Focus.de describes a new generation of “better red than dead” growing in #Germany

“It’s better to live in Germany under Putin’s rule than to fight for Germany,” said 18-year-old student Jan Wagner. German students announced a large-scale protest in 90 cities against the return of conscription.

Some other quotes:

“It’s better to flee than to fight”, “We don’t want to be cannon fodder”, “It’s better to live under occupation than to fight”, and “Ukraine should have surrendered instead of defending itself with human lives”.

What these people completely don’t get about #Russia is that it’s not coming to you to somehow peacefully occupy you and let you live your lives. It’s coming to use you as a mobilisation resource - the cannon fodder that it will be not sorry to send to the worst assaults in order to spare their precious Russian youth from Moscow and St Petersburg. We know, because they’re doing 100% that in the occupied Donbas and Zaporizhzhia since 2014.

Source: focus.de/politik/schueler-bei-… (in German)

Премʼєр Польщі натякнув, що Навроцький брав участь у заході, проплаченому росіянами

Дональд Туск звинуватив частину польських політиків у співпраці з криптовалютною компанією, яка, за його словами, має зв’язки з російськими спецслужбами та фінансами. Премʼєр наголосив, що організатори деяких політичних подій отримували кошти від структури, пов’язаної з Росією, і саме туди запрошували найвищих посадовців країни.

В ответ на призыв Илона Маска «ликвидировать ЕС» глава МИД Польши Радослав Сикорский предложил ему улететь на Марс, где нет цензуры на нацистское приветствие

«Лети на Марс. Там нет цензуры на нацистские приветствия», написал Сикорский в X.

Молдова запросила в Румунії екстрену допомогу з електроенергією після атаки РФ по Україні

Відомо, що через атаки на енергетичну систему України, в регіоні «було відключено важливий енергетичний блок». Крім того, лінії міжсистемного з'єднання завантажені майже до межі.

Премьер-министр Польши Туск о новой стратегии национальной безопасности США:
"Дорогие американские друзья, Европа — ваш ближайший союзник, а не ваша проблема.

И у нас общие враги. По крайней мере, так было последние 80 лет.

Нам нужно придерживаться этого, это единственная разумная стратегия нашей общей безопасности.

Если, конечно, что-то не изменилось".

Маск призвал "упразднить" Евросоюз после штрафа против Х

Основатель Space X и владелец Tesla миллиардер Илон Маск заявил, что бюрократия "медленно душит Европу".

"ЕС должен быть упразднен, а суверенитет возвращен отдельным странам, чтобы правительства могли лучше представлять свой народ", — написал он в X.

F1 Light Box Helps You Know the Current Race Status

[joppedc] wrote in to let us know that the Formula 1® season is coming to an end, and that the final race should be bangin’. To get ready, he built this ultra-sleek logo light box last week that does more than just sit there looking good, although it does that pretty well. This light box reacts to live race events, flashing yellow for safety cars, red for red flags, and green for, well, green flags.

The excellent light box itself was modeled in Fusion 360, and the files are available on MakerWorld. The design is split into four parts — the main body, a backplate to mount the LEDs, the translucent front plate, and an enclosure for an ESP32.

Doing it this way allowed [joppedc] to not only print in manageable pieces, it also allowed him to use different materials. Getting the front panel to diffuse light correctly took some experimenting to find the right thickness. Eventually, [joppedc] landed on 0.4 mm (two layers) of matte white PLA.

There isn’t much in the way of brains behind this beauty, just an ESP32, a strip of WS2812B addressable LEDs, and a USB-C port for power. But it’s the software stack that ties everything together. The ESP32 has WLED, Home Assistant runs the show, and of course, there is the F1 sensor integration to get live race data.

If you’re looking for more of an F1 dashboard, then we’ve got you covered.

hackaday.com/2025/12/06/f1-lig…

Standalone USB-PD Stack For All Your Sink Needs

USB PD is a fun protocol to explore, but it can be a bit complex to fully implement. It makes sense we’re seeing new stacks pop up all the time, and today’s stack is a cool one as far as code reusability goes. [Vitaly] over on Hackaday.io brings us pdsink – a C++ based PD stack with no platform dependencies, and fully-featured sink capabilities.

This stack can do SPR (5/9/15/20V) just like you’d expect, but it also does PPS without breaking a sweat – perfect for your Lithium Ion battery charging or any other current-limited shenanigans. What’s more, it can do EPR (28V and up) – for all your high-power needs. For reference, the SPR/PPS/EPR combination is all you could need from a PD stack intended for fully taking advantage of any USB-PD charger’s capabilities. The stack is currently tailored to the classic FUSB302, but [Vitaly] says it wouldn’t be hard to add support for a PD PHY chip of your choice.

It’s nice to have a choice in how you want your PD interactions to go – we’ve covered a few stacks before, and each of them has strong and weak sides. Now, if you have the CPU bandwidth, you could go seriously low-tech and talk PD with just a few resistors, transistors, and GPIOs! Need to debug a particular USB-C edge case? Don’t forget a logger.

hackaday.com/2025/12/06/standa…

Lessons Learned After Trying MeshCore for Off-grid Text Messaging

[Michael Lynch] recently decided to delve into the world of off-grid, decentralized communications with MeshCore, because being able to communicate wirelessly with others in a way that does not depend on traditional communication infrastructure is pretty compelling. After getting his hands on a variety of hardware and trying things out, he wrote up his thoughts from the perspective of a hardware-curious software developer.

He ends up testing a variety of things: MeshCore firmware installed on a Heltec V3 board (used via an app over Bluetooth), a similar standalone device with antenna and battery built in (SenseCAP T-1000e, left in the header image), and a Lilygo T-Deck+ (right in the header image above). These all use MeshCore, which is built on and reportedly compatible with Meshtastic, a framework we have featured in the past.

The cheapest way to get started is with a board like the Heltec v3, pictured here. It handles the LoRa wireless communications part, and one interfaces to it over Bluetooth.
The first two devices are essentially MeshCore gateways, to which the user connects over Bluetooth. The T-Deck is a standalone device that resembles a Blackberry, complete with screen and keypad. [Michael] dove into what it was like to get them up and running.

Probably his most significant takeaway was that the whole process of onboarding seemed a lot more difficult and much less clear than it could be. This is an experience many of us can relate to: the fragmented documentation that exists seems written both by and for people who are already intimately familiar with the project in its entirety.

Another thing he learned was that while LoRa is a fantastic technology capable of communicating wirelessly over great distances with low power, those results require good antennas and line of sight. In a typical urban-ish environment, range is going to be much more limited. [Michael] was able to get a maximum range of about five blocks between two devices. Range could be improved by purchasing and installing repeaters or by having more devices online and in range of one another, but that’s where [Michael] drew the line. He felt he had gotten a pretty good idea of the state of things by then, and not being a radio expert, he declined to purchase repeater hardware without any real sense of where he should put them, or what performance gains he could expect by doing so.

Probably the most surprising discovery was that MeshCore is not entirely open source, which seems odd for an off-grid decentralized communications framework. Some parts are open, but the official clients (the mobile apps, web app, and T-Deck firmware) are not. [Michael] found this out when, being primarily a software developer, he took a look at the code to see if there was anything he could do to improve the poor user experience on the T-Deck and found that the firmware was proprietary.

[Michael]’s big takeaway as a hardware-curious software developer is that the concept is great and accessible (hardware is not expensive and there is no licensing requirement for LoRa), but it’s not really there yet in terms of whether it’s practical for someone to buy a few to distribute among friends for use in an emergency. Not without getting into setting up enough repeaters to ensure connectivity, anyway.

hackaday.com/2025/12/06/lesson…

Something New Every Day, Something Relevant Every Week?

The site is called Hackaday, and has been for 21 years. But it was only for maybe the first half-year that it was literally a hack a day. By the 2010s, we were putting out four or more per day, and in the later 20-teens, we settled into our current cadence of eight hacks per day, plus some original pieces over the top. That’s a lot of hacks per day! (But “Eight-to-Ten-Hacks-a-Day” just isn’t as catchy.)

With that many posts daily, we also tend to reach out to a broader array of interests. Quite simply, not every hack is necessarily going to be just exactly what you are looking for, but we wouldn’t be writing it up if we didn’t think that someone was looking for it. Maybe you don’t like CAN bus hacks, but you’re into biohacking, or retrocomputing. Our broad group of writers helps to make sure that we’ll get you covered sooner or later.

What’s still surprising to me, though, is that a couple of times per week, there is a hack that is actually relevant to a particular project that I’m currently working on. It’s one thing to learn something new every day, and I’d bet that I do, but it’s entirely another to learn something new and relevant.

So I shouldn’t have been shocked when Tom and I were going over the week’s hacks on the podcast, and he picked an investigation of injecting spray foam into 3D prints. I liked that one too, but for me it was just “learn something new”. Tom has been working on an underwater ROV, and it perfectly scratched an itch that he has – how to keep the top of the vehicle more buoyant, while keeping the whole thing waterproof.

That kind of experience is why I’ve been reading Hackaday for 21 years now, and it’s all of our hope that you get some of that too from time to time. There is a lot of “new” on the Internet, and that’s a wonderful thing. But the combination of new and relevant just can’t be beat! So if you’ve got anything you want to hear more about, let us know.

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hackaday.com/2025/12/06/someth…