Your phone or laptop will give you access to the vast majority of news in the world, in languages you can read and a few hundred you can’t. Maybe you only like one news source, though, and that news source happens to be Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). If that’s the case, you might like to give this project a look from [Ron Grimes].

[Ron] built a device that does one thing and one thing only: it displays news stories from CBC. It’s built around a Raspberry Pi 2, and the project began when he wanted to interface a keypad just to see if he could. With that done, the next challenge was to integrate a 16×2 character LCD display of the HD44780 persuasion. With those two tasks completed, the question was simple — what to display? He figured tuning into the CBC news feed would be useful, and the Chocolate Box News Reader was born.

The device displays 29 news feeds in total, including the main top stories, world news, and Canadian regional news. It stores 15 news items per feed and will hang on to those stories even if the Internet drops. The reader will display the whole stash of stored news in around 90 minutes or so, and each stored item comes with more information if something strike’s [Ron’s] curiosity or interest. Files are on GitHub for the curious.

It’s a neat build, and we can imagine it being a smart item to have kicking around the house. It was also a great way for [Ron] to build on his familiarity with the Raspberry Pi, too. Meanwhile, if you’ve got your own nifty Pi-based projects—or others!—don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

The annoying thing about commercial smart home gear is its lack of interoperability. HomeAssistant is very flexible though, and it’s easy to use all kinds of gear—even stuff you bodge together yourself. [Jeff Sandberg] demonstrates that ably with his project to use ancient 1990s burglar alarm sensors in his modern smarthome setup.

The sensors in question are from an old GM Interlogix security system. The sensors themselves sit on doors or windows. They use magnets and a reed switch to sense if the door or window is opened. If so, they send out a radio message saying as much. All [Jeff] had to do was catch those messages and translate them for HomeAssistant.

To listen in on the sensors, [Jeff] employed a Nooelec NESDR—a software defined radio that could pick up the 319.5 MHz signals. The NESDR runs a tool called RTL_433, which can decode the sensor signals, and spit out MQTT messages to interface with HomeAssistant.

Much of the hard work was done already for [Jeff]—he just had to lace together the components. This is just a testament to the hard work by people in the HomeAssistant and SDR communities for figuring all this out and putting the tools online.

We’ve seen some neat HomeAssistant builds before, like this neat home control terminal. If you’re cooking up your own smarthome hacks, don’t hesitate to let us know!

The Quansheng UV-K5 is a popular handheld radio. It’s useful out of the box, but also cherished for its modification potential. [OM0ET] purchased one of these capable VHF/UHF radios, but got to hacking—as he wanted to use it as a desktop radio instead!

This might just sound like a simple reshell, but there was actually a bit of extra work involved. Most notably, the Quansheng is designed to be tuned solely by using the keypad. For desktop use, though, that’s actually kind of a pain. Thus, to make life easier, [OM0ET] decided to whip up a little encoder control to handle tuning and other control tasks using an ESP32. This was achieved with help from one [OM0WT] and files for that are on Github. Other tasks involved finding a way to make the keypad work in a new housing, and how to adapt things like the audio and data module and the speaker to their new homes.

Despite the original handheld being much smaller than the case used here, you’d be surprised how tight everything fits in the case. Still, the finished result looks great. We’ve seen some other adaptable and upgradable ham radio gear before, too. Sometimes custom is the way to go! Video after the break.

Computers were supposed to be personal, customizable, and cool. At times, in this cold modern world, we forget that. However, the cyberdeck scene is chock full of people building creative, original computers that suit their own tastes, aesthetics, and needs. [DIY Tinkerer] is one such individual, and he made the most of his woodworking skills when it came time to build his own cyberdeck!

The technological basics are along the lines of what we’re used to in this field. The build is based around a Raspberry Pi 4, with [DIY Tinkerer] selecting an 8 GB model for his needs. It’s paired with a 9000 mAh onboard battery, and there’s a power jack on the front to let the thing run on anything from 5 to 20 volts DC. For ease of use, there’s a multi-memory card reader and several USB 3 ports available.

The rest of the video focuses on the woodworking side of things. [DIY Tinkerer] shows us how he managed to build a new housing out of a rugged plastic case that would also be practical to use. The final product is both functional and attractive, and comes with an oscilloscope built in to boot! It came a long way from his earlier build, too.

We’ve seen a great load of cyberdeck builds over the years.

If you’re trying to learn a new language, there are always a lot of words to learn. A word-of-the-day calendar can help, and they’re often readily available off the shelf. Or, you can grab some hardware and build your own, as [daedal-tech] did!

The project was built as a gift to help [daedal-tech]’s partner with their efforts to pick up French. Thus, a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W was employed and paired with a small Waveshare e-Paper display. These were stuffed inside a fancy light switch plate from Hobby Lobby and a small stand, the pair of which act as a pretty nice little frame for the build. The Pi runs a small Python script which employs the BeautifulSoup4 library and the Python Image library. Basically, the script grabs French words and spits them out on the display with a small description such that one might understand their meaning.

It’s a simple build, but one that has some real utility and is fun to boot. We might see more word clocks than calendars around these parts, but we love both all the same!

The Vectrex was a unique console from the early 1980s. Developed by a company you’ve probably never heard of—Smith Engineering—it was put into production by General Consumer Electronics, and later sold by Milton Bradley. It was an outright commercial failure, but it’s remembered for its sharp vector display and oddball form factor.

The Vectrex was intended for tabletop use in a home environment. However, [Jeroen Domburg], also known as [Sprite_tm], decided to set about building a portable version. This wasn’t easy, but that just makes the development process a more interesting story. Thankfully for us, [Sprite_tm] was kind enough to tell the tale at the 2023 Hackaday Supercon.

Vectorlicious

[Sprite] starts by introducing the audience to the Vectrex, just to make sure everyone understands what was special about this thing. For comaprison’s sake, he lines it up against its contemporaries. Back in the early 1980s, the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision had incredibly low resolution video output with big ugly pixels. In contrast, the Vectrex could draw clean, sharp lines with its inbuilt vector-style display.

Basically, instead of coloring in individual pixels, the Vectrex instead drew lines from point to point on the screen. It was an entirely different way of doing graphics—fast, tidy, and effective—and it was popular in early video arcade games, too. Some Vectrex games even came with plastic overlays to create the impression of color on the screen. Unlike pixel displays, though, this technology didn’t really scale well to prettier, more lifelike graphics. Thus after the Vectrex, no other mainstream consoles adopted this technique.

From there, [Sprite_tm] walks the audience through the hardware of the Vectrex. The architecture is fairly simple, based around a 68A09 CPU, which is a Motorola CPU with some improvements over the earlier 6502. It’s paired with some ROM, RAM, and I/O glue logic, and it loads its games off cartridges. Then there’s the audio hardware, a digital-to-analog converter for video output, and all the subsequent analog electronics for driving the vector CRT display.

Unlike a modern console, what’s inside the box is no secret. Datasheets and full schematics are publicly available that lay out exactly how the whole thing works. This is hugely valuable for anyone looking to repair a Vectrex—or make a portable one. You don’t need to reverse engineer much, since it’s all laid out for you. Indeed, as [Sprite_tm] notes, a replica motherboard already exists that lets you play Vectrex games on an oscilloscope’s XY input.

Building the Portable

Some people have built small Vectrexes before, by going the emulator route with a Raspberry Pi and a small LCD display. [Sprite] wasn’t a fan of this route, as modern pixel LCDs make for jagged diagonal lines because they’re not proper vector displays like the original Vectrex CRT. Thus, to build a more authentic portable Vectrex, [Sprite_tm]’s build needed certain parts. On top of replicating the CPU and logic of the Vectrex, he needed to find a small CRT that operate as a proper vector display. Plus, he wanted to build something properly portable—”I wanna sit on the bus and then whip it out and play it,” he explains.

Obviously, finding a suitable CRT was the first big hurdle to clear. [Sprite_tm] mused over using a tube from a Sony Watchman handheld portable TV, but decided against it. He notes that these are fairly rare and valuable, and he didn’t want to destroy one for his project. But he still needed a small CRT in a practical form factor, and he found the perfect donor. In the 90s, LCDs were pretty crap and expensive, so apartment video intercoms relied on CRTs instead. Now, these systems are all largely defunct, and he notes you can find old examples of these answerphones for a few dollars online.

Of course, these answerphone CRTs weren’t designed for vector operation. However, [Sprite_tm] teaches us how you can convert one to draw straight lines on command instead of scanning like a TV. You can get legit vector operation just by squirting the right voltages into the deflection coils. Of course, getting it to work in practice is a lot harder than you might think, but perseverance got the job done in the end. Understanding the physics involved is useful, too, and [Sprite_tm] explains the theory with an apt comparison between coils and a pig.

From there, the talk explains how the rest of the hardware came together. [Sprite_tm] elected to stuff all the Vectrex magic into an FPGA, which felt cooler than software emulation but was more compact than using all-original chips on a replica mainboard. It lives on a custom PCB that also carries all the necessary electronics to drive the CRT in the desired vector mode.

The build also has a cartridge port for playing original Vectrex games. However, for ease of use, [Sprite] also fitted a RISC V CPU, some RAM, and a microSD card for loading ROMs for games that he doesn’t own in physical format. Everything was then wrapped up in a custom 3D-printed case that’s roughly twice as large as the Nintendo Game Boy Color in length and width—and about four times thicker.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a major functional component of the modern Internet. We rely on it for just about everything! It’s responsible for translating human-friendly domain names into numerical IP addresses that get traffic where it needs to go. At the heart of the system are the top-level domains (TLDs)—these sit atop the whole domain name hierarchy.

You might think these TLDs are largely immutable—rock solid objects that seldom change. That’s mostly true, but the problem is that these TLDs are sometimes linked to real-world concepts that are changeable. Like the political status of various countries! Then, things get altogether more complex. The .io top level domain is the latest example of that.

A Brief History

Before we get into the current drama, we should explain some background around top level domains. Basically, as the Internet started to grow out of its early nascent form, there was a need to implement a proper structured naming system for online entities. In the mid-1980s, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) introduced a set of original top level domains to categorize domain names. These were divided into two main types—generic top-level domains, and country code top-level domains. The generic TLDs are the ones we all know and love—.com, .org, .net, .edu, .gov, and .mil. The country codes, though, were more complex.

Initially, the country codes were based around the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 standard—two letter codes to represent all necessary countries. These were, by and large, straightforward—the United Kingdom got .uk, Germany got .de, the United States got .us, and Japan got .jp.

Eventually, management of TLDs was passed from IANA to a new organization called ICANN—Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Over time, ICANN has seen fit to add more TLDs to the official list. That’s why today, you can register a domain with a .biz, .info, or .name registration. Or .horse, .Dad, .Foo, or so many others besides. 

What’s With .io?

Over the past 20 years or so, the .io domain has become particularly popular with the tech set—the initialism recalls the idea of input/output. Thus, you have websites like Github.io or Hackaday.io using a country-code TLD for vanity purposes. It’s pretty popular in the tech world.

This was never supposed to be the case, however. The domain was originally designated for the British Indian Ocean Territory, all the way back in 1997. This is a small overseas territory of the United Kingdom, which occupies a collection of islands of the Chagos Archipelago. Total landmass of the territory is just 60 square kilometers. The largest island is Diego Garcia, which plays host to a military facility belonging to the UK and the United States. Prior to their removal by British authorities in 1968, the island played host to a population of locals known as Chagossians.

The territory has been the subject of some controversy, often concerning the Chagossians and their wish to return to the land. More recently, the Mauritian government has made demands for the British government to relinquish the islands. The East African nation considers that the islands should have been handed back when Mauritius gained independence in 1968.

Recent negotiations have brought the matter to a head. On October 3, the British and Mauritius governments came to an agreement that the UK would cede sovereignty over the islands, and that they would hence become part of Mauritius. The British Indian Ocean Territory would functionally cease to exist, though the UK would maintain a 99-year lease over Diego Garcia and continue to maintain the military facility there.

The key problem? With the British Indian Ocean Territory no longer in existence, it would thus no longer be eligible for a country-code TLD. According to IANA, ccTLDs are based on the ISO 3166-1 standard. When a country ceases to exist, it is removed from the standard, and thus, the ccTLD is supposed to be retired in turn. IANA states protocol is to notify the manager of the ccTLD and remove it after five years by default. Managers can ask for an extension, limited to another five years for a total of ten years maximum. Alternatively, a ccTLD manager may allow the domain to be retired early at their own discretion.

However, as per The Register, the situation is more complex. The outlet spoke to ICANN, which is the organization actually in charge of declaring valid TLDs. A spokesperson provided the following comment:

ICANN relies on the ISO 3166-1 standard to make determinations on what is an eligible country-code top-level domain. Currently, the standard lists the British Indian Ocean Territory as ‘IO’. Assuming the standard changes to reflect this recent development, there are multiple potential outcomes depending on the nature of the change.

One such change may involve ensuring there is an operational nexus with Mauritius to meet certain policy requirements. Should ‘IO’ no longer be retained as a coding for this territory, it would trigger a 5-year retirement process described at [the IANA website], during which time registrants may need to migrate to a successor code or an alternate location.

We cannot comment on what the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency may or may not do in response to this development. It is worth noting that the ISO 3166-1 standard is not just used for domain names, but many other applications. The need to modify or retain the ‘IO’ encoding may be informed by needs associated with those other purposes, such as for Customs, passports, and banking applications.

Basically, ICANN passed the buck, putting the problem at the feet of the International Standards Organization which maintains ISO 3166-1. If the ISO standard maintains the IO designation for some reason, it appears that ICANN would probably follow suit. If ISO drops it for some reason, it could be retired as a ccTLD.

The Register notes that the .io record in ISO 3166-1 has not changed since a minor update in 2018. Any modification by ISO would be unlikely before the treaty between the UK and Mauritius is ratified in 2025. At that point, the five year clock could start ticking.

However, history is a great educator in this regard. There’s another grand example of a country that functionally ceased to exist. In 1991, the Soviet Union was no longer a going concern. And yet, the .su designation remains “exceptionally reserved” in the ISO 3166-1 standard at the request of the Foundation for Internet Development. However, the entry notes it was “removed from ISO 3166-1 in 1992” when the USSR broke up into its constituent states. Those states were all given their own country codes, except for Ukraine and Belarus, which had already entered ISO 3166 before this point.

But can you still get a .su domain? Well, sure! Netim.com will happily register one for you. A number of websites still use the TLD, like this one, and it has reportedly become a popular TLD for cybercriminal activity. The current registry is the Russian Institute for Public Networks, and .su domains persist despite efforts by ICANN to end its use in 2007.

Given .io is so incredibly popular, it’s unlikely to disappear just because of some geopolitical changes. Even if it were to be designated for retirement, it would probably stick around for another five to ten years based on existing regulations. More likely, though, special effort will be made to officially reserve .io for continued use. Heck, even if ISO drops it, it could become a regular general TLD instead. If .pizza can be a domain, surely .io can be as well.

Long story short? There are questions around the future of .io, but nothing’s been decided yet. Expect vested interests to make sure it sticks around for the foreseeable future.