Hackaday Links: February 1, 2026

[cybersecurity@poliverso.org]

Hackaday Links: February 1, 2026

For many readers, more snow is the last thing they want to see right now…but what if it comes in the form of an online simulator in the style of an old DOS game? Created by [Potch], it works like one of those “falling sand” simulators, with sliders that let you control various elements of the wintry action. For more a immersive experience, open the window and let some cold air in while you play.

If those old school graphics have you yearning for a simpler time, then you’ll love Places to Telnet, a page on the very slick CRT-themed telnet.org that lists servers you can connect to. The list is made up primarily of games, but there’s also systems you can call up to do things like show the weather or browse Wikipedia. They even take submissions, so if you know any interesting destinations that aren’t on the list, make sure to share with the class.

Our ability to make and use tools is one of the things that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom, and is an ability not often seen outside of primates. But a recent paper in Current Biology describes how one cow, Veronika, has been observed using a long-handled brush to scratch herself. Apparently the clever heifer will even flip the brush around and use the handle side when she wants to really dig in there. The paper says the findings “invite a reassessment of livestock cognition”, and points out that little serious research has been done on bovine intelligence in the 10,000 or so years since humans first domesticated them. We’re just happy this paper came out when it did — that way it will be a distant memory by the time we fire up the grill in the summer.

Get ready for Planet of the Cows
While the cows might be catching up to us, we’re still comfortably ahead of them in terms of spaceflight. Those eagerly awaiting humanity’s return to the Moon will have to wait a little longer however, as NASA has pushed back the wet dress rehearsal for Artemis II. This in turn has kicked the actual launch a few days farther down the road, and realistically, is probably the first of several delays as the space agency checks and re-checks the SLS rocket and Orion capsule before liftoff.

The launch rehearsal was supposed to start last night, but was delayed due to the unusually cold weather at the Cape — a wise precaution given the Shuttle-lineage of the SLS, especially as we’re just a few days past the 40th anniversary of the Challenger disaster.

While on the subject of returning to the Moon, Blue Origin has announced that they are pausing space tourism flights aboard their New Shepard rocket for at least two years so that they can better focus their energies on developing the Blue Moon lunar lander. It’s a bit hard to believe the two programs could have much overlap, or that the Jeff Bezos backed company doesn’t have the resources to pursue both simultaneously. Seems more likely that demand for suborbital joyrides isn’t what they hoped for, especially after the public backlash several of the celebrity passengers experienced after their flight. With Virgin Galactic still in the middle of their own multi-year pause on commercial flights, the entire sub-orbital tourism industry (such as it is) is effectively on hold for the time being.

Suborbital flights for the wealthy will likely return one day, but by the time you read this, Belkin will have permanently pulled the plug on almost all of their Wemo smart gadgets. While Belkin’s cloud services for the devices has now gone dark, they note that any devices in the wild that were configured to work with Thread or Apple’s HomeKit will continue to work in local mode. We’re no strangers to seeing IoT devices go belly-up, but the end of Wemo still feels significant. Introduced in 2011, they were an early success story in a now flooded market.

While the average Wemo owner is out of luck, there’s good news for hackers. Tools and libraries which interact with Wemo devices on the local network such as pywemo are reportedly unaffected by the cloud shutdown. So if you see any of these devices popping up on the second-hand market, or maybe even the trash, they can still be put to use. If you manage to rescue some of these smart gadgets from the landfill, make sure to let us know.

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