IT'S MONDAY, AND THIS IS DIGITAL POLITICS. I'm Mark Scott, and will be in Brussels all next week for this conference (where I'll be moderating a panel on May 20 at 11:50 CET.) If you're around and want to grab coffee, ping me here.

— Countries want to build sovereign AI infrastructure. I crunched the numbers to see how much that would actually cost.

— Digital antitrust cases were supposed to rein in the power of dominant players. But when it comes to online advertising, market power is on the rise.

— Spending on government-focused AI systems will rise 35 percent this year to over $80 billion.

Let's get started:

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Although the term ‘dry ice’ is generally used for solid CO₂, it’s much more accurate to call this ‘dry snow’, as, rather than being actual solid blocks, they are effectively snow that’s been compressed really tightly. While not really necessary for most applications of dry ice, it is possible to make blocks of actual CO₂ ice, and thus [Hyperspace Pirate], as someone with a healthy obsession with cold things had to make some of his own.

As a first step, you, of course, have to chill down CO₂ in a container, for which Mr. [Pirate] used a Joule-Thomson cryocooler, with a 15% butane, 35% propane, and 50% ethylene gas mixture. Of course, as ethylene is only easy to get if you have a lot of money to spend, you will want to make it yourself from ethanol. This involves boiling and 400°C aluminum oxide to capture the produced ethylene.

With the CO₂ pressure chamber cooled in its refrigerated bath, the process didn’t take long. After opening the pressure chamber, the results were interesting to say the least. Although there was definite ice formation along the sides that contacted the metal chamber the closest, the closer to the center, the more the CO₂ resembled the usual fluffy, compressed dry ice.

This is encouraging as it shows that it’s definitely possible to make nice ice pucks or cubes, but the method needs further refinement to get more ice and less snow.

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We feature a lot of DIY portable computers — rehash the “is that a cyberdeck” in the comments to your heart’s content — but how many of them are explicitly girly? Certainly, none of the ones that come to mind oozed the distilled femme energy of [cc] AKA [bossbratox]’s project, playfully titled “Mermaid in the Shell”.

The build started with a frame clutch purse, which, given that it comes with nice hinges and latches, is really a brilliant starting point for a project case. The fact that you can find them shaped like pink seashells really seals the deal for this particular project. A ZitaoTech BB Q10 keyboard — in white, naturally — pairs with a 3.5″ touchscreen as the interface for a Raspberry Pi 3A+. You might be thinking, “great, another toy with an old Pi inside. What can you really do with a Pi3 in 2026?” Well, admittedly, for full-fat desktop Linux, the 3A+ is looking a bit long in the tooth and short in the RAM.

If you are willing to work within its constraints and not run a full Linux desktop, though, 512 MB is plenty of RAM to work with. [cc] has set up a custom terminal user interface (TUI) to give her everything she needs — wifi, bluetooth, a full terminal, a remote serial monitor, a local LLM chatbot, a PDF reader, a text editor, and, of course, a mermaid digital pet. That last one is user-skinnable, though, so if you want a terminal tamagotchi of your own, you can grab the code off GitHub and swap the spites for whatever you want.

Thanks to [cc] for the tip. Whether your next build is dripping the femme-ergy and kawaii as heck, or just utilitarian tacticool, please let us know in the tips line.

Remember, too, that an aesthetic doesn’t need to be skin-deep. We have some tips for good-looking PCBs here that are relevant because they now come in pink — as we saw with this wearable circuit sculpture.

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We notice there are a lot of hacks on YouTube lately, but we don’t share enough hacks about YouTube. That’s why [PortalRunner]’s latest oeuvre is interesting: it’s a video that gives you a different picture depending on the selected bitrate.

Watch it at 1080p, you get one thing; at 360p, the image is completely different. The hack relies on understanding precisely how YouTube cuts down videos — because if you haven’t uploaded a video there before, you might not know the creator doesn’t have to encode all of those options; they’re invited to upload in the highest possible definition, and YouTube reencodes the rest.

1080p and 720p films are shown at 60FPS, while 360p and below are 30FPS– so that’s one way to hide the difference. Since YouTube drops every second frame when encoding the lower-quality video, images you want in the HD version can be kept only in even-numbered frames that YouTube will remove. That seems easy enough, but how does [PortalRunner] avoid the low-quality image flickering in at 30 FPS when watching in higher definition?

Well, that relies on understanding exactly how downsampling works: going from 1080p to 360p means tossing out every third pixel in both the horizontal and vertical directions. If you’re careful, it turns out you can craft an image that vanishes when the 3×3 grid of pixels it’s made of at 1080p is averaged to a single background-colored pixel at 360p. [Portal Runner] is using vertical stripes here, but that’s not the only way to do it. Just to be sure the message came through loud and clear at 1080p, though, the original image, not the stripy one, is used on the odd-numbered, discarded frames.

Hiding the 1080p video is only half the battle: he needs to get those frames not to average specifically to the background color, but to make his new images. That’s a bit tricky, which is why the demonstration uses “1080p” and “lower” as its easter eggs: they fit well inside one another, with the characters lining up one-to-one. That’s without even getting into the hack he’s using with extra i-frames to create thumbnails on the timeline to tell you to ‘subscribe’. Look, it is YouTube, what else can you expect? We’re just glad to see a totally benign hack of the platform that’s holding so many hacks these days.

Of course, real hackers live on the command line, and you can play YouTube there, too.

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hackaday.com/2026/05/10/hacked…

For as many speakers as someone can cram into a surround sound system, humans still (generally) only have two ears to listen to those sounds with. This means that, for recording purposes, it’s possible to create incredibly vivid three-dimensional sounds with just two microphones, provided that there’s an actual physical replica of a human ear attached to each microphone. This helps ensure that all the qualities of the sounds are preserved in a way a real human would experience them, and as [David Green] demonstrates, these systems don’t need to be very expensive.

This build doesn’t just use models of human ears for recording sounds through. The silicone ears are mounted on a styrofoam mannequin head as well, which provides some sound isolation between the two microphones, much like a real human head. The ears are mounted in appropriate locations with the microphones installed inside, and the entire microphone apparatus is positioned on a PVC rig with a camera so that binaural audio will be recorded for anything [David] points it at.

Although he had some issues interfacing two microphones using 19th-century technology instead of soldering everything together, the build still eventually came together, and only for around $70 USD. However, this build is a bit dated now, so prices may have changed by now. It’s still a great way to produce realistic stereo sound without breaking the bank, but it’s not the only way of getting this job done.

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While Artemis II was primarily a demonstration flight of the architecture NASA plans to use for future lunar missions, it was also an excellent excuse for the crew to snap some photos of the Moon and Earth with the benefit of modern camera technology. If you’ve been looking forward to seeing more of the crew’s images, you’re in luck, as thousands of new images have recently been released.

Now we don’t mean to beat up on the folks at NASA, but browsing through these images, we couldn’t help but be reminded of an article we saw on PetaPixel that discussed the space agency’s haphazard approach to sharing images online.

It’s really more like an unsorted file dump than anything, made worse by the fact that you have to access it through a government website that looks and performs like it was designed in the early 2000s. There’s even a prominent button that attempts to load a gallery feature that relies on the long-deprecated Adobe Flash. It would be nice to see the situation improved by the time astronauts actually touch down on the lunar surface, but we wouldn’t count on it.

Speaking of old tech, we’ve been following the resurgence of keyboard-equipped smartphones with great interest, as we imagine many of you have been. A recent CNBC article addresses the trend, although it didn’t quite take the nerd contingent into account. We want physical keys so we can work in the terminal and write code without fighting an on-screen keyboard, but of course, that’s not exactly what your average consumer is looking for.

It’s quite the opposite, in fact. A 20-something user referenced in the article explained how the younger generations see the physical keyboard as a way to be less connected to their phones, describing it as “an extra barrier of inconvenience that adds more steps into the thinking process.” If you need us, we’ll be collecting dust in the corner.

As regular readers may know, we’ve also taken an interest in plug-in solar panels recently. So-called “solar balconies” have become quite popular in Europe, but regulatory friction in the United States has prevented them from achieving similar success here. An article in the MIT Technology Review talks about the process of bringing solar balconies to the US, and we’re not overly thrilled with some of the developments it highlights.

As the key hurdle appears to be safety, UL Solutions recommends that balcony solar panels be plugged into a specialized outlet. If putting a regular AC plug on the end of a solar panel can lead to potentially dangerous situations, they believe the solution is to require a different plug that no one could mistake for anything else, with built-in safety features to reduce the risk of electric shock.

That might not seem unreasonable at first, but it actually represents a pretty serious hurdle for many users. Consider that the whole advantage of these panels is the convenience: you can simply open the box, plug them in, and start collecting energy. But if you need to install a special outlet, potentially requiring an electrician, the whole concept falls apart. Expect to hear more from us on this particular subject as it develops.

Finally, Spirit Airline customers weren’t the only ones running into issues this week — a Southwest flight in California was delayed due to complications with a robotic passenger. The bot actually had a ticket, but the flight crew said it still violated the airline’s rules for large carry-on luggage and had to be moved to a different seat. Then somebody realized the robot’s relatively large lithium-ion battery was also in violation of carry-on limits, and it had to be removed and confiscated by authorities. Important details to keep in mind if you happen to be a robot planning your summer vacation.

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.

hackaday.com/2026/05/10/hackad…

The idea of using cardboard for a sloppy PC case isn’t new; it’s a time-honored tradition dating back to at least the 1990s. That said, with today’s CNC cutters and other advanced tooling available to hobbyists, you might be curious to see how far you can push the concept. As demonstrated in a recent video by [mryeester], the answer appears to be that good planning and a solid understanding of cardboard’s limitations are as essential as ever.

After having the PC case drawn up in CAD and cut on a professional CNC cutter by a buddy who makes commercial cardboard displays, the installation procedure for the PC components showed where a bit of foresight could have saved a lot of time and effort.

The first problem was that the GPU couldn’t be installed due to wrong measurements on where the IO bracket normally is screwed into the case. Some cardboard cutting later, the GPU slid into place, but of course, there’s no way to screw it down, putting the full weight on the PCIe slot of the mainboard. Fortunately, the mainboard was quite literally bolted into place, and the case consists of multiple layers of corrugated cardboard to add some rigidity.

Next was more carving as the PSU cut-out was designed for an SFX PSU, not an ATX one. After that ordeal, one could say that perhaps a nice thing about a cardboard case is that you get to pick where buttons are located, though this comes with its own logistical issues.

Finally, mounting side panels turned into another chore, with perhaps some engineering possible to make it work better. For example, we recently looked at making cardboard hinges that would look pretty good on a cardboard PC case. You can also waterproof cardboard and make it much stronger, turning a throwaway, temporary cardboard solution into something that will last for years, even with occasional exposure to moisture and a water-cooling leak.

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For the last few years, the must-have feature that companies are competing to show off on their filament deposition 3D printers is multi-material printing. Be it tool swapping or a material-changing system, everyone wants to show they can give you the capability to make multicoloured plastic tchotchkes. So far, that hasn’t really been the case in the world of at-home resin printing — until now. A company called Polysynth, headed by a fellow named [Eric], hopes you’ll pay a premium for the ability to make multimaterial resin prints, and they show some interesting use cases in the video below.

The technique is simple: instead of one resin tank underneath the dipping build plate, [Eric]’s Polysynth printer has a carousel of up to eight small circular tanks. To avoid cross-contamination from uncured resin, the print needs to be cleansed between alternating dips in the different resin vats. Rather than add a wash vat and slow the process down that way, [Eric] and his team decided to use centrifugal force: they just spin the print really, really fast to fling all the uncured resin to the sides of the vat. Yes, really.

The hard part isn’t the resin-removing spin cycle — the hard part is stopping the spin at the precise orientation the part started at, to within a few microns. For that, he’s using a sort of kinematic linkage to lock the spinning portion back into place using a servo. It seems to work, based on the demonstration in the video embedded below. Even better, [Eric] shows off a resin conductive enough to use for fully printed, multilayer PCBs. We doubt SLS will ever compete with traditional fabs on volume, but for fast turnaround without waiting on parts from China, the conductive resins could open up some killer apps for this kind of printer. That and dental: printing gums and teeth of dentures in one solid go is likely to appeal to users in that space.

What do you think? Tipster [Aaron Tagliaboschi] was interested enough to send in the video, and we’re grateful that he did. It’s early days yet, and you cannot buy one of these machines just yet. Since it’s a commercial product, you’ll be starting from scratch if you want to build your own.

It wasn’t that long ago that the only way to get a home resin printer was to build it yourself, and it’s still an option that might save some coin. If you go that route, why not try spinning? We hear that’s a good trick, so let us know if you try it.

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hackaday.com/2026/05/10/multim…

Car airbags are both a very simple concept and a marvel of engineering, replacing the bone-shattering impact of unforgiving plastic and steel with a relatively soft landing in a funky-smelling air cushion. This deceptively simple concept requires that the gas generator activates only when there is a crash and finishes filling the airbag in the milliseconds before the squishy human’s cranium with its soft filling attempts to occupy the same space as said airbag. This makes mad Aussie bloke [Turnah81]’s attempt at DIY-ing a car airbag a most daring proposition.

Rather than messing about with an IMU and microprocessors, he went low-tech with an inertial fuel cut-off switch. These are mechanical switches that hold a steel ball in place with a magnet until a sufficiently large force — like a crash — dislodges the ball and triggers an event. Usually, a switch like this cuts off the fuel pump.

After a bit of fun with a crash-test rig and the airbag of a salvaged steering wheel, a DIY airbag was assembled using a compressed-gas cylinder instead of the fancy gas generator, along with an electrically triggered valve. Here, you can already see why modern airbags use a gas generator, as it is simply far more compact.

For the bag itself, a pillow case was adapted, with the subsequent crash test — as pictured above — going about as well as you can imagine. After this, he tried a few improvements, like using a bin liner and detonating some fuel, but it seems that the gas generator is very hard to beat for producing a large amount of gas in very little time.

Meanwhile, the inertial cut-off switch turned out to be more than sufficient for this purpose, and it was also used to trigger the original airbag. Of course, with how cheap those off-the-shelf airbag units are and are tested to be fit for purpose, you’d never DIY them for actual use in a car unless you were stark raving mad.

Airbags have a checkered history. There are some places you shouldn’t try to save costs.

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This project is perhaps the single most passive-aggressive thing we’ve ever seen on this site: rather than tell someone directly to ‘shut up’, [Blytical]’s speech jammer lets you hack their brain from across the room to stop them from speaking. It’s also a bit of an object lesson in why you shouldn’t just copy reference implementations without careful study — by his own implementation, [Blytical] was forced to learn a lot more than he intended going into this project.

The brain hack behind it is called ‘delayed auditory feedback’: by feeding their speech back to the target with a short delay — only 50 to 200 ms — it creates a confounding effect that is apparently very difficult to speak through. The array of ultrasound transducers is used to accurately aim the audio by serving as an inaudible, low-spread carrier wave, as we saw in another project this year. A shotgun mike picks up the audio from the speaker you wish to harass, and an array of audio processing circuitry takes care of the rest.

That’s where problems happen, as [Blytical] admits he just tossed some reference implementations onto a PCB without bothering to think too hard about what he was doing. It’s the datasheet version of vibe coding, and it usually goes about as well — sometimes perfectly, but rarely without a lot of troubleshooting. That troubleshooting is really, really hard when you don’t quite understand why things were laid out the way they were on the datasheet. We don’t blame [Blytical], you can learn a lot when you bite off more than you can chew. The fact that he risked this failure mode rather than do the whole thing in software with a Pi says good things about how he’s conducting his education.

It’s a shame, though, because we’ve been waiting to see another one of these speech jammers in action for quite some time. Perhaps someone will try again; the ultrasonic array portion seems solved, so if the delay circuit was the problem, perhaps a tiny tape loop would suffice.

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hackaday.com/2026/05/10/speech…

The way that the sense of smell works is that olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) are wired up to olfactory receptors (ORs) in the nasal epithelium, from which they send signals to the brain. Once arrived there, a hierarchy of processing results in us experiencing the sensation of ‘smelling’. Exactly how the olfactory receptor-to-brain mapping works during development, and whether its physical pattern in the nasal epithelium is replicated in the brain, remained major questions until now. In a study published in Cell by [David H. Brann] and others, many of these questions have now been answered, at least for mice.

As it turns out, the mapping between OSNs and ORs isn’t performed by a random selection process, but instead creates a receptor map that’s closely matched between the nasal epithelium and the brain. What has complicated answering this question up till now is that the nasal epithelium isn’t a flat surface, but a convoluted labyrinth that maximizes surface area to smell better.

The second issue was linking the physical location of OSNs and gene expression in the nasal epithelium. Using a new approach, the researchers showed an intricate patterning in this epithelium, with the basal stem cells from which it regenerates maintaining this patterning. This makes for a system very similar to, for example, the auditory system, where the detection of frequencies in the inner ear, as a linear system, is found to be replicated in the brain.

Although it does not provide us with all the answers yet about how this genetic patterning works, it offers a glimpse at a fascinating system that would seem to be used repeatedly across sensory systems. It may also provide potential treatments for medical conditions affecting the olfactory system, whereby the sense of smell is missing, reduced, or oddly miswired, for example, after a SARS-CoV-2 infection of the olfactory nerve that leads to symptoms such as a constant sensation of a burning smell.

You have to wonder if a better understanding of the nose will revive interest in digitally creating and sending smells?

hackaday.com/2026/05/10/tracin…