Someone Made a Hackers DVD Robot
Media
It’s common knowledge that I love the movie “Hackers” and if you haven’t seen it you should…and in the meantime, you might not find the post all that interesting.
For the rest of us: Someone made a tape robot that works the same way as it does in the movie scene where Zero Cool is fighting with Acid Burn over the local TV station!
To jog your memory, or for those weirdos that haven’t seen this masterpiece, here’s the scene from the movie:
Hackaday has a write up. Here’s a blurb:
The whole system is controlled by an ESP32 running FluidNC inside the robot as well as a handmade cyberdeck next to it that manages the overall process of loading and storing tapes. Although [Nathan] is currently using the robot for his streaming channel, he’s planning to also use it for digitizing part of his massive tape collection, which contains a few titles that were never released on newer formats.
On a related note, this scene from “Hackers” has always struck me as odd. Are we to believe that Acid Burn was OK with the racist guy that was on the channel until Zero Cool swapped him for “The Twilight Zone”? While hardly a big flaw in a movie with a lot of, let’s say “quirks,” bit that has always bugged me a bit.
Related Posts
My Bat Phone Holiday Project
With three kids I don’t need a holiday break project to give me something to do like I used to, but I do still like to find something on my list and give it a time limit so I can use the time to accomplish something fun and improve some non-day job skills.
Read moreHacking the STLToday Paywall v2025
Welcome back to our continuing series of breaking new STLToday paywall versions. Want to hear something crazy? We’ve been doing this for over 10 years now! Or to put it another way, STLToday.com, the website for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, has been using a paywall for over a decade, and they haven’t been able to make one that isn’t cracked in a matter of minutes.
Read moreMy Current AI Workflow
Sometimes, after rebutting someone’s extreme exuberance over AI or cracking a joke, I feel like people may assume that I don’t like AI or I never use it. That’s not the case at all! I do use it and I integrate it (or advocate for its use) in my CTO role at Ten2 and when consulting but I do take care to use it in situations that make sense, such as text generation, and not places where it doesn’t make sense, such as decision-making.
Read more