One of the joys you get to experience whether as a proud parent or pet owner is that a lot of things get left around haphazardly. You could of course pick every piece of discarded clothing, half-destroyed toy and detritus yourself, but as a parent of three children himself [Nathaniel Nifong] opted to use his engineering background to potentially over engineer a wires-suspended robotic claw to do this picking up for him.

What he calls Stringman robots requires an anchoring point at four corners of a room, after which the robotic crane can then scour across the ceiling, identify targets to pick up and move these to predesignated drop-off points. It’s an open source project with the LeRobot-based firmware available on GitHub in addition to build instructions for the physical hardware. There’s also a pilot run of ready to use hardware and kits for those who want to trial it, but aren’t interested in building it themselves via [Nathaniel]’s company website.

The basic idea is that this crane can run for an hour or so and deal with the mess in its room without having to do anything yourself. The process isn’t perfect yet, of course, with the underlying diffusion transformer to implement machine vision requiring more refinement. The gripper itself struggles with objects like books, which can be a concern for parents and bookworms, and of course while the crane is operating the wires will dip down as a potential risk to anyone in the room.

Compared to an overhead crane like a traditional bridge crane this wire-suspension crane is probably more stable, but either is an interesting engineering challenge when applied to a household. Next it would probably also be cool if items could be put away where they belong instead of dropped into a bin, as so far that task will still be left to deal with by the adult humans.

Before the advent of electricity in the home made electrically-heated clothes irons a possibility, ironing was a cumbersome process, with self-heated irons being an arguable improvement over solid (so-called sad) irons that required heating in an external heat source like a stove or fire. These self-heating irons used a variety of fuels, with the one featured on the [Our Own Devices] YouTube channel using gasoline for fuel, making it technically a gasoline-powered clothes iron.

The used gasoline form is LSR, which is commonly referred to as naphtha and is also sold as camping fuel today. In addition to the gasoline version a kerosene-powered version was also sold, so you had to better make sure you refueled your iron with the right fuel.

After pouring in fresh fuel you have to prime it by pushing the plunger a couple of times, before igniting the burner with a lit match via a hole in the side while opening the fuel valve. If you did things right, the iron will now be heating up. In a sense this makes it effectively like a camping stove, with also many of the same caveats, with such irons gaining a reputation for starting fires and causing bodily harm.

Due to decaying seals this iron in the video wasn’t fired up, but it was disassembled to show the internal components, along with a comparison of the kerosene version. Inside is a kind of crude carburetor that mixes air in with the fuel to get a combustible fuel-air mix, along with plenty of soot to attest to this iron having been regularly used.

Although electrical irons eventually removed all need for gasoline-powered irons, they were still used in mostly rural settings until the 1950s. Reading the Wikipedia entry on clothes irons makes one rather glad that these days we can iron our clothes without all the fuss and significant risk of accidents of these old irons.

[Enginerd]’s chonky key handle is a beautiful use of 3D printing that helps people help themselves. The large wings, indented faces, and beefed-up grip make a typical house key much easier for someone with arthritis or difficulty gripping those brass slivers. Bright filaments in different colors can also help someone with vision limitations. The thing that will not improve is the space in your pocket or purse.

The design only requires a tiny bit of plastic, prints without supports, and what sets it apart from similar models is that you do not need any double-sided tape or bolts, only a keyring, so someone may have to assemble it for the user. The author is clever enough to use an uncut blank in the project photo so that no one will be decoding and copying their house key. We would wager they have read Hackaday if they are so prepared.

Some of the people who purchased early consumer 3D printers already need these kinds of builds, and there is no shortage of intelligent people creating remarkable open-source designs.

These days our appetite for more data storage is larger than ever, with video files larger, photo resolutions higher, and project files easily zipping past a few hundred MB. At the same time our options for data storage are becoming more and more limited. For the longest time we could count on there always being a newer, roomier, faster, and cheaper form of storage to come along, but those days would seem to be over.

We can look back and laugh at low capacity USB Flash drives of the early 2000s, yet the first storage drive to hit 1 TB capacity did so in 2007, with a Hitachi Deskstar 7k100, only for that level of capacity in PCs to not really be exceeded nineteen years later.

We also had Blu-ray discs (BD) promise to cram the equivalent of dozens of DVDs onto a single BD, with two- and even four-layer BDs storing up to a one-hundred-and-twenty-eight GB. Yet today optical media is dying a slow death as the sole remaining cheap storage option. NAND Flash storage has only increased in price, and the options for those of us who have large cold storage requirements would seem to be decreasing every day.

So what is the economical solution here? Invest in LTO tapes using commercial left-overs, or give up and sign up for Cloud Storage for the low-low price of a monthly recurring fee?

It’s Not Hoarding, I Swear

Although there are many people today who use just a lightweight laptop with something like 256 GB of storage in it without any complaints, the problem would seem to lie mostly with those who are really into having local and offline data. This can include things like multimedia content, but also project files and resources, which especially in the case of video editing and game development can quickly balloon into pretty serious size requirements.

Over the decades of memory storage, there’s been a near-constant flurry of new innovations and technologies, always with the knowledge that in a decade there would be massively larger forms of storage or at least big price drops to look forward to. This is how my first late 90s PC didn’t have just a zippy Celeron 400 CPU, but also a massive 4 GB HDD.

Compared to the 30 MB HDD in the 386-based system that I had before this was massive, but with multimedia content flooding in courtesy of the filesharing revolution, I quickly had to pop in a 10 GB HDD. By the time that I upgraded to a new PC that was considered small, and I found myself well above 20 GB, before soon joining the 1 TB and later the 5+ TB club. By 2012 HDDs were using 2 TB platters, so this was basically becoming unavoidable.

Meanwhile a lot of files were offloaded or backed up onto optical media, both CDs and DVDs. Although ZIP disks also briefly made an appearance in my PCs, optical discs were simply far cheaper and more universally usable.

The Problem

Even before the current ‘AI’ datacenter-induced tripling of Flash storage costs that’s also affecting USB Flash drives and HDDs, optical media had been slowly phased out for a while. Even without checking sales numbers, you don’t have to be a genius to consider it a bad sign that manufacturers like Pioneer are exiting the optical storage market and big names like Sony ceased the production of recordable Blu-ray discs along with MiniDisc and MiniDV formats.

If you have recently shopped around for internal 5.25″ optical disc drives (ODDs) in particular, you may have noticed that these are becoming increasingly more rare and expensive. Even stand-alone BD player options are becoming more limited, with that distinct ‘final gasp’ vibe that comes with a dying format, as with VHS and kin in the past.

Part of the problem can probably be attributed to the move away by content distributors – including multimedia, games and software – from physical media to online distribution methods. This takes the form of streaming services, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and online game stores. At this point you do not even need a BD player in your home game console, never mind PC, to install games. Neither do you need a BD player connected to your smart TV as you can just join the new brave world of terminal-based subscriptions.

So with demand for optical media massively reduced by this shift, what’s left for those of us who just want to back up our data in peace and without shelling out too much hard-earned cash?

The Future

With the prospect of cheap DVD and BD blanks becoming a thing of the past, or unusable due to a lack of new optical drives to use them with, what options remain? We can look at metrics like cost per GB to see what might conceivably make sense.

The most recent 50-disc spindle of DVD+Rs that I purchased came in at just under €15 for 235 GB, so that’s about 6 cents/GB, and I could have gotten it much cheaper by going for larger spindles and shopping around some. For comparison, SSD storage was more than triple that even before the recent price surge, and HDDs are coming in around that same price tag as well.

A quick look at LTO tapes and drives for sale shows that while tapes for the older LTO-8 standard from 2017 are pretty reasonable, the drives cost an absolute fortune, so you’d have to be pretty lucky to score one without having to pawn off a kidney.

Add to this that LTO tapes are only really guaranteed for a lifespan of 15-30 years and are incomparably slower due to being a linear format. This makes tape storage only really suitable for the coldest of cold storage, and not for keeping some videos around, or for game development resources that you would like to pop in and quickly query without dying from old age while a tape seeks to the appropriate position.

The Solution?

Even assuming that the current insane surge in pricing for RAM, NAND Flash, and even HDD storage is just a temporary blip, and that by the time 2027 rolls around the RAMpocalypse will just be a bad dream to meme about, the basic economics of cost per storage would still not have changed in any measurable way.

The advantage of optical media, especially DVDs, is that they’re a very simple technology, relatively speaking. While there is some impressive technology in the optical pick-up component of an ODD, over the decades they have become highly affordable commodity devices. Meanwhile the discs are very cheap to produce, being at their core just some plastic with a coating on which the bits are written, while being very durable if kept away from physical harm.

It’s also essentially guaranteed that a DVD+R or BD-R will not have its data altered, something which cannot be guaranteed with a USB Flash drive. Filesystem corruption and electrical issues may damage or even destroy the Flash drive.

Although it’s easy to say that one should just ‘stop hoarding data’ or subscribe to some cloud storage solution for potentially infinite money per GB, high latency and the possibility of data loss due to a datacenter issue, there are many arguments to be made in favor of keeping local, offline copies, and that this should be done on highly durable media. We just cannot be sure that optical media will remain an option in the future.

What is your take on this conundrum? How do you manage your storage needs in this modern era, and what are your plans for the future? Please feel free to sound off in the comments.

Many of us are guilty of toeing the line between having a ready supply of components at hand and simply hoarding for fear of throwing anything out. In a first admission of this problem, [Scott Lawson] decided to implement a couple of changes to assess his own position on this sliding scale.

The first change was to only put parts, components, and supplies in transparent boxes. Next was to add a sticker on each box noting the contents and box creation date. This was extended to plastic bags inside the boxes when further subdivision was warranted.

Next, the question was about usage patterns, as you may think that you know how often you use something from a specific box, or how important its contents are, but it helps to add some objectivity to this. For this, [Scott] used sheets of dot stickers, with a sticker added each time he opened a box and used something from it.

By persistently doing this for a few years at his home lab, [Scott] was able to assess which boxes fell into any of three categories: hot, warm, and cold. Cold boxes are very rarely — if ever — accessed, and can thus be readily moved to the attic, shed, or even sold off if they have spent a year or longer in cold storage. Hot boxes should obviously be kept near the work areas. This way, one can make objective decisions of what boxes should go where for optimal access, and what things in your home lab are basically just there to look pretty and gather dust.

This is an effective low-tech way to get organized. Or you can go the opposite direction.

Keeping a cool head is difficult at the best of times, least of all when it’s summer and merely thinking of touching bare skin to the pavement already gets you a second-degree burn. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to spend all summer in an air-conditioned room, but what if you took said room with you? Introducing [Hyperspace Pirate]’s air-conditioned vest.

Following on from last time’s adventures with a battery-powered air-conditioner that merely blew cold air onto one’s overheating body, this time the same compressor is used for a more compact build.

Since obviously using your body as part of the evaporator would be uncomfortable, instead a heat exchanger was used that transfers the delicious frosty cold to water-filled tubing, zip-tied inside a very fashionable vest.

The basic unit runs on a couple of LiPo packs, but a solar-powered circuit was also built and tested using two small-ish panels. Of course, the requisite backpack-sized setup for that configuration is somewhat bulky, but at least the panels can also provide shade in addition to power for the compressor, hitting two fiery birds with one frosty stone.

Compared to one of those solar-powered caps with a built-in fan, this unit with some refinement could actually be an improvement, as well as keeping you a lot chillier. We’re looking forward to [Hyperspace]’s trial runs in the upcoming Floridian summer, as well as future chilling adventures.

A significant fraction of people can’t handle lactose, like [HGModernism]. Rather than accept a cruel, ice cream free existence, she decided to do something you really shouldn’t try: biohacking her way to lactose tolerance.

The hack is very simple, and based on a peer reviewed study from the 1990s: consume lactose constantly, and suffer constantly, until… well, you can tolerate lactose. If you’re lactose intolerant, you’re probably horrified at the implications of the words “suffer constantly” in a way that those milk-digesting-weirdos could never understand. They probably think it is hyperbole; it is not. On the plus side, [HGModernism]’s symptoms began to decline after only one week.

The study dates back to the 1980s, and discusses a curious phenomenon where American powdered milk was cluelessly distributed during an African famine. Initially that did more harm than good, but after a few weeks mainlining the white stuff, the lactose-intolerant Africans stopped bellyaching about their bellyaches.

Humans all start out with a working lactase gene for the sake of breastfeeding, but in most it turns off naturally in childhood. It’s speculated that rather than some epigenetic change turning the gene for lactose tolerance back on — which probably is not possible outside actual genetic engineering — the gut biome of the affected individuals shifted to digest lactose painlessly on behalf of the human hosts. [HGModernism] found this worked but it took two weeks of chugging a slurry of powdered milk and electrolyte, formulated to avoid dehydration due to the obvious source of fluid loss. After the two weeks, lactose tolerance was achieved.

Should you try this? Almost certainly not. [HGModernism] doesn’t recommend it, and neither do we. Still, we respect the heck out any human willing to hack the way out of the limitations of their own genetics. Speaking of, at least one hacker did try genetically engineering themselves to skip the suffering involved in this process. Gene hacking isn’t just for ice-cream sundaes; when applied by real medical professionals, it can save lives.

Thanks to [Kieth Olson] for the tip!