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Longform articles, the best of what the Hackaday writing crew has to offer.

Marion Stokes Fought Disinformation With VCRs

January 20, 2026 by 25 Comments

You’ve likely at least heard of Marion Stokes, the woman who constantly recorded television for over 30 years. She comes up on reddit and other places every so often as a hero archivist who fought against disinformation and disappearing history. But who was Marion Stokes, and why did she undertake this project? And more importantly, what happened to all of those tapes? Let’s take a look.

Marion the Librarian

Marion was born November 25, 1929 in Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Noted for her left-wing beliefs as a young woman, she became quite politically active, and was even courted by the Communist Party USA to potentially become a leader. Marion was also involved in the civil rights movement.

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Tolerating Delay With DTN

January 19, 2026 by 19 Comments

The Internet has spoiled us. You assume network packets either show up pretty quickly or they are never going to show up. Even if you are using WiFi in a crowded sports stadium or LTE on the side of a deserted highway, you probably either have no connection or a fairly robust, although perhaps intermittent, network. But it hasn’t always been that way. Radio networks, especially, used to be very hit or miss and, in some cases, still are.

Perhaps the least reliable network today is one connecting things in deep space. That’s why NASA has a keen interest in Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN). Note that this is the name of a protocol, not just a wish for a certain quality in your network. DTN has been around a while, seen real use, and is available for you to use, too.

Think about it. On Earth, a long ping time might be 400 ms, and most of that is in equipment, not physical distance. Add a geostationary orbital relay, and you get 600 ms to 800 ms. The moon? The delay is 1.3 sec. Mars? Somewhere between 3 min and 22 min, depending on how far away it is at the moment. Voyager 1? Nearly a two-day round trip. That’s latency!

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Optimizing Software With Zero-Copy And Other Techniques

January 16, 2026 by 19 Comments

An important aspect in software engineering is the ability to distinguish between premature, unnecessary, and necessary optimizations. A strong case can be made that the initial design benefits massively from optimizations that prevent well-known issues later on, while unnecessary optimizations are those simply do not make any significant difference either way. Meanwhile ‘premature’ optimizations are harder to define, with Knuth’s often quoted-out-of-context statement about these being ‘the root of all evil’ causing significant confusion.

We can find Donald Knuth’s full quote deep in the 1974 article Structured Programming with go to Statements, which at the time was a contentious optimization topic. On page 268, along with the cited quote, we see that it’s a reference to making presumed optimizations without understanding their effect, and without a clear picture of which parts of the program really take up most processing time. Definitely sound advice.

And unlike back in the 1970s we have today many easy ways to analyze application performance and to quantize bottlenecks. This makes it rather inexcusable to spend more time today vilifying the goto statement than to optimize one’s code with simple techniques like zero-copy and binary message formats.

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ISS Medical Emergency: An Orbital Ambulance Ride

January 15, 2026 by 45 Comments

Over the course of its nearly 30 years in orbit, the International Space Station has played host to more “firsts” than can possibly be counted. When you’re zipping around Earth at five miles per second, even the most mundane of events takes on a novel element. Arguably, that’s the point of a crewed orbital research complex in the first place — to study how humans can live and work in an environment that’s so unimaginably hostile that something as simple as eating lunch requires special equipment and training.

Today marks another unique milestone for the ISS program, albeit a bittersweet one. Just a few hours ago, NASA successfully completed the first medical evacuation from the Station, cutting the Crew-11 mission short by at least a month. By the time this article is released, the patient will be back on terra firma and having their condition assessed in California.  This leaves just three crew members on the ISS until NASA’s Crew-12 mission can launch in early February, though it’s possible that mission’s timeline will be moved up.

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Clone Wars: IBM Edition

January 14, 2026 by 49 Comments

If you search the Internet for “Clone Wars,” you’ll get a lot of Star Wars-related pages. But the original Clone Wars took place a long time ago in a galaxy much nearer to ours, and it has a lot to do with the computer you are probably using right now to read this. (Well, unless it is a Mac, something ARM-based, or an old retro-rig. I did say probably!)

IBM is a name that, for many years, was synonymous with computers, especially big mainframe computers. However, it didn’t start out that way. IBM originally made mechanical calculators and tabulating machines. That changed in 1952 with the IBM 701, IBM’s first computer that you’d recognize as a computer.

If you weren’t there, it is hard to understand how IBM dominated the computer market in the 1960s and 1970s. Sure, there were others like Univac, Honeywell, and Burroughs. But especially in the United States, IBM was the biggest fish in the pond. At one point, the computer market’s estimated worth was a bit more than $11 billion, and IBM’s five biggest competitors accounted for about $2 billion, with almost all of the rest going to IBM.

So it was somewhat surprising that IBM didn’t roll out the personal computer first, or at least very early. Even companies that made “small” computers for the day, like Digital Equipment Corporation or Data General, weren’t really expecting the truly personal computer. That push came from companies no one had heard of at the time, like MITS, SWTP, IMSAI, and Commodore. Continue reading “Clone Wars: IBM Edition” →

A Linux Power User Puts SteamOS To Work

January 12, 2026 by 53 Comments

The line between a Linux user and a Linux power user is a bit gray, and a bit wide. Most people who install Linux already have more computer literacy than average, and the platform has long encouraged experimentation and construction in a way macOS and Windows generally aren’t designed for. Traditional Linux distributions often ask more of their users as well, requiring at least a passing familiarity with the terminal and the operating system’s internals especially once something inevitably breaks.

In recent years, however, a different design philosophy has been gaining ground. Immutable Linux distributions like Fedora Silverblue, openSUSE MicroOS, and NixOS dramatically reduce the chances an installation behaves erratically by making direct changes to the underlying system either impossible or irrelevant.

SteamOS fits squarely into this category as well. While it’s best known for its console-like gaming mode it also includes a fully featured Linux desktop, which is a major part of its appeal and the reason I bought a Steam Deck in the first place. For someone coming from Windows or macOS, this desktop provides a familiar, fully functional environment: web browsing, media playback, and other basic tools all work out of the box.

As a Linux power user encountering an immutable desktop for the first time, though, that desktop mode wasn’t quite what I expected. It handles these everyday tasks exceptionally well, but performing the home sysadmin chores that are second nature to me on a Debian system takes a very different mindset and a bit of effort. Continue reading “A Linux Power User Puts SteamOS To Work” →

NPAPI And The Hot-Pluggable World Wide Web

January 9, 2026 by 16 Comments

In today’s Chromed-up world it can be hard to remember an era where browsers could be extended with not just extensions, but also with plugins. Although for those of us who use traditional Netscape-based browsers like Pale Moon the use of plugins has never gone away, for the rest of the WWW’s users their choice has been limited to increasingly more restrictive browser extensions, with Google’s Manifest V3 taking the cake.

Although most browsers stopped supporting plugins due to “security concerns”, this did nothing to address the need for executing code in the browser faster than the sedate snail’s pace possible with JavaScript, or the convenience of not having to port native code to JavaScript in the first place. This led to various approaches that ultimately have culminated in the WebAssembly (WASM) standard, which comes with its own set of issues and security criticisms.

Other than Netscape’s Plugin API (NPAPI) being great for making even 1990s browsers ready for 2026, there are also very practical reasons why WASM and JavaScript-based approaches simply cannot do certain basic things.

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