Hackaday Links: August 16, 2026

August 16, 2026 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

We’re no strangers to unusual hardware failures around these parts, but even so, a swarm of jellyfish clogging up the works is a new one to us. That’s exactly what happened to the cooling system at the Gravelines nuclear power plant in France earlier this week, resulting in three reactors having to be shut down. This isn’t even an isolated incident, as POLITICO points out that the same thing actually happened last year around this same time.

So why are jellyfish staging an annual protest against nuclear power? A warming of the North Sea has extended breeding seasons and produced larger populations of the plankton that the jellyfish feed on. This is great for the gelatinous sea creatures, but not exactly ideal if you’re trying to pump the water they live in through a complex cooling system. The French installed filter screens and monitoring systems after this happened in 2025, but clearly they’re going to need to keep working on the problem.

From a new problem to a very old one, a BBC investigation has revealed that the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) Blood and Transplant department was inadvertently leaking private patient data by sending it in the clear over the pager network. Sniffing pager messages was fairly trivial decades ago, and is even easier these days thanks to the proliferation of cheap software-defined radios and open source decoding software. Given the fragility of the underlying communication network they use, the NHS announced they were going to stop using pagers by 2021, but clearly not everyone got the memo.

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Peeling Fruit With The Power Of Steam

August 15, 2026 by Fenix Guthrie 8 Comments

Steam power is a staple of the steampunk aesthetic, thermodynamics, and a checkpoint for the budding mechanical engineer studying heat cycles. But because food is largely made of water, steam is also common in the culinary arts. So it’s no surprise that when thermodynamics is applied to cooking, exciting things can happen.

This particular example of steam-powered culinary happenings is inspired by industrial potato-peeling machines. By adding high-pressure, high-temperature steam to a pressure vessel with potatoes inside, heat can transfer more easily to the inside of the potatoes. Because the pressure is so high, however, the water in the skin won’t boil. This is fundamentally the same concept as a pressure cooker. However, what’s different is that instead of a pressure cooker’s slow release, these industrial peeling machines rely on explosive decompression, flash boiling the water underneath the potato’s skin. This rapidly expanding steam rips away the skin in a nice clean sheet.

But, to [Stuff Made Here’s] disappointment, there were no videos of the process on the internet. But, fortunately for us, being an engineer of complicated machines means that there is one now that you can watch below.

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SB Mini II Is A Homebrew Apple II Clone

July 7, 2026 by Tyler August 17 Comments

On the one hand, the original Apple II has been copied over and over again since at least the early 80s, so maybe this hack is old hat to the greybeards around here. On the other hand, this is the year 2026. When Apple released it back in 1977, who could have predicted people would still be building these things nearly five decades later?

In that sense, a homebrew Apple II in the current year is pretty remarkable. It’s a really well done project by [simonboak], nicely open sourced with a case to match, so is worth looking at on its own merits.

It doesn’t run *DOOM*, but neither did the original. *Oregon Trail* is more this unit’s speed.

Unlike the later models, the original Apple II only used commercially available ICs, making it an easy target for recreation. No FPGAs required, just good old-fashioned DIPs. OK, these are modern CMOS versions of the chips, but other than that, the biggest concession to modernity is space on the board for a Raspberry Pi Pico to allow for connecting a USB keyboard.

The accompanying blog post lists some other differences from 1977’s favorite home computer: SRAM vs DRAM — because you know the Woz would have used it if he could — and omitting the composite video circuitry in favor a late-model VGA card. There’s no need for the composite output since he’s eschewing the period-appropriate CRT for a retro-styled LCD monitor, which is also 3D printed and available on Printables. It’s crazy to think that the Apple II family lived long enough not only to see the dawn of VGA but also well into its sunset.

If a homebuilt Apple ][ doesn’t impress, what about a PC-compatible circa 1995?

Bringing Swift To The Apple II

June 27, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 6 Comments

Swift is a relatively modern program language, appearing in 2014 as a replacement for Objective-C. Since then, it’s become a popular solution for programming apps across Apple platforms. That led [Yeo Kheng Meng] to a simple yet fun idea—porting Swift to the oldest Apple platform of all.

Yes, [Yeo] managed to build a development environment for Swift that targets the Apple II platform. Not just one machine, either—everything from the original Apple II up to the IIe and a little beyond. Now, the Apple II is very different from modern Macs and iPhones and the like, having debuted in 1977 with a 1 MHz 6502 CPU and a minuscule 4 KB of RAM. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use a modern language to develop for it!

[Yeo] does a great job of explaining how it all works, and how Claude Code and GPT 5.5 Codex were used to help piece things together. The compiler is set up to spit out bytecode that’s executed by a virtual machine running on the 6502. The target was to allow the setup to work on a standard 1977 Apple II from the factory, which would allow it to then run on subsequent models without issue. However, there is a small note— [Yeo]’s implementation requires the RAM to have been upgraded to 48 KB.

We love seeing modern stuff ported to the Apple II. This Portal port was a particular highlight.

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It’s An Apple Lisa, On A FPGA

May 9, 2026 by Jenny List 5 Comments

Most of us will know that Apple’s precursor to the Macintosh series of computers was a machine called the Lisa. Something of a behemoth compared to those early Macs, it had a price to match and wasn’t a commercial success. Working Lisas survive, but unlike a Mac you won’t find many at your local swapmeet. But what if you really must try this early Apple GUI? Never fear, because [AlexElectronics] is here with a much more accessible version on a FPGA.

This Lisa has a surprisingly large PCB compared to the size of the FPGA, because of the number of connectors. It takes the approach of mixing new and old in interfaces, for example as well as original Lisa keyboard and mouse support, you can also use modern USB versions. There’s also an HDMI output for a modern monitor, and an SD card. Unexpectedly alongside the FPGA there’s a 40-pin DIP, it’s a UART chip because there’s no handy pre-built one for that particular chip. We’re told it will be up on GitHub when finalized.

Keeping old computers alive, especially rare ones, is hard. We like projects like this one, and we hope to see more developments. Meanwhile you can see the machine in the video below.

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Recreating One Of The First Hackintoshes

March 30, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 22 Comments

Apple’s Intel era was a boon for many, especially for software developers who were able to bring their software to the platform much more easily than in the PowerPC era. Macs at the time were even able to run Windows fairly easily, which was unheard of. A niche benefit to few was that it made it much easier to build Hackintosh-style computers, which were built from hardware not explicitly sanctioned by Apple but could be tricked into running OSX nonetheless. Although the Hackintosh scene exploded during this era, it actually goes back much farther and [This Does Not Compute] has put together one of the earliest examples going all the way back to the 1980s.

The build began with a Macintosh SE which had the original motherboard swapped out for one with a CPU accelerator card installed. This left the original motherboard free, and rather than accumulate spare parts [This Does Not Compute] decided to use it to investigate the Hackintosh scene of the late 80s. There were a few publications put out at the time that documented how to get this done, so following those as guides he got to work. The only original Apple part needed for this era was a motherboard, which at the time could be found used for a bargain price. The rest of the parts could be made from PC components, which can also be found for lower prices than most Mac hardware. The cases at the time would be literally hacked together as well, but in the end a working Mac would come out of the process at a very reasonable cost.

[This Does Not Compute]’s case isn’t scrounged from 80s parts bins, though. He’s using a special beige filament to print a case with the appropriate color aesthetic for a computer of this era. There are also some modern parts that make this style computer a little easier to use in today’s world like a card that lets the Mac output a VGA signal, an SD card reader, and a much less clunky power supply than the original would have had. He’s using an original floppy disk drive though, so not everything needs to be modernized. But, with these classic Macintosh computers, modernization can go to whatever extreme suits your needs.

Thanks to [Stephen] for the tip!

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An upside down laptop with its cover removed on a grey surface. The inside of the laptop is a series of black modules connected to the frame with glorious amounts of screws and not glue!

Apple’s Most Repairable Laptop Is Thanks To Right-to-Repair

March 28, 2026 by Navarre Bartz 22 Comments

The common narrative around device design is that you can have repairability or a low price, but that they are inversely proportional to each other. Apple’s new budget MacBook Neo seems to attempt a bit of both.

Brittle snap-fit enclosures or glue can make a device pop together quickly during manufacture, but are a headache when it comes time to repair or hack it. Our friends at iFixit tore down the Neo and found it to be the most repairable MacBook since the 2012 unibody model. A screwed in battery, and modules for many of the individual components including the USB ports and headphone jack make it fairly simple to replace individual components. Most of those components are even accessible as soon as you pop the bottom cover instead of requiring major surgery.

As someone who has done a keyboard replacement on a 2010 MacBook, the 41 screws holding the keyboard in brought back (bad) memories. While this is a great improvement over Apple’s notoriously painful repair processes, we’re still only looking at an overall 6/10 score from iFixit versus a 10/10 from Framework or Lenovo.

The real story here is that these improvements from Apple were spurred by Right-to-Repair developments, particularly in the EU, that were the result of pressure from hackers like you.

If you want to push a Neo even further, how about water cooling it? If you’d rather have user-upgradeable RAM and storage too in a Mac, you’ve got to go a bit older.

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