We’re less than a week away from the 2026 Hackaday Supercon, and things are getting a little… intense. So we trust you’ll forgive us if this week’s post weighs in a bit less than usual and reaches you a little later in the day. Especially since we’ll start it off with the official schedule for this year’s festivities.
Earlier this week we announced the more than 30 speakers who will be gracing the stage at this year’s Supercon, and before that we told you about the dozen deep dive workshops designed for attendees who want to get their hands dirty. Now those of us joining you in Pasadena can finally start plotting our course through the weekend to make sure we maximize our hacking journey.
Hubble Space Telescope
Speaking of planning ahead, NASA is once again looking for proposals on how to save the Hubble Space Telescope. The iconic observatory has no propulsive capabilities of its own, and with the Space Shuttle long since retired, no vehicles can provide the occasional kick in the pants it needs to maintain a stable orbit. As it stands, Hubble has only until 2034 or so before it reenters Earth’s atmosphere and burns up.
That gives a commercial company the better part of a decade to design, build, and launch a vehicle that can grab onto Hubble and take it to a higher orbit. That would have been an impossible timeline in the past, but commercial competition has greatly increased the pace at which missions can be put together. While it was ultimately unsuccessful, the $30 million commercial mission designed to reboost the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory was launched just nine months after the ink dried on the contract. If NASA decides to go ahead with a Hubble rescue mission, the timeline — and undoubtedly the paycheck — will be considerably expanded for whatever company takes on the challenge.
On the subject of endangered pieces of expensive hardware, it looks like Apple’s foray into folding displays has met with some difficulty. Some users are reporting unusually tight hinges in their iPhone Duo, which in some cases is followed by a crunching sound and eventually a busted display. The company says that only a “small number” of devices have been impacted, but Internet sleuths believe that still may put the total in the thousands.
In their phenomenal teardown, iFixit took a look at some potential causes for the screen failures and theorized that the mechanism which cradles the display as it folds may be getting jammed up and not providing adequate mechanical support. Though there’s not enough data yet to say exactly what’s happening, it does seem clear that it’s not a user issue.
Finally, if you have fond memories of uploading your wardriving data to WiGLE, check out Radiaverse. It’s sort of the same concept, except instead of reporting on the location of WiFi access points, users upload radiation data pulled from their RadiaCode detectors. We sincerely hope you don’t find anything too spicy while exploring the interactive globe, but if you do, we’d like to hear about it.
See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.
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