Can you teach an old typewriter new tricks? You can, at least if you’re [maniek-86]. And a word to all you typewriter fanatics out there — this Optima SP 26 was beyond repair, lacking several internal parts.

Image by [maniek-86] via redditBut the fully available keyboard was a great start for a gaming typewriter. So [maniek-86] crammed in some parts that were just laying around unused, starting with a micro-ATX motherboard.

But let’s talk about the keyboard. It has a standard matrix, which [maniek-86] hooked up to an Arduino Lenoardo. Although the keyboard has a Polish layout, [maniek-86] remapped it to English-US layout.

As you’ll see in the photos of the internals, this whole operation required careful Tetris-ing of the components to avoid overheating and ensure the cover could go back on.

The graphics were a bit of a challenge, since the motherboard had no PCI-E x16 slot. To address this, [maniek-86] used a riser cable, probably connected to a PCI-E x1 slot with an adapter, in order to use an NVIDIA GT 635 GPU. It can’t run AAA games at 4k, but you can bet that it’ll play Minecraft, Fortnite, or Dota 2 just fine.

Parkinson’s Keyboard Design Starts With the Human Body

This is OnCue, designed by [Alessandra Galli]. For Andrea, design is a “vehicle for care, inclusion, and meaningful social impact,” and these values are evident in her creation.

Image by [Alessandra Galli] via Design WantedWhat makes OnCue different? Lots of things. For one, there’s a pair of wearable cuffs which use haptic feedback and visual cues to help alleviate symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. The keycaps are like little trays for your fingers, so it’s much harder to accidentally hit neighboring keys while typing.

The keys themselves have haptic feedback as well as the cuffs. AI-driven visual cues light up the most likely next letters, which is interesting. And everybody deserves a split layout.

Although wrist-based haptic feedback was the most well-received feature based on user feedback, it’s interesting to note that no single feature stood out as preferred by all. Users found the haptic feedback calming and relaxing, which is a huge win compared to the usual keyboard experience faced by users with Parkinson’s disease. Because the overall Parkinson’s experience is different for everyone, [Alessandra] took a modular approach to designing the customization software. Users can adjust the settings based on routines, preferences, and intensity of symptoms. And plus it looks to me like there’s a haptic feedback slider right there on the keyboard.

The Centerfold: Bonsai? Banzai!

Image by [mugichanman] via redditAgain, isn’t this just nice? The overall look, of course. I wouldn’t be able to use that keyboard or probably that mouse, but maybe that keyboard hiding on the right would work.

Regarding the real bonsai on the right shelf, [mugichanman] keeps it outside for the most part. It only comes indoors for a little while — three days at the absolute most. If you’re interested in the care and feeding of these tiny trees, check out this bonsai master class in a book.

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 Columbia Index Typewriter

Remember the Caligraph? Probably not, so I’ll wait. Well, apparently inventor Charles Spiro was hellbent on building a better Caligraph after he saw one being used. But he couldn’t raise enough capital to create such a large machine, so instead he went down to the basement and came up with the Columbia Index Typewriter.
Image via The Antikey Chop
If you’ll recall, index typewriters are like label makers — you must choose each character using an index of some kind. Operating this machine was no different.

One simply turned the straight handle on the right side to choose the character, which was highlighted by a small hand. Then the user would just press down on the handle to print it, and this action locked the typewheel so it wouldn’t slip and print something different.

Interestingly, the Columbia was the first typewriter with proportional spacing. That means that the carriage advanced based on the width of individual characters.

Columbia typewriters were only made for three years, from 1884-87. Three models were produced — Nos. 1 and 2, followed by an improved No. 2. The Columbia shown here is a No. 1, which typed in uppercase only. The 2 came out in March 1885 and could do upper and lowercase. The improved No. 2 was more robust and better mechanically, as well as being easier on the eyes. By 1887, Spiro was working on the Bar-Lock typewriter.

Finally, One-Handed Keyboard Does It Flat Out

The journey toward the keyboard you see here began with an email to [HTX Studio]. It came from a father who wanted to see his daughter be digitally independent again after an accident took the use of her right hand.

Image by [HTX Studio] via Yanko DesignHe asked the company to build a one-handed keyboard with a built-in trackball mouse, and even included a drawing of what he envisioned.

After several iterations, each tested by the daughter, the result is a compact, 61-key affair in a fanned-out arrangement for ease of use. Everything is within close reach, with special consideration given to the location of Space and Delete.

One of the early iterations had the user moving the entire keyboard around to mouse. While that’s definitely an interesting solution, I’m glad that everyone settled on the nicely exposed trackball with left and right click buttons above Space and Delete.

Another thing I’m happy about is that [HTX Studio] not only built 50 more of these in both left- and right-handed models and gave them away to people who need them, they went ahead and open-sourced it (Chinese, translated). Be sure to check out their fantastic video below.

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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/2025/06/17/keebin…

The Franck–Hertz experiment was a pioneering physics observation announced in 1914 which explained that energy came in “packets” which we call “quanta”, marking the beginning of quantum physics. Recently, [Markus Bindhammer] wrote in to let us know he had redone the experiment for himself.

In the original experiment a mercury vacuum tube was used, but in his recreation of the experiment [Markus] uses a cheaper argon tube. He still gets the result he is looking for though, which is quite remarkable. If you watch the video you will see the current readings clump around specific voltage levels. These voltage levels indicate that energy is quantized, which was a revolutionary idea at the time. If you’re interested in how contemporary physics regards, particles, waves, and quanta, check out this excellent presentation: But What Actually Is a Particle? How Quantum Fields Shape Reality.

Before closing we have to say that the quality of [Markus]’s build was exceptional. He made a permanent enclosure for his power supplies, made custom PCBs, used ferrule crimps for all his wire interconnects, included multiple power switches and dials, professionally labeled and insulated everything, and even went to the trouble of painting the box! Truly a first class build. One thing that surprised us though was his use of rivets where we would almost certainly have used bolts or screws… talk about confidence in your workmanship!

If you’re interested in quantum physics it is certainly a topic we have covered here at Hackaday. Check out Quantum Mechanics And Negative Time With Photon-Atom Interactions or Shedding Light On Quantum Measurement With Calcite.

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hackaday.com/2025/06/17/a-diy-…

Siccome qui nel Fediverso siete un po' tutti matti con queste storie di diritti umani, ambiente, ecc. ecc. ( 😀 ) mi permetto di raccontarvi del mio telefono, nel caso vi interessasse.

E' un telefono fatto da un'azienda olandese, la #Fairphone appunto, con in testa l'idea della sostenibilità, sia a livello sociale che ambientale.

E' un telefono assemblato da persone che ricevono uno stipendio dignitoso, che lavorano in ditte che garantiscono diritti sindacali, non vengono coinvolti bambini, i materiali provengono da produttori che si impegnano per la sostenibilità ambientale delle loro attività, c'è molto materiale riciclato e infine è progettato in maniera modulare, in modo da poter essere riparabile e finire più tardi possibile in una discarica (si rompe la fotocamera? Vai sul sito ti compri il pezzo di ricambio, apri il telefono, togli la fotocamera vecchia e monti la nuova)

Ora... io non vi consiglio assolutamente di comprarlo, è un telefono "difficile" (nel senso che è fatto da una piccola azienda che non ha le possibilità di giganti come Samsung o Apple), costa un botto (a parità di prestazione da Mediaworld ne trovate che costano la metà ma del resto se vuoi pagare degli stipendi dignitosi ai lavoratori da qualche parte quei soldi dovranno venire fuori...), l'affidabilità non è proprio delle migliori (ma negli anni è aumentata molto) e se avete un problema il supporto tecnico vi risponde con due settimane di ritardo (però esiste una community dove si trova gente parecchio preparata e disponibile).

Detto questo, se siete di quei "woke" che mettono i diritti umani e l'ambiente davanti a tante altre cose forse questo telefono (che, ripeto, io vi sconsiglio di comprare) potrebbe interessarvi.

C'è anche una versione "de-googlizzata" che usa /e/OS.

Ha 5 anni di garanzia.

Se decideste di comprarlo poi non venite a dirmi che è colpa mia, io vi ho solo detto che esiste, non vi ho detto di comprarlo.

Fate circolare un po' il messaggio, magari a qualcuno dei vostri contatti interessa.

fairphone.com/

We are Fairphone

We make technology with a purpose—designed to last longer, perform better, and make a real impact. And we’ve been at it for more than a decade.

^Fairphone

We will be in Harvard Square at 6pm today, June 17th, to map surveillance cameras. Meet us at Cambridge Kiosk (former Out of Town News).

On Saturday, June 21st, we will be at the Boxborough Fifers Day. Tell us if you will help us at the table.

masspirates.org/blog/2025/06/1…

Considered by many to be just a dull output for sequential text, the command-line terminal is a veritable canvas to the creative software developer. With the cursor as the brush, entire graphical user interfaces can be constructed, or even a basic text-based dashboard on which values can be updated without redrawing the entire screen over and over, or opting for a much heavier solution like a GUI.

Ncurses is one of the most well-known and rather portable Terminal User Interface (TUI) libraries using that such cursor control, and more, can be achieved in a fairly painless manner. That said, for anyone coming from a graphical user interface framework, the concepts and terminology with ncurses and similar can be confusingly different yet overlapping, so that getting started can be somewhat harrowing.

In this article we’ll take a look at ncurses’ history, how to set it up and how to use it with C and C++, and many more languages supported via bindings.

Tools And Curses

The acronym TUI is actually a so-called retronym, as TUIs were simply the way of life before the advent of bitmapped, videocard-accelerated graphics. In order to enable more than just basic, sequential character output, the terminal had to support commands that would move the cursor around the screen, along with commands that affect the way text is displayed. This basic sequence of moving the cursor and updating active attributes is what underlies TUIs, with the system’s supported character sets determining the scope of displayed characters.

Ncurses, short for “new curses“, is an evolution of the curses library by Ken Arnold as originally released in 1978 for BSD UNIX, where it saw use with a number of games like Rogue. Originally it was a freely distributable clone of System V Release 4.0 (SVr4) curses by the time of its release in 1993, based on the existing pcurses package. Later, ncurses adopted a range of new features over the course of its subsequent development by multiple authors that distinguished it from curses, and would result in it becoming the new de-facto default across a wide range of platforms.

The current version is maintained by Thomas Dickey, and the ncurses library and development files are readily available from your local package manager, or downloadable from the ncurses website. Compiling and running ncurses-based application is straightforward on Linux, BSD, and MacOS courtesy of the libncurses and related files being readily available and often already installed. On Windows you can use the MinGW port, with MSYS2 providing an appropriate terminal emulator, as well as the pacman package manager and access to the same ncurses functionality as on the other platforms.

Hello Curses

The core ncurses functionality can be accessed after including the ncurses.h header. There are two standard extensions in the panel.h and menu.h headers for panel stack management and menus, respectively. Panels are effectively wrappers around an ncurses window that automate a lot of the tedious juggling of multiple potentially overlapping windows. The menu extension is basically what it says on the tin, and makes creating and using menus easier.

For a ‘hello world’ ncurses application we’d write the following:

This application initializes ncurses before writing the Hello World! string to both the top left, at (2, 2) and the center of the terminal window, with the terminal window size being determined dynamically with getmaxyx(). The mvprintw() and mvwprintw() work like printf(), with both taking the coordinates to move the cursor to the indicated position in row (y), column (x) order. The extra ‘w’ after ‘mv’ in the function name indicates that it targets a specific window, which here is stdscr, but could be a custom window. Do note that nurses works with y/x instead of the customary x/y order.

Next, we use attributes in this example to add some color. We initialize a pair, on index 1, using predefined colors and enable this attribute with attron() and the COLOR_PAIR macro before printing the text. Attributes can also be used to render text as bold, italic, blinking, dimmed, reversed and many more styles.

Finally, we turn the color attribute back off and wait for a keypress with getch() before cleaning up with endwin(). This code is also available along with a Makefile to build it in this GitHub repository as hello_ncurses.cpp. Note that on Windows (MSYS2) the include path for the ncurses header is different, and you have to compile with the -DNCURSES_STATIC define to be able to link.

Here the background, known as the standard screen (stdscr) is used to write to, but we can also segment this surface into windows, which are effectively overlays on top of this background.

Multi-Window Application

The Usagi Electric 1 (UE1) emulator with ncurses front-end.
There’s more to an ncurses application than just showing pretty text on the screen. There is also handling keyboard input and continuously updating on-screen values. These features are demonstrated in e.g. the emulator which I wrote recently for David Lovett’s Usagi Electric 1 (UE1) vacuum tube-based 1-bit computer. This was my first ever ncurses project, and rather educational as a result.

Using David’s QuickBasic-based version as the basis, I wrote a C++ port that differs from the QB version in that there’s no single large loop, but rather a separate CPU (processor.cpp) thread that processes the instructions, while the front-end (ue1_emu.cpp) contains the user input processing loop as well as the ncurses-specific functionality. This helps to keep the processor core’s code as generic as possible. Handling command line flags and arguments is taken care of by another project of mine: Sarge.

This UE1 front-end creates two ncurses windows with a specific size, draws a box using the default characters and refreshes the windows to make them appear. The default text is drawn with a slight offset into the window area, except for the ‘title’ on the border, which is simply text printed with leading and trailing spaces with a column offset but on row zero.

Handling user input with getch() wouldn’t work here, as that function is specific to stdscr and would foreground that ‘window’. Ergo we need to use the following: int key = wgetch(desc). This keeps the ‘desc’ window in focus and obtains the key input from there.

During each CPU cycle the update_display() function is called, in which successive mvwprintw() calls are made to update on-screen values, making sure to blank out previous data to prevent ghosting, with [url=https://linux.die.net/man/3/clrtoeol]clrtoeol()[/url] and kin as the nuclear option. The only use of attributes is with color and bold around the processor state, indicating a running state in bold green and halted with bold red.

Finally, an interesting and crucial part of ncurses is the beep() function, which does what it says on the tin. For UE1 it’s used to indicate success by ringing the bell of the system (inspired by the Bendix G-15), which here provides a more subtle beep but can be used to e.g. indicate a successful test run. There’s also the flash() function that unsurprisingly flashes the terminal to get the operator’s attention.

A Much Deeper Rabbit Hole

By the time that you find yourself writing an ncurses-based application on the level of, say, Vim, you will need a bit more help just keeping track of all the separate windows that you will be creating. This is where the Panel library comes into play, which are basically wrappers for windows that automate a lot of the tedious stuff such as refreshing windows and keeping track of the window stack.

Applications also love to have menus, which can either be painstakingly created and managed using core ncurses features, or simplified with the Menu library. For everyone’s favorite data-entry widget, there is the Forms library, which provides not only the widgets, but also provides field validation features. If none of this is enough for your purposes, then there’s the Curses Development Kit (CDK). For less intensive purposes, such as just popping up a dialog from a shell script, there is the dialog utility that comes standard on Linux and many other platforms and provides easy access to ncurses functionality with very little fuss.

All of which serves to state that the ground covered in this article merely scratches the surface, even if it should be enough to get one at least part-way down the ncurses rabbit hole and hopefully appreciative of the usefulness of TUIs even in today’s bitmapped GUI world.

Header image: ncurses-tetris by [Won Yong Jang].

hackaday.com/2025/06/17/a-gent…

L’udienza si svolgerà il prossimo 8 luglio

“Libera”, 55enne completamente immobile, toscana, non riesce ad assumere il farmaco letale per il “suicidio assistito” e chiede che sia il medico a somministrarglielo. Il tribunale solleva la questione di legittimità costituzionale sull’articolo 579 del codice penale che vieta l’omicidio del consenziente e quindi l’eutanasia

“Libera” (nome di fantasia, da lei scelto, a tutela della privacy) è una donna toscana di 55 anni, affetta da sclerosi multipla progressiva, completamente paralizzata e mantenuta in vita da trattamenti di sostegno vitale. Possiede tutti i requisiti per l’accesso al suicidio medicalmente assistito stabiliti dalla Corte costituzionale nella sentenza n. 242/2019, però non è fisicamente in grado di assumere autonomamente il farmaco letale: è completamente paralizzata dal collo in giù, ha difficoltà nel deglutire e dipende dai suoi caregiver per tutte le attività quotidiane. Ha rifiutato la sedazione profonda perché vuole essere lucida e cosciente fino alla fine. Per questo, assistita dai suoi legali, coordinati da Filomena Gallo, segretaria nazionale dell’Associazione Luca Coscioni, ha presentato un ricorso d’urgenza al tribunale di Firenze, con cui chiede che il suo medico di fiducia possa somministrarle il farmaco.

Il tribunale di Firenze, il 30 aprile 2025, ha sollevato la questione di legittimità costituzionale sull’articolo 579 del codice penale (omicidio del consenziente). L’udienza pubblica in Corte costituzionale si terrà il prossimo 8 luglio.

L’articolo 579 del codice penale, infatti, punisce con la reclusione fino a 15 anni “chiunque cagiona la morte di un uomo”, senza ammettere eccezione alcuna, a differenza dell’attuale formulazione dell’articolo 580 che depenalizza l’aiuto al suicidio per persone nelle condizioni di “Libera”.

Dichiara l’avvocata Filomena Gallo, Segretaria dell’Associazione Luca Coscioni e legale di “Libera” con un ampio collegio di studio e difesa, composto anche dal professor Giacomo D’Amico e gli avvocati Angioletto Calandrini, Francesca Re e Alessia Cicatelli: “‘Libera’ potrebbe procedere con l’aiuto al suicidio perché ha i requisiti previsti dalla sentenza Cappato, ma nella sua condizione non è più in grado di autosomministrarsi il farmaco e ha bisogno che sia un medico a farlo per lei. Motivo per cui per la nostra assistita abbiamo chiesto al giudice del tribunale di Firenze di autorizzare il suo medico a procedere con la somministrazione del farmaco che l’azienda sanitaria aveva ritenuto idoneo, e in subordine di sollevare l’incidente di costituzionalità sul reato di omicidio del consenziente previsto dal codice penale. Il giudice fiorentino ha sollevato la questione di legittimità costituzionale dell’articolo 579 del codice penale nella parte in cui non esclude la punibilità del medico che attua, con le modalità della legge 219/2017, articoli 1 e 2, la volontà suicidaria di un paziente nelle condizioni sopra descritte, sottolineando il possibile contrasto con gli articoli 2, 3, 13 e 32 della Costituzione italiana. ‘Libera’, che sta soffrendo a livelli insopportabili a causa della malattia e di ulteriori complicazioni, attende con urgenza l’intervento della Corte costituzionale, dove si svolgerà l’udienza pubblica il prossimo 8 luglio, per poter porre fine alle proprie sofferenze e chiede il rispetto della sua privacy e di quella della sua famiglia”.

Dichiara Marco Cappato, Tesoriere dell’Associazione Luca Coscioni: “l’ordinanza pone una questione decisiva per il rispetto del diritto all’autodeterminazione nel fine vita. La Corte costituzionale da 8 anni esorta il legislatore a intervenire nel rispetto della libertà di scelta della persona malata. La questione sollevata dal tribunale di Firenze è un’occasione importante per dare una risposta a “Libera” e a tutte le persone che sono e saranno nelle sue stesse condizioni”.

Se la Corte costituzionale, esattamente come ha fatto con l’articolo 580, dichiarasse incostituzionale il divieto assoluto di somministrazione di un farmaco letale da parte di un medico, anche quando la persona che lo richiede si trova nelle condizioni di malattia previste dalla sentenza n. 242/2019, molte persone malate, fisicamente impossibilitate all’autosomministrazione e oggi per questo discriminate, potrebbero accedere alla morte volontaria.

L'articolo Per la prima volta l’Eutanasia arriva in Corte costituzionale proviene da Associazione Luca Coscioni.

La Relazione Europea sulla Droga 2025: Tendenze e Sviluppi presenta l'ultima analisi dell'EUDA sulla situazione della droga in Europa. L’ #EUDA è l’Agenzia dell’Unione europea sulle droghe (European Union Drugs Agency). È un organismo dell’ #UE con sede a Lisbona, operativo dal 2 luglio 2024, che ha sostituito il precedente Osservatorio europeo delle droghe e delle tossicodipendenze.

Concentrandosi sul consumo di droghe illecite, sui danni correlati e sull'offerta di droga, la relazione fornisce una serie completa di dati nazionali su questi temi, nonché sui trattamenti specialistici per la tossicodipendenza e sui principali interventi di riduzione del danno.

Il report fornisce una panoramica aggiornata sulla situazione delle droghe in Europa fino alla fine del 2024, evidenziando tendenze e sviluppi rilevanti per le politiche e gli operatori del settore.

Offerta, produzione e precursori
La disponibilità di droghe illecite rimane elevata per tutte le sostanze. I dati del 2023 mostrano tendenze stabili nei sequestri e nei reati legati alla droga, con una produzione significativa e sequestri di precursori chimici.

Cannabis
È la droga illecita più consumata in Europa. I dati includono prevalenza d’uso, richieste di trattamento, sequestri, prezzo, purezza e danni associati.

Cocaina
Seconda droga più usata dopo la cannabis, con variazioni significative tra i paesi. Il report analizza uso, trattamento, sequestri, prezzo, purezza e danni.

Stimolanti sintetici
Comprendono amfetamina, metamfetamina e catinoni sintetici. L’analisi copre uso, trattamento, sequestri, prezzo, purezza e impatti sulla salute.

MDMA
Associata principalmente al contesto ricreativo e notturno. Il report esamina uso, sequestri, prezzo e purezza.

Eroina e altri oppioidi
L’eroina è l’oppioide illecito più usato e causa un notevole carico sanitario. La situazione evolve, influenzando le strategie di intervento.

Nuove sostanze psicoattive
Il mercato è dinamico, con nuove sostanze rilevate ogni anno. Include cannabinoidi sintetici, catinoni, oppioidi sintetici e nitazeni.

Altre droghe
LSD, funghi allucinogeni, ketamina, GHB e protossido di azoto sono usati in Europa. Il report analizza uso, sequestri, trattamento e danni.

Uso di droghe per via iniettiva
In calo negli ultimi dieci anni, ma ancora associato a gravi danni sanitari. Include dati su prevalenza e analisi dei residui nelle siringhe.

Malattie infettive correlate
Chi si inietta droghe è a rischio di infezioni come HIV ed epatiti B e C. Il report fornisce dati aggiornati su queste infezioni.

Morti indotte da droghe
Fondamentale per valutare l’impatto sulla salute pubblica. Include dati su overdose e sostanze coinvolte.

Trattamento con agonisti degli oppioidi
È il trattamento specialistico più comune per gli utenti di oppioidi. Il report analizza copertura, accesso e percorsi terapeutici.

Riduzione del danno
Comprende interventi per ridurre i danni sanitari, sociali ed economici. Include programmi con naloxone, stanze del consumo e trattamenti sostitutivi.

La pubblicazione è scaricabile qui edr-2025-full-book-6.06.2025-en.pdf

@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo