The Sidekick was a thin client before anyone called it that, and when its servers went dark it became a very nice paperweight. Someone dug the old SDK out of an archive and started poking at DangerOS, which is exactly the kind of pointless, delightful archaeology this category exists for. Mind the bits about the Java-based OS and what survives of it.

The line between a microcontroller and a real SoC just got blurrier: the ESP32-S31 is RISC-V with a proper MMU, so this is the real kernel rather than the no-MMU compromise. Nobody is going to compile a browser on it, but a cheap Wi-Fi board running a 6.x port is exactly the kind of toy that ends up in a hundred weekend projects. Watch for the Espressif repo to grow a community.

A small commit, very much in the OpenBSD house style: instead of a sprawling security dashboard, one new key in top that shows which processes have pledged, unveiled or chrooted themselves. The nice part is that it makes privilege-awareness visible at a glance, so unhardened daemons stand out on a running system. Tiny change, satisfying idea.

Every e-reader is a little Linux box with a locked door, and this project takes the door off its hinges. A jailbroken Paperwhite 3 gets an Alpine userspace, games, a browser, an arXiv client and even a tiny local language model that types out its thoughts at a stately pace. Very much the old spirit: old hardware, cheap on the second-hand market, and nothing leaving the device.

Late-90s energy in pure form: someone put an IRC network on a port every tool refuses to touch, then scanned the whole IPv4 space to see who else was squatting there. The gap between what the socket API allows and what the wire allows is the whole joke, and the trick. The scan turns up a few residents who probably ought to be somewhere else.

Someone noticed that the UTF-8 bytes for a goat decode on an 8088 into a locked flag load followed by two NOPs, which is to say they run and do nothing, harmlessly. From there it is a short, deranged hop to whole programs spelled in emoji. The proper old-school spirit: no point to it at all, beyond the joy of finding out.

Someone shipped a physical N64 game in 2026, and the cheat underneath is the best part. The engine only understands 2D, so the levels simply have no elevation and it never learns about the third dimension. That is the sort of lie the old console programmers would have respected. Sixty frames a second on hardware with 4 kB of texture memory is no small thing either.

Mes exists for one of the most stubbornly idealistic goals in free software: building the whole toolchain up from something small enough to audit. What makes this post good is the confession, not the changelog. A researcher admits that proving an idea can work comes easily, and handing people a finished release does not.

Proper demoscene stuff: a procedural landscape with an accidental moon, made for Outline 2026 and fitted into less space than this paragraph. The write-up is the treat, with Forth pressed into service as a stepping stone because it maps so neatly onto the x87 stack. Note the render time on period-correct cycles. Patience was a feature in 1994.

No screen, no touch, just a serial port and a shell, which is to say the correct way to meet a computer. Someone looked at an ESP32-S3 and decided what it needed was an editor, GPS, weather and APRS, plus installable apps in C. The single supported board is the very late-90s price of doing it for fun.

Yes, it runs DOOM, and no, that is not the interesting part. Dumping the camera's memory out through photo metadata is the sort of trick that makes you sit up, and it turns a sealed bit of landfill into a documented platform. Probably a better console than camera, as the write-up concedes.

This is the correct response to finding a neglected gadget in a drawer: adopt its orphaned operating system. A dormant project, a maintainer asking for help and a stranger who turns up to do the work is the late-90s spirit in one blog post. Note the budget, about 12 KB of RAM left for apps, and that Python is running there at all.

Everyone thinks about building a laser harp and almost nobody does, which makes this one's excess all the more welcome. The detail to enjoy is using photoresistors on purpose, because their sluggishness gives you pluck speed and so dynamics. Then there is the fog machine hookup, which is the only sensible way to make the strings visible.

Somebody built an 8-bit machine out of 460 dual triodes, gave it flip digits salvaged from British railway platform clocks, and made it run an airship simulator. This is precisely what the hobby is for. The rest of the list, including a revived West German 4-bit trainer, is a pleasant evening of browsing for anyone who misses front panels.

Someone is working through the Futamura projections on a Brainfuck compiler for no reason beyond the joy of it, which is exactly the spirit this category exists for. Partial evaluation is one of those ideas that sounds like a parlour trick until the compiler falls out. Read the earlier instalment first, as the author sensibly insists.

This is the hobbyist spirit at its most charming: a retro handset, a tiny SIP client and arcade buttons in place of a dialling plan. The best touch is that each contact's button lights only when it's a civilised hour in their time zone, which is more scheduling discipline than most calendar software manages. There are no inbound calls either, so the scammers can look elsewhere.

Every great hack begins with something absurd and small. Here, a car that apparently insists on a map SD card before it will let you change the time, and an owner who assumed that could not possibly be true. The late-90s spirit lives on in anyone willing to root a head unit over a wrong clock.

One outage, one suspicious command, and a developer who wouldn't accept that he had simply fat-fingered it. Anyone who has lived near the kernel will enjoy the moment the fifty-year-old utility turns out to be the culprit, and the digging that follows is the fun part.

A 454 MHz ARM9 with no FPU, 60 MB of RAM and Linux 2.6.28 is not where most people go looking for a modern internet radio, which is the appeal. The nice detail is the bundled TLS stack, because the stock OpenSSL dates from 2004. Pure late-90s spirit: nobody asked, it was hard, and now there is a little box that works.

The Fourth Edition tape turned up in a storage room last year, and people are now doing what people should do with such a find: reading it for fun. This author follows memory allocation back to a routine sitting in the C compiler's tools, before it had become a tidy library call. Nothing you don't know about allocators, but plenty of pleasure in seeing the ancestor in medieval C.

The phone company may have taken the copper away, but a small board with an ESP32 will give an old handset its dial tone back. Scott Dylewski's design handles ringing, calls between two phones, SIP and an answering machine, with dial codes for home automation. Open files, real bells, and the correct sort of pointlessness.

A comic book history of free software is the sort of thing that should have been handed out with every 1990s install CD. This is the third part of its BSD run, and the fun for someone who knows the story is seeing how it gets drawn. It is a bedtime story for people with opinions about init.

Set the hype aside and enjoy the hack: hand-written real-mode assembly, int8 weights, and a 386 hallucinating PCI bars for hardware that never existed. It is the same spirit as a demoscene intro, with a kernel log as the demo. Anyone who has read a lot of boot logs will find the output unsettlingly familiar.

Lisp machines get all the nostalgia, but the 80s also had hardware for non-strict functional languages, and it lost for the usual reason: commodity CPUs kept getting faster. Now that they've stopped being so obliging, a PhD student is trying the idea again for the sheer cute of it. The demo comes first, which is how all such talks should open.