Hackaday Links: February 8, 2026

We start this week with a bit of a good news/bad news situation. On February 6th, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) was shut down after 25 years of operation. Located at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, the RHIC was the only operating particle collider in the United States, and along with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), was one of only two heavy-ion colliders in existence.

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that the RHIC is going dark so that the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) can take its place. Planned for activation in the mid-2030s, the EIC will occupy the same tunnel as the RHIC and reuse much of the same hardware. As the name implies, it will be used to collide electrons.

Switching gears (no pun intended) to the world of self-driving cars, Waymo’s chief safety officer, Dr. Mauricio Peña, made a surprising admission this week during a U.S. Senate hearing. When asked what his company’s vehicles do when they are presented with a situation that their on-board systems can’t resolve, Dr. Peña explained that they would contact a human “remote assistance operator.” He further clarified that these individuals, located both in the US and the Philippines, don’t literally drive the car remotely. Still, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts questioned not only the company’s transparency on the issue of remote assistance, but the idea that individuals overseas could be making decisions on how vehicles should operate on US roadways.

While on the subject of a hyped-up technology that hasn’t quite delivered, CNN posed an interesting question — in an article titled “No, but seriously: What’s going on with bitcoin?“, David Goldman pointed out that the cryptocurrency recently dropped below $63,000 USD for the first time in over a year and a half (as of today, it has rebounded slightly to just under $71,000). He goes on to explain that global uncertainty and rapidly improving AI technology are partly to blame, although we’re honestly not quite sure how that second one works. But more importantly, he theorizes that the market is returning to where it was before the 2024 presidential election. Then candidate Trump embraced the digital currency and promised to remove restrictions he claimed were holding it back. This naturally caused a bump in Bitcoin value after he won the White House, but as those changes have yet to materialize, the excitement is apparently wearing off.

In software news, the remaining Windows users who still haven’t been beaten into submission by Microsoft will have another feature taken away from them; as of February, the operating system’s integrated 3D Viewer is officially being deprecated. The tool allows users to inspect various types of 3D files, including STLs, and was added to Windows back when Microsoft was convinced “mixed reality” was going to be a thing. Anyone who has 3D Viewer installed will still be able to use it, but it will no longer be available for download officially from Microsoft. On the bright side, the web-based alternative that Microsoft recommends seems pretty slick.

Those holding out hope for life on the Red Planet will be excited to read the recent report from NASA which claims that the organic compounds discovered on Mars by the Curiosity rover can’t be fully explained by non-biological processes. In other words, while there are geological processes that could have produced some of the molecules detected, and some could have been deposited on the planet by meteorites, none of the possibilities studied could account for them all. The researchers caution that this doesn’t mean there is current or active life on the Martian surface, however, as we still don’t fully understand the timescales required to break these molecules down. Curiosity might have sniffed out the signs of life, but that life could still have died off billions of years ago.

On the subject of space, a recent post about the number of satellites in low-Earth orbit by mathematician John Cook got some debate going. He runs the numbers and argues that given the current number of LEO satellites (~12,500), and the area of space that they operate in, each bird has roughly 100,000,000 km³ to itself. Not exactly the close quarters flying that we’ve been hearing so much about recently with the proliferation of satellite constellations such as SpaceX’s Starlink. That said, others were quick to point out that his math only really works out if all the satellites were evenly distributed, which is obviously not the case in the real world. So while his estimate is probably a bit too generous, it still helps put into context just how mind-bogglingly big space actually is.

Finally, for those who would prefer to scroll endlessly through something a bit more intellectually stimulating than social media, check out Xikipedia. This open source project takes the content from the Simple English Wikipedia and turns it into a never ending feed that you can browse, complete with an algorithm that will suggest articles to you based on your personal interests. What do you call the opposite of doomscrolling — maybe knowledgescrolling?

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’ve love to hear about it.

hackaday.com/2026/02/08/hackad…

Wooden Case Makes a 2026 TV Stylish

The middle of the 20th century produced a revolution in understated stylish consumer design, some of which lives on today. The reality of living in a 1950s or ’60s house was probably to be surrounded by the usual mess of possessions from many past decades, but the promise was of a beautiful sleek and futuristic living space. Central to this in most homes would have been the TV set, and manufacturers followed the trends of the age with cases that are now iconic. Here in 2026 we put up with black rectangles, but fortunately there’s Cordova Woodworking with a modern take on a retro TV cabinet.

We’ve put the build video below, and it’s a wonderfully watchable piece of workshop titillation in a fully-equipped modern shop. While we appreciate they’ve put the design up for sale, we think many Hackaday readers could come up with their own having already been inspired. One thing we notice over the originals is that they use “proper” wood for their case, when we know the ’60s version would have had veneer-faced ply or chipboard.

The result is a piece of furniture which nicely contains the modern TV and accessories, but doesn’t weigh a ton or dominate the room in the way one of the originals would have, much less emit that evocative phenolic hot-electronics smell. We’d have one in our living room right now. Meanwhile if you’d like a wallow in mid-century TV, we have you covered.

youtube.com/embed/5RI6_DHBPfM?…

hackaday.com/2026/02/08/wooden…

Habit Detection For Home Assistant

Computers are very good at doing exactly what they’re told. They’re still not very good at coming up with helpful suggestions of their own. They’re very much more about following instructions than using intuition; we still don’t have a digital version of Jeeves to aid our bumbling Wooster selves. [Sherrin] has developed something a little bit intelligent, though, in the form of a habit detector for use with Home Assistant.

In [Sherrin]’s smart home setup, there are lots of things that they wanted to fully automate, but they never got around to implementing proper automations in Home Assistant. Their wife also wanted to automate things without having to get into writing YAML directly. Thus, they implemented a sidecar which watches the actions taken in Home Assistant.

The resulting tool is named TaraHome. When it detects repetitive actions that happen with a certain regularity, it pops up and suggests automating the task. For example, if it detects lights always being dimmed when media is playing, or doors always being locked at night, it will ask if that task should be set to happen automatically and can whip up YAML to suit. The system is hosted on the local Home Assistant instance. It can be paired with an LLM to handle more complicated automations or specific requests, though this does require inviting cloud services into the equation.

We’ve featured lots of great Home Assistant hacks over the years, like this project that bridges 433 MHz gear to the smart home system. If you’ve found your own ways to make your DIY smart home more intelligent, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!

hackaday.com/2026/02/08/habit-…

Resist and unsubscribe: resistandunsubscribe.com

Scott Galloway docente ed esperto di finanza lancia una campagna di boicottaggio economico contro le BigTech e le aziende che sostengono l'ICE.

Ecco come motiva la sua iniziativa:
"Dobbiamo riconoscere che il presidente è del tutto indifferente all'indignazione dei cittadini, ai tribunali o ai media. Risponde a una sola cosa: il mercato. L'arma più potente per resistere all'amministrazione è uno sciopero economico nazionale mirato della durata di un mese — una campagna coordinata che colpisca le BigTech e le imprese che sostengono l'ICE — per infliggere il massimo danno con il minimo impatto sui consumatori. In sintesi, la via più breve per il cambiamento senza danneggiare i consumatori è uno sciopero economico mirato alle aziende che guidano i mercati e sostengono il nostro presidente"

Segue un elenco di #BigTech da boicottare disdicendo gli abbonamenti ai loro servizi

#EconomicStrike #boycott #IceOut #Resist #Unsubscribe #ScottGalloway

@scuola
@informapirata
@RFancio
@Khrys
@lindasartini
@quinta
@filippodb
@mcp
@lgsp
@Puntopanto
@casilli
@steko
@nemobis
@gubi
@jenshansen
@dado
@DarioZanette

Bookface 2.0 Releases!

New year, new Friendica, new Bookface!

DOWNLOAD FOR FRIENDICA 2026.01 & 2025.07-rc

DOWNLOAD FOR FRIENDICA 2024.12

If you're a server admin who is still running the previous Friendica stable 2024.12 and were pulling Bookface from either the "main" or "stable" branches of the repo please be aware those are now targeting the new stable version 2026.01, which will not work with the previous stable version. There is now a separate 2024.12 branch in the repository.

Please note that the Userstyles version has not been updated with 2.0 changes and that project is now archived. Those stylesheets will receive no further development or maintenance updates. If you're still on an instance that doesn't have the Bookface scheme available the version for Friendica Release Candidate 2025-07-rc does work with stable 2026.01.

Okay, so what's IN it? The most noticeable change in v2.0 is that the User Menu and Notifications have been moved to the far right in the desktop layout:

Also, the Search field expands on focus to make it easier to see what you are typing, and if navigation labels are enabled alignment issues with them have been fixed, as has the alignment of the buttons themselves.

When you open the User Menu now your user name appears with your avatar at all screen sizes. Some people have multiple accounts that use the same avatar and it could get confusing as to which account they were logged into when, at some screen widths, the username would disappear due to space constraints.

There has long been an alignment issue with Event Action Buttons if the label text was too long because they were absolutely positioned. They have been changed to a flex layout now, which also increased the space for the buttons above them:

The release for 2026.01 has a dozen changes and fixes. The release for 2024.12 has nearly two dozen. See the Changelog at the end of the ReadMe file for details.

@Friendica Admins @Friendica Support