Pallets are a wonderful way to package goods and move them around, but especially the wooden ones have a very finite lifespan. This means that many of them are discarded every day, even though there is still good wood on them. Even if it’s not the highest quality wood, you can still use it for some nice wooden items, like the tea tray that [GR Woodworking] recently put together.

The reclaimed wood is the typical fast-growing, soft type, with the suspicion of it being paulownia here. Of course, wooden pallets use a wide variety of wood varieties, so not all reclaimed wood is equally suitable for applications like this, and identifying the type can be a challenge in itself.

In the video it’s shown how the wood is planed to make it smooth and straight, before the joints are created and it is married to the poplar or aspen base plate. Of note is that absolutely no power tools or bulky things like router tables are used here, just basic hand tools that should make this kind of woodworking accessible to people even without that kitted-out woodworking shop.

After assembly it’s finished with Vararhana oil-based stain to give it a darker look and really bring out the grain. Naturally, since it’s a tea tray it has to be commissioned with a proper tea ceremony, which it passes with flying colors.

Four years ago the EMF hacker camp in the UK released a new kind of event badge. The Tildagon was designed to be a recurring event badge, useful for the next EMF rather than destined to be e-waste. With the 2026 event coming up there’s a new Tildagon called the Spaceagon, and as you might expect it’s very familiar indeed.

Tildagon owners can update their badge with the Spaceagon front panel, while those without one can buy the new badge. It has a few minor updates from its predecessor, including better buttons, LEDs, and display mounting, and there’s a compass, a joystick, and touch sensitive areas.

The Tildagon introduced its own add-on format, the Hexpansion. This year there’s the first official Hexpansion, a keyboard, using the same rubber moulding we see on quite a few maker projects. We like the Hexpansion idea because it uses an edge connector rather than a set of pins on the device, but at the cost of more expensive badge parts.

If you’re going to EMF you should be able to order yourself a Spaceagon, or an upgrade kit if you already own a Tildagon. Meanwhile we covered the 2024 version back when it arrived, and surprisingly this isn’t the first keyboard add-on for it either.

While many operating systems seem to try to prevent you from peeking under the hood, Unix and Linux positively encourage it. One great tool that we’ve looked at before is strace. Using this tool, you can see details about every system call a program makes. As you might imagine, for any significant program, the output from strace can be huge.

While I’m not always a fan of GUIs, this is one of those cases where making the data easier to browse is a great idea. Enter strace-tui, a text-based GUI for strace from [Rodrigodd]. The program can parse output from strace or manage the strace execution itself, and either way, display the data in a useful way.

I started out looking at [janestreet’s] strace_ui, but the OCaml setup was throwing errors for me, so I just gave up. The strace-tui installs like many Rust programs, using cargo, and it went smoothly.

An Example

The only issue I had running the tool was that I don’t normally keep ~/.cargo/bin on my path. You can add it to your path, link the executable into your path, or solve that in any number of other ways.

As an example, I traced a symbolic link command (ln -sf nature.txt test.link). It is easy to pick out some essential information on the top line. The command took 112 system calls, 14 of them failed (which isn’t unexpected), there were no unfinished calls, no signals, and only a single PID.

The bottom shows things you can do. Arrows or j and k, along with the usual cursor control keys like Home and Page Down scroll through the list. The right and left arrows will expand or collapse items. That will show details about the call in question, including the arguments and return values. You can consult the help for all the details.

Useful Tools

The real power, though, lies in filtering out the noise and searching for specific things. If you are looking at something you don’t want to see, you can press a lowercase h to hide it, but note that it hides everything similar, not just an individual line. An uppercase H will bring up a filter dialog where you can include or exclude groups of data.

Searching is also a great way to find what you want. A slash key starts a search. The N key navigates with a lowercase entry moving forward and an uppercase one moving backward.

For example, if I only wanted to look at openat commands, I could open the dialog. Not only does it show filters, but it also shows how many things match (there are 30 instances of openat). Pressing a will toggle all entries off and then selecting openat greatly reduces the amount of output. I also selected symlinkat,  read, and fstat so I would only look at the file-related items.

Many of the file operations are related to loading shared libraries and locales. To find the actual line that makes the link, it was easy to press the slash key and some text from the file like test.link.

That will highlight the symlinkat line, which is no surprise, but this is a simple example. If you press Enter or the right arrow, you can see more detail, including arguments, the return value, the amount of time executing, and a backtrace that shows how your program made it to the call.

This is a simple example, but the program can also visualize multi-threaded or multi-process traces using graphs. That can be helpful for analyzing real programs.

Even this simple program has a lot of output. Sure, if you are trying to debug a locale-related problem, all of the lines about loading locale files that don’t exist might be gold. But most of the time, you don’t really care about all the standard loading scaffolding and a tool like this can help cut through the chatter.

Missing Links

According to the project page, there are some missing features, and we presume this is a roadmap for future development.

In particular, the program can’t filter traces for specific processes or threads. There’s also no way to copy details to the clipboard or export filtered traces out to a file. Of course, it is open source, so you can always volunteer to add some of this or your favorite feature.

If you give strace-tui a shot, or have other strace tips and tricks you’d like to share, let us know in the comments.

We do sometimes go on about how absurdly powerful microcontrollers are these days, but this time it’s technically a microprocessor, not a microcontroller, at the heart of the build — specifically, an STM32MP2. Still, you know you’re living in the future when an STM32 of any sort can not only run [John Cronin]’s gk handheld game console, but provide 3D acceleration to boot.

Full disclosure: you’ve seen this handheld here before — sorta. That was version 3, which was an STM32-based handheld.  V3 used the much less powerful STM32H7S7L8, with a single Cortex-M7 clocked at 600 MHz and a 2D NeoChrom GPU. The STM32MP2, by contrast, has dual Cortex-A35 cores running 1.5 GHz and a bonus Cortex-M33. It’s running a custom OS called gkos, which is mostly POSIX-compliant and boasts nigh-instantaneous boot times.

As with the last version, you can run a bevy of emulators from the 8-bit to the 32-bit era, but the added power and OpenGL support mean this handheld also runs N64 games via a fork of mupen64. There are also emulators for ‘real’ computers, namely Atari ST and XL, and a little-known thing known as a “PC”. DOSBox gets the equivalent performance of a 50 MHz 486, which means you can run all the classics, including DOOM, though that will be more performant running the native-running port of sdl-DOOM.

You also get extra inputs to play with and a bigger screen compared to the last version. Oh, and WiFi. There are accelerometers for tilt control, and did we mention the screen’s touch input is supported? If it weren’t for the form-factor, we’d call this a capable little computer. The GK handheld looks like an awesome handheld console, check it out in the demo video below.

In our search for the unusual or interesting among the world of operating systems, it might seem unexpected that today’s choice for a Daily Driver is the latest version of Microsoft Windows. Aside from Hackaday perhaps having a larger than average percentage of viewers using Linux based operating systems and generally catering to open source enthusiasts, there’s hardly anything special about Windows, is there?

Oddly for me there is — because while it’s a common enough OS for the masses, the last time I had a Windows computer it ran XP. That venerable OS is a world away from today’s Windows 11, and thus as someone who’s exclusively sat in front of a GNOME desktop for much of the last two decades, it’s an entirely new operating system.

There’s no doubt that it will make a Daily Driver, because of course I’ll be able to do my work on it. Where the interest lies is in seeing what Windows has become. Is it still a useful general purpose operating system, or has it become the locked-down walled garden of crapware that its detractors warn you about? Time to dive in.

A Secret Windows Machine

I have had a Windows partition on this machine since I bought it back in 2024. It’s an ex-corporate laptop from a reseller, and those machines always come with a too-small flash drive and a Windows install. So when I bought a new much larger drive for my Linux install I dropped the Windows partition on it too. After all, you never know when you might need Windows for something, right? Two years later and I’ve never touched it, so my first task in my Windows 11 is to run a system update. I timed the start to 16:30, and left it running. I have a gigabit fibre connection so it should be quick, shouldn’t it. At 19:16 I was finally able to use the computer, but even then Microsoft wasn’t quite finished. There were a slew of permissions choices where I had to opt out of their various data slurps, and their offers and mail.

Coming back to the Windows desktop when your last experience was XP with the Windows 95 theme is a bit of a shock. You instinctively head for the Start menu in the bottom left corner and instead find a widget box full of news feeds and stock tickers you don’t want. Closer inspection shows they’ve chased a macOS style interface with a Windows logo on the bottom bar as the Start menu roughly where Mac users find their folder full of apps.

I’m trying to approach this think as a Windows user would, so instead of heading off and downloading open source installers as you might expect, I’m off to the Microsoft Store. Although Redmond has its hand on my shoulder I was able to find GIMP without issue, so the basic requirements for my normal daily use is sorted without any drama at all. It’s the ancient version 2.1 though, so it was off to gimp.org for the latest version. Installation was the same as any Windows install back in the day, there’s no locking down here.

Crapware’s a Bit Different

So I’ve got a Daily Driver, what are my impressions. After so long away and having missed the debacle of Windows 8’s Metro interface, I think the desktop interface is actually pretty good. It’s kept up with the times in a way macOS — with its barmy top-corner menus which just don’t work in a world of 4K screens — hasn’t. As to the commercial aspects of the OS, I was expecting it to ask me for a Microsoft account and it hasn’t, so that’s a plus. But the thing I had forgotten about was the ubiquity of nag screens. I haven’t had to click a “No, I don’t want to upgrade to your premium version” button in a very long time, and here I am suddenly having all manner of software wanting my attention. No Adobe Acrobat, I don’t want to give you any money! And then there’s the AI. Nothing in my Linux install is trying to offer me AI services, but it seems everything is here.

My jaunt into Windows land will be over when I’ve finished writing this piece, and I guess it’ll be as long again before I revisit this partition. Updating it took nearly three hours, and it’s constantly nagging me for paid upgrades, offering me news stories from sources I don’t like, and trying to push AI services on me. But is it a walled garden of crapware? That’s a more difficult question to answer. I’ve not had to enter a Microsoft account to use it, and I can install the software I want, so it’s not become the walled garden its detractors will tell you it has. The crapware though? Less clear cut.

This is a reseller laptop, so at least in theory, its original drive should have been wiped or even destroyed as part of a corporate data security scheme. So the reseller puts a cheap drive in and gives it a basic Windows install. It’s completely vanilla Windows 11, which is where it differs from many new laptops. There is no bundled software, no nagware, no commercial anti-virus, and no dubious-value security package. It’s as clean as Windows gets, but even so, there’s still too many features being pushed on me that I simply don’t want. It may not have old-style crapware installed, but the crap is still there.

So my final impression? This trip into Windows-land has been interesting, and I’ve found an OS better than I expected. But it’s reminded me again of the reasons why I moved on from dual-booting Windows XP all those years ago, with a lingering feeling that I still don’t quite own it.

Windows 11 then, it’s a daily driver for millions of people, but I still won’t be one of them.

Photogrammetry is the process of 3D scanning an object by taking a lot of photographs, then using software to turn those into a 3D model. But the process can only scan what the camera can see, and one can’t always get a good view of every part of an object. To solve this, [Thomas Megel] shared an experiment in using a mirror to capture the underside of an object simultaneously with its top. The results were encouraging!

To do this he perched a small tabletop gaming mini on a mirror serving as a turntable platform in his self-designed OpenScan Mini machine, which is designed to take highly structured photos of small objects for scanning purposes. This produced a single scan with two objects, the original and its mirror image, together in one file.

Aligning separate models and combining them into one is a common way to deal with partial or incomplete scans. The idea here is to get two scans at once, instead of separately with a reposition of the object in between. Additionally, it should be possible for the software to automatically separate, align, and combine the two since it is known exactly where the mirror plane is.

As far as a proof of concept, it’s encouraging. [Thomas] is still playing with the idea and looking for suggestions, so if you have any insights be sure to share them.

3D scanning can be a very useful tool, and while photogrammetry can be done with little more than your mobile phone’s camera, in some ways the concept is over a hundred years old.

Imagine for a moment that the Cookie Monster is going to visit, but all the cookie baking utensils in your house have been mislaid. The horror! Fortunately [Startup Chuck] is here with a video showing the process of baking cookies in a 3D printer, and as an extra treat he’s using entirely 3D printed utensils too.

The utensils are comprehensive array of all you’d need for serious cookie production, even going as far as to print a mixing bowl and beater for a KitchenAid mixer. There are scoops aplenty, and something we’re particularly impressed with, a spatula with a TPU blade. We’re guessing that FDM prints might not be the best for cooking because all manner of food could get caught in those layer lines and go off, but let’s face it, this is a bit of fun rather than a forever cooking project. We like the AI generated spork for its near-flatness, reminding us of our AI-generated breakfast. Finally he even prints a cookie baking sheet using nylon filament.

An enclosed 3D printer makes a surprisingly effective low-temperature oven, with the heated bed as the element. It works, and makes recognizable cookies, though they’re not browned. As entertaining as this experiment may be, we can’t recommend following his example — at the very least, moisture and food ingredients in your printer probably aren’t conducive to good future printing.