's the thing. There is a way forward. One that could potentially position the UK as a leader in practical — and replicable — digital regulation that marries a principles-based approach to greater oversight with regulatory certainty that boosts Britain's world-leading tech industry. It would allow the country to mirror what the EU is attempting, via its alphabet soup of new digital rules, but in a way that is more market-friendly and more flexible.

Dare I say it: it would be a potential opportunity to benefit from Brexit by forging a middle way that combines Europe-style online protections with American-style market economics.

So what would that look like? First, the Labour government should double down on existing digital rules as part of what the UK has to offer, both to its citizens and the wider world. The likes of the Online Safety Act and Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act could be gold-standards to be copied by other countries. To do that, they need to be implemented in a way that demonstrates benefits to both people and UK Inc.

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If done well, such rules could position the country as a "RegTech" superpower by demonstrating the benefits of what well-designed, principles-based online oversight can accomplish. That could include turning the country into a "sand box" to allow firms to test out their new digital services/products within a digital regulatory regime open to such innovation. To date, no one is offering that globally.

Second, the UK has what few in the world can boast of: a vibrant domestic tech sector — and not just an outsourced call center for US tech giants (sorry, Ireland!). Make use of it via greater public sector funding and commercial incentives for pension funds and other long-term investors to invest in homegrown companies. The country's financial services industry, including the FTSE100, also needs to do a better job at keeping these UK tech companies within the country, and not see them scamper off to the US whenever they want to go public.

Third, don't give up on digital rules. Regulation isn't there just for the sake of it. The UK has crafted some of the most innovative efforts to corral online abuses, even if such legislation developed without a meaningful long-term plan. British leaders shouldn't now give up on that, just because of shifting geopolitical winds. If greater online safety, privacy and competition protections were a worthwhile aim a few years ago, what has changed now to potentially roll back on that agenda? London, be confident in your approach to digital policymaking.

Alas, I don't see a game plan for any of this coming from the UK's Labour government. That is a shame. And not because I'm a cheerleader for the country where I live. But because a British alternative on tech policy — compared to those offered by the EU, US and China — makes others, elsewhere, up their game in the global crucible of ideas around platform governance, digital competition and artificial intelligence.

For now, London is missing a trick by failing to outline, clearly, what it wants to achieve on digital. That is a disservice, both to the UK and its allies worldwide.

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