EN: The dynamics of #ruscist losses in the war against Ukraine since February 24, 2022
index.minfin.com.ua/en/russian…

UA: Динаміка втрат рашистів у війні проти України з 24 лютого 2022 року
index.minfin.com.ua/ua/russian…

RU: Динамика потерь рашистов в войне против Украины с 24 февраля 2022 года
index.minfin.com.ua/russian-in…

Kubernetes Cluster Goes Mobile in Pet Carrier

There’s been a bit of a virtualization revolution going on for the last decade or so, where tools like Docker and LXC have made it possible to quickly deploy server applications without worrying much about dependency issues. Of course as these tools got adopted we needed more tools to scale them easily. Enter Kubernetes, a container orchestration platform that normally herds fleets of microservices in sprawling cloud architectures, but it turns out it’s perfectly happy running on a tiny computer stuffed in a cat carrier.

This was a build for the recent Kubecon in Atlanta, and the project’s creator [Justin] wanted it to have an AI angle to it since the core compute in the backpack is an NVIDIA DGX Spark. When someone scans the QR code, the backpack takes a picture and then runs it through a two-node cluster on the Spark running a local AI model that stylizes the picture and sends it back to the user. Only the AI workload runs on the Spark; [Justin] also is using a LattePanda to handle most of everything else rather than host everything on the Spark.

To get power for the mobile cluster [Justin] is using a small power bank, and with that it gets around three hours of use before it needs to be recharged. Originally it was planned to work on the WiFi at the conference as well but this was unreliable and he switched to using a USB tether to his phone. It was a big hit with the conference goers though, with people using it around every ten minutes while he had it on his back. Of course you don’t need a fancy NVIDIA product to run a portable kubernetes cluster. You can always use a few old phones to run one as well.

youtube.com/embed/XudewmfourQ?…

hackaday.com/2025/11/18/kubern…

Cloudflare va giù nel magnifico Cloud! incidente globale in fase di risoluzione

18 novembre 2025 – Dopo ore di malfunzionamenti diffusi, l’incidente che ha colpito la rete globale di Cloudflare sembra finalmente vicino alla risoluzione. L’azienda ha comunicato di aver implementato una correzione e di essere ora nella fase di monitoraggio attivo, dopo una giornata caratterizzata da disservizi, errori intermittenti e problemi sui servizi applicativi e di sicurezza.

L’incidente, iniziato alle 11:48 UTC, ha coinvolto varie componenti dell’infrastruttura Cloudflare, generando rallentamenti, timeout e blocchi a livello globale, con impatti anche su CDN, API, autenticazione e dashboard di gestione.

Di seguito la ricostruzione completa della giornata.

Timeline dell’incidente Cloudflare

11:48 UTC – Inizio dell’incidente
Cloudflare segnala un degrado interno del servizio. Diversi servizi risultano instabili a livello globale e viene avviata l’analisi del problema.

12:03 UTC – Indagine in corso
Cloudflare conferma che alcuni servizi continuano a essere colpiti da errori intermittenti.

12:21 UTC – Prime evidenze di ripristino parziale
Cloudflare osserva miglioramenti, ma i clienti sperimentano ancora errori più elevati del normale.

12:37 UTC – Indagine ancora attiva
Persistono anomalie diffuse sulla rete.

12:53 UTC – Indagine ancora in corso
I tecnici continuano a lavorare senza individuare ancora una soluzione definitiva.

13:04 UTC – Disattivato temporaneamente l’accesso WARP a Londra
Durante i tentativi di mitigazione, Cloudflare disattiva WARP nella region di Londra. Gli utenti locali non riescono a connettersi tramite il servizio.

13:09 UTC – Problema identificato
Cloudflare comunica di aver individuato la causa dell’incidente e di aver iniziato a implementare una soluzione.

13:13 UTC – Ripristino parziale di Access e WARP
Cloudflare ripristina Access e WARP, riportando i livelli di errore alla normalità.
WARP Londra torna operativo. Si continua a lavorare sui restanti servizi applicativi.

13:35 UTC – Problemi ancora presenti
I servizi applicativi non sono ancora stati ripristinati completamente.

13:58 UTC – Lavori in corso
Continuano gli interventi per riportare online i servizi rimanenti.

14:22 UTC – Ripristino dashboard
La dashboard Cloudflare torna operativa, anche se i servizi applicativi mostrano ancora instabilità.

14:34 UTC – Continuano i lavori di ripristino
Il team tecnico prosegue con le attività necessarie a ripristinare tutti i servizi.

14:42 UTC – Cloudflare: “Incidente risolto, monitoraggio in corso”
Cloudflare annuncia di aver implementato una correzione definitiva. Tutti i servizi dovrebbero tornare progressivamente alla normalità, ma rimane attivo il monitoraggio post-incident.

Impatti dell’incidente

L’incidente ha avuto un impatto rilevante su scala globale. Molti siti web serviti da Cloudflare (tra cui redhotcyber.com) hanno mostrato rallentamenti, pagine non raggiungibili, errori 502, 522 e 526, oltre a problemi di caching e routing.

I servizi di sicurezza e autenticazione, come Cloudflare Access e WARP, sono stati fortemente colpiti nella prima fase. In alcune regioni gli utenti non hanno potuto autenticarsi o accedere alle risorse protette.

Anche Downdetector ha mostrato malfunzionamenti, rendendo difficile monitorare l’ampiezza dell’incidente e contribuendo alla percezione di un blackout molto esteso.

L’infrastruttura globale Cloudflare ha registrato rallentamenti e instabilità, con ripercussioni a catena su servizi non direttamente ospitati sulla piattaforma.

Che cos’è Cloudflare WARP

Cloudflare WARP è un servizio sviluppato da Cloudflare con l’obiettivo di migliorare la sicurezza e le prestazioni della connessione Internet degli utenti. A differenza delle VPN tradizionali, che puntano principalmente a fornire anonimato instradando tutto il traffico attraverso server remoti, WARP è progettato per rendere la navigazione più veloce, stabile e protetta, senza appesantire la connessione.

Come funziona

WARP utilizza il protocollo WireGuard, noto per essere leggero, rapido e altamente sicuro. Il traffico viene instradato attraverso la rete globale di Cloudflare, che funge da “strato protettivo” tra l’utente e il web. Questo permette di:

• criptare le connessioni su reti non sicure (come Wi-Fi pubblici),
• ridurre la latenza grazie alla rete globale Cloudflare,
• filtrare automaticamente traffico malevolo o sospetto,
• proteggere da intercettazioni e attacchi man-in-the-middle.

Non mira all’anonimato totale come una VPN classica, ma si concentra su sicurezza e stabilità della connessione.

La differenza tra WARP e WARP+

Cloudflare offre due versioni del servizio:

• WARP: gratuito, utilizza la rete standard Cloudflare.
• WARP+: a pagamento, instrada parte del traffico tramite la tecnologia Argo Smart Routing, che sceglie dinamicamente il percorso più veloce tra i server Cloudflare, migliorando ulteriormente la velocità.

Situazione attuale

Secondo l’ultimo aggiornamento, la correzione è stata applicata con successo e i servizi stanno tornando alla normalità. Cloudflare è ora nella fase di monitoraggio attivo e nelle prossime ore potrebbero verificarsi residui di instabilità durante l’assestamento della rete

L'articolo Cloudflare va giù nel magnifico Cloud! incidente globale in fase di risoluzione proviene da Red Hot Cyber.

Humane Mousetrap Lets You Know It’s Caught Something

“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door,” so goes the saying, but VHS beat Betamax and the world hasn’t been the same since. In any case, you might not get rich building a better mousetrap, but you can certainly create something more humane than the ol’ spring’n’snap, as [nightcustard] demonstrates.

The concept is the same as many humane mousetraps on the market. The mouse is lured into a confined cavity with the use of bait, and once inside, a door closes to keep the mouse inside without injuring it. [nightcustard] achieved this by building a plastic enclosure with plenty of air holes, which is fitted with a spring-loaded door. When a mouse walks through an infra-red break beam sensor, a Raspberry Pi Pico W triggers a solenoid which releases the door, trapping the mouse inside. This design was chosen over a passive mechanical solution, because [nightcustard] noted that mice in the attic were avoiding other humane traps with obvious mechanical trigger mechanisms.

As a bonus, the wireless connectivity of the Pi Pico W allows the trap to send a notification via email when it has fired. Thus, you can wake up in the morning and check your emails to see if you need to go and release a poor beleaguered mouse back into the wild. This is critical, as otherwise, if you forget to check your humane trap… it stops being humane pretty quickly.

If you’re looking for more inspiration to tackle your mouse problems, we can help. We’ve featured other traps of this type before, too. Meanwhile, if you’ve got your own friendly homebrew solutions to pesky pest problems, don’t hesitate to hit up the tipsline.

hackaday.com/2025/11/18/humane…

Casting Metal Tools With Kitchen Appliances

Perhaps the biggest hurdle to starting a home blacksmithing operating is the forge. There’s really no way around having a forge; somehow the metal has to get hot enough to work. Although we might be imagining huge charcoal- or gas-fired monstrosities, [Shake the Future] has figured out how to use an unmodified, standard microwave oven to get iron hot enough to melt and is using it in his latest video to cast real, working tools with it.

In the past, [Shake the Future] has made a few other things with this setup like an aluminum pencil with a graphite core. This time, though, he’s stepping up the complexity a bit with a working tool. He’s decided to build a miniature bench vice, which uses a screw to move the jaws. He didn’t cast the screw, instead using a standard size screw and nut, but did cast the two other parts of the vice. He first 3D prints the parts in order to make a mold that will withstand the high temperatures of the molten metal. With the mold made he can heat up the iron in the microwave and then pour it, and then with some finish work he has a working tool on his hands.

A microwave isn’t the only kitchen appliance [Shake the Future] has repurposed for his small metalworking shop. He also uses a standard air fryer in order to dry parts quickly. He works almost entirely from the balcony of his apartment so he needs to keep his neighbors in mind while working, and occasionally goes to a nearby parking garage when he has to do something noisy. It’s impressive to see what can be built in such a small space, though. For some of his other work be sure to check out how he makes the crucibles meant for his microwave.

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hackaday.com/2025/11/18/castin…

Cheap VHF Antenna? Can Do!

The magnetic loop antenna is a familiar sight in radio amateur circles as a means to pack a high performance HF antenna into a small space. It takes the form of a large single-turn coil made into a tuned circuit with a variable capacitor, and it provides the benefits of good directionality and narrow bandwidth at the cost of some scary RF voltages and the need for constant retuning. As [VK3YE] shows us though, magnetic loops are not limited to HF — he’s made a compact VHF magnetic loop using a tin can.

It’s a pretty simple design; a section from the can it cut out and made into a C shape, with a small variable capacitor at the gap. The feed comes in at the bottom, with the feed point about 20 % of the way round the loop for matching. The bandwidth is about 100 MHz starting from the bottom of the FM broadcast band, and he shows us it receiving broadcast, Airband, and 2 meter signals. It can be used for transmitting too and we see it on 2 meter WSPR, but we would have to wonder whether the voltages induced by higher power levels might be a little much for that small capacitor.

He’s at pains to point out that there are many better VHF antennas as this one has no gain to speak of, but we can see a place for it. It’s tiny, if you’re prepared to fiddle with the tuning its high Q gets rid of interference, and its strong side null means it can also reduce unwanted signals on the same frequency. We rather like it, and we hope you will too after watching the video below.

youtube.com/embed/JYIU0Nxn8fg?…

hackaday.com/2025/11/18/a-vhf-…

Congratulations to the 2025 Component Abuse Challenge Winners

For the Component Abuse Challenge, we asked you to do the wrong thing with electrical parts, but nonetheless come out with the right result. It’s probably the most Hackaday challenge we have run in a long time, and you all delivered! The judging was tight, but in the end three projects rose up to the top, and will each be taking home a $150 DigiKey gift certificate, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give all of the projects a look.

So without further ado, let’s check out the winners and all the others that tickled the hacky regions of our judges’ brains.

Prize Winners

[Miroslav Hancar]’s LED Candles was a shoe-in, at least if you watched the video demo. It presents itself as a simple LED on a round PCB with a coin cell, but then when [Miroslav] lights it with an actual lighter, it starts glowing. (And maybe smoking just a little bit.) He makes both single-LED and quad-LED varieties, and they’re both gems.

The component misuse is an old favorite: the diode’s forward voltage drop depends on the temperature, and if you measure the voltage across the current-limiting resistor, you can read this voltage and determine when someone is setting fire to your LED. A bonus of the single-LED configuration is that if you touch the LED’s leads, your finger shunts some of the current, and you can “snuff” the LEDs out. And while we’ve seen similar LED hacks before, the addition of actual fire to this one seems to have warmed our judges’ hearts.

[Luke J. Barker]’s Need an Electrical Slip Ring? is simplicity itself, and appears to have been born of the mother of invention. [Luke] was making a VertiBird helicopter toy, which spins around on the desk and rises and falls with joystick control. And for that, he needed a slip ring. Enter the humble audio jack, which fills the job nicely, transmitting power to the rotating helicopter without twisting up wires in the process. There’s not much magic here, but it’s a fantastic idea when you need something to spin.

On the other end of the spectrum, [Craig D]’s Boosting voltage with a cable looks like it shouldn’t work at first, but it does. In most step-up-voltage setups, you’re storing the energy in either a capacitor or inductor, and switching it in and out of the circuit to hop the voltage up. Here, the energy isn’t ever really “stored” as much as it’s “in flight”.

A circuit sends a pulse down a long length of coaxial cable that is left open at the other end. The pulse reflects off the open end and heads back toward the voltage driver, which then fires off another pulse at just the right time to make the travelling wave a little bit bigger, and this continues. It’s like pushing a swing – adding a little extra oomph at just the right time can build up. There’s a lot of cool physics here, a nice simulation that actually ends up corresponding very well with reality, and in the end the pulse timing isn’t rocket science, but rather figuring out the resonant frequency along the coax. And it works well enough to light up two neon bulbs in series (~140 V) off of a 15 V power supply.

Honorable Mentions

We got way more cool entries than we have prizes, so we try to round them up into categories and give them a little time in the sun.

Out of Spec

Normally, a 555 timer oscillator circuit relies on filling up a capacitor with a current that’s throttled through a resistor. How can you make it go faster? Make the capacitor smaller and the resistor less resistive. What happens when you get rid of them both entirely, relying on stray capacitance and the resistance of whatever wire you’re using? That’s what [MagicWolfi] aimed to find out with his Ludicrous 555 project.

The IC-Abusing Diode Tester is an absolutely horrible circuit. Nothing in it works like it should. The only reason the IC doesn’t burn up is that it’s more robust than the datasheet promises, and the battery used has such a high internal resistance that it can’t source that much current anyway. Parts are powered by leakage current, and below their minimum voltage. [Joseph Eoff] counts seven values that are out of spec in this single historical circuit, so that’s gotta count for something.

Junk Box Substitutions

You need GPIO lines, but you have a UART. [Ken Yap] proposes repurposing the DSR, DTR, RTS, and CTS lines as inputs and outputs, and he writes code to make them do his bidding.

Or maybe you’re working on self-assembling robots and you need some magic glue to hold different modules together. [Miana]’s Low-melt-solder connected robots is half research project, and half hack. Resistors are used to melt solder, magnets align the parts together, and when it all cools down, it’s as if two modules are brazed together. This one’s a lot more than a hack, but we’re honored to have it entered in the contest anyway!

Bizarro World

We honestly thought we’d get more entries that made use of the duality of most sensors / emitters. Instead, we got two. [Nick]’s Better Than Bluetooth does the LED-as-photosensor trick, and concludes that it’s better than Bluetooth if expense, limited range, and frustration are what you’re looking for in a data link. Meanwhile, [Kauz] proves that electromagnets are also pickups by building a guitar pickup out of six relays.

Side Effects

Everything is a fuse if you run enough current through it. [JohnsonFarms] pushed conductive filament to the melting point, and calibrated it along the way. While roasting a hotdog with mains voltage and a couple forks, [Ian Dunn] discovered that if you stick some LEDs in it, they light up.

Most old op-amps oscillate out of control when given feedback, unless you damp it down a bit with a capacitor. [Adrian Freed] found an op-amp lousy enough that would do this at audio frequencies, and used it to reimagine a classic noisemaker.

Finally, while you should probably avoid the metastable middle-zones between digital one and zero, [SHAOS] combines unbuffered NAND and NOR gates to tease out a third logic state. [Bob Widlar] would be proud.

Thanks All!

As always, we had more great entries that we could feature here, so head on over to Hackaday.io and check them out. And thanks again to DigiKey for providing our top three with $150 gift certificates. If you’re looking for your chance to show off a project that you’re working on, hang on for a while because we’ll be starting up a new contest in early 2026.