An Event Badge Re-Imagined As A Cyberdeck

We’re used to handheld Linux devices of varying usefulness appearing on a regular basis, but there’s something about the one in a video from [Rootkit Labs] which sets it aside from the herd. It’s a fork of a conference badge.

The WHY2025 badge had pretty capable hardware, with an ESP32-P4, a really nice screen, and the lovely SolderParty keyboard. Here it’s been forked, to become a carrier board for their previous project, the Flipper Blackhat. This is a Linux add-on for the Flipepr Zero, and it seems that plenty of people wanted it in a more useful context. The result is something that looks a lot like a WHY badge, but running Linux.

It’s a great shame when badges end up lying unused after the event, and ones like the WHY 2025 badge are a serious effort to make something that endures. Here, the badge endures in spirit by being forked and re-engineered, and we like it a lot. The full video is below the break.

youtube.com/embed/QxqeU8ZfaYg?…

hackaday.com/2026/02/02/an-eve…

CPU Scheduler Divines The Will Of The Heavens

Horoscopes are a great way to pass a boring lunchbreak, and an excellent excuse for ending a ill-considered relationship. They’re also a hilarious way to handle CPU scheduling under Linux, thanks to the work of [Lucas Zampieri].

The project is called scx_horoscope, and it’s a sched_Ext scheduler that makes its CPU scheduling choices based on what the heavens are doing in real time. Different tasks are handled based on different astronomical objects. For example, the Sun represents life force, and thus grants boons to key system processes. The Moon, an emotive influence, rules over interactive processes like shells and terminals. Mercury, as the god of communication, handles network and IO tasks, and so it goes from there. It’s not just a surface level thing, either—[Lucas] has implemented the influences of the elements of fire, air, earth, and water, and there are negative timeslice penalties on associated tasks when a given planet lands in retrograde.

You can argue whether or not the broader motions of the heavens have any impact on our lives based on the time and circumstances of our birth. But you can’t argue that scx_horoscope really will influence how your computer runs based on the dance of the planets in the sky. Mostly, though, we concern ourselves with astronomy rather than astrology around these parts!

[Thanks to Benjamin for the tip!]

hackaday.com/2026/02/01/cpu-sc…

Миллиардный долг за «братскую» нефть: Венесуэла выставила счет Беларуси на $1,39 млрд

Минск годами копил долги перед Каракасом, надеясь, что 20% стоимости нефти им просто подарят как «помощь от великодушного народа», но реальность оказалась суровой — теперь венесуэльцы требуют деньги или акции белорусских предприятий.

Yesterday, Soloviev came out with some fantastic nonsense about the ‘Russophobia’ of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence (!) and Starlink - it’s worth listening to the whole thing (English subtitles) video.echelon.pl/w/u6awSQ7YG1A… - but it is also a good excuse to remind on what legal basis Starlink actually works in the Russian army. Well, as is often the case… on none. Starlink has no legal basis in the Russian army and operates illegally, as Russian military analysts have been quick to point out.

Both #Starlink and #OneWeb attempted to legally enter the Russian market in 2017-2018 but were blocked by the FSB and #Roscosmos, which announced the construction of its own Skif system. Dmitry #Rogozin, as head of Roscosmos, spoke at length at the time about Starlink being a Pentagon agency and made many grandiose announcements about the launch of a Russian system that would be a hundred times better. It is not difficult to guess that, as is often the case in Russia, it ended with grandiose announcements and none of the several hundred satellites were launched into orbit.

The Skif programme itself was shut down last year, but it was replaced by a new programme called Rassvet (dawn), which was supposed to have 16 low-orbit satellites in space by 2025, but has… zero. Russian military experts themselves write about this with some regret, pointing out that the FSB and Roscosmos, with their ‘dog in the manger’ approach, have deprived their army of the opportunity to make normal use of Starlink. Yes, that “Pentagon surveillance stations”, on which Russian army today relies.

This ‘normal’ use of Starlink by the RF army is, of course, a bit far-fetched because, apart from the lack of a Russian licence, there are also Western sanctions . Musk recently explained that the famous incident when Starlink cut off communication with a Ukrainian naval drone near Crimea was due to American sanctions and not the ill will of the company itself, which risked legal consequences if it had tolerated an unknown terminal operating in the sanctioned territory of occupied Crimea at the time.

In summary, as of 2026, the Russian army widely uses Starlink devices purchased privately by Russians in the West and literally carried in their luggage to Russia, where they operate on the basis of private subscriptions in a manner that is completely illegal from the point of view of Russian law and semi-legal from the point of view of Starlink, which, after all, has no right to operate on Russian territory, but most of them are concentrated on the front line, i.e. effectively on Ukrainian territory.

And the Russians could probably continue to use them if it weren’t for the fact that Rubicon began installing Starlink on drones carrying out deep strikes on Ukrainian territory, including power plants and an exceptionally heinous attack on a civilian bus near Pavlohrad, where a real-time controlled ‘Geran’ drone with Starlink killed 16 miners. Starlink began by introducing restrictions on fast-moving terminals, 90% of which are drones, and is now working with the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence on a ‘white list’ of terminals belonging to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which should eliminate all Russian terminals operating in the frontline zone.

Why wasn’t this done earlier? Because some of the Ukrainian terminals were also imported privately and were not always registered with the Ministry of Defence for various reasons, so Russian terminals were actually tolerated for convenience, but now this should come to an end.

If this comes to fruition, the Russians will be left empty-handed, despite Rogozin’s grand announcements about a ‘hundred times better’ Russian system, which has only one drawback: it does not exist.

«Медовый месяц» Трампа и Лукашенко закончился, не успев начаться

Инсайды подтверждают: Минск в ярости. Трамп отказался покупать белорусское золото, заблокировал экономические бонусы и не помог помириться с Европой.

Трамп назвал церемонию "Грэмми" "мусором" и пригрозил ведущему судом за шутку об острове Эпштейна

Ведущий Тревор Ноа на церемонии «Грэмми» сказал:
Песня года, поздравляем Билли Айлиш, вау! Это премия «Грэмми», которую хочет получить каждый артист, почти так же, как Трамп хочет получить Гренландию. Что вполне логично, ведь остров Эпштейна исчез, и ему нужен новый, чтобы проводить время с Биллом Клинтоном.