When I was a kid, I was interested in a number of professions that are now either outdated, or have changed completely. One of those dreams involved checking out books and things to patrons, and it was focused primarily on pulling out the little card and adding a date-due stamp.

Of course, if you’ve been to a library in the last 20 years, you know that most of them don’t work that way anymore. Either the librarian scans special barcodes, or you check materials out yourself simply by placing them just so, one at a time. Either way, you end up with a printed receipt with all the materials listed, or an email. I ask you, what’s the fun in that? At least with the old way, you’d usually get a bookmark for each book by way of the due date card.

As I got older and spent the better part of two decades in a job that I didn’t exactly vibe with, I seriously considered becoming a programmer. I took Java, Android, and UNIX classes at the local junior college, met my now-husband, and eventually decided I didn’t have the guts to actually solve problems with computers. And, unlike my husband, I have very little imagination when it comes to making them do things.

Fast forward to last weekend, the one before Thanksgiving here in the US. I had tossed around the idea of making a personal library system just for funsies a day or so before, and I brought it up again. My husband was like, do you want to make it tonight using ChatGPT? And I was like, sure — not knowing what I was getting into except for the driver’s seat, excited for the destination.

Vibing On a Saturday Night

I want to make a book storage system. Can you please write a Python script that uses SQL Alchemy to make a book model that stores these fields: title, author, year of publication, genre, and barcode number?

So basically, I envisioned scanning a book’s barcode, pulling it up in the system, and then clicking a button to check it out or check it back in. I knew going in that some of my books don’t have barcodes at all, and some are obliterated or covered up with college bookstore stickers and what have you. More on that later.

First, I was told to pip install sqlalchemy, which I did not have. I was given a python script called books_db.py to get started. Then I asked for code that looks up all the books and prints them, which I was told to add to the script.

Then things were getting serious. I asked it to write a Flask server and a basic HTML front end for managing the books in the system. I was given the Flask server as app.py, and then some templates: base.html to be used by all pages, and index.html to view all the books, and add_book.html to, you know, add a new book. At that point, I got to see what it had created for the first time, and I thought it was lovely for a black and white table. But it needed color.

Check It Out

I asked the chat-thing for features and implemented them piecemeal, as you do if you’re not a masochist. First up was a cute little trash-can delete-button for every entry. Then it was time to set up the CheckoutEvent. Each of these events records which book it belongs to, whether it’s a check-out or check-in event, and the timestamp of said event. Of course, then it was time to get the checkout history wired to the front-end and accessible by clicking a book’s title.

All I really had to do was add a history route to app.py, update index.html to make the titles clickable, and create the book_history.html it spat out. Then I had it add the buttons for checking in and out on the new checkout history page, which involved adding routes to app.py as well as a helper to compute the current status.

Then it had me modify the history route and update book_history.html with the actual buttons. And they’re super cute, too — there’s a little red book on the checkout button, and a green book on the check-in.

Barcode Blues

On the index.html page, can you add a barcode number-based search box? And when the user searches, redirect them to the book page for that barcode?

Now it was time to get the barcode scanning situation up and running. I was sure at some point that ChatGPT would time me out for the night since I use the free model, but it just kept helping me do whatever I wanted, and even suggesting new features.

I wanted the barcode handling to be twofold: one, it should definitely pull the checkout page if the book exists in the system, and it should also definitely go to the book-entering page if not.

Yes — that’s a great workflow feature.
We’ll add a barcode search box to your index page, and when someone submits a barcode, the app will:

1. Look up the book by barcode

2. Redirect straight to that book’s checkout history page

3. Show a nice error if the barcode doesn’t exist

I did what it told me, adding a barcode search route in app.py and updating the index() route to use it. I then added its barcode search form to index.html. It was at this point that I had to figure out a way to generate barcodes so I could make little stickers for the books that lack them entirely, or have otherwise obliterated ones.

I have a pretty basic 1D barcode scanning gun, and it won’t scan everything. As I soon found out, it prefers fake EAN barcodes to UPCs altogether. I finally found an online barcode generator and got to work, starting with a list of randomly-generated numbers I made with Excel. I decided I wanted all the fake barcodes to start with 988, which is close enough to the ISBN 978 lead-in, and happens to use my favorite number twice.

We took a brief detour as I asked the chat-thing to make the table to have ascending/descending sorting by clicking the headers. The approach it chose was to keep things server-side, and use little arrows to indicate direction. I added sorting logic to app.py and updated index.html to produce the clickable headers, and also decided that the entries should be color-coded based on genre, and implemented that part without help from GPT. Then I got tired and went to bed.

The Long, Dark Night of the Solo Programmer

I’m of a certain age and now sleep in two parts pretty much every night. In fact, I’m writing this part now at 1:22 AM, blasting Rush (2112) and generally having a good time. But I can tell you that I was not having a good time when I got out of bed to continue working on this library system a couple of hours later.

There I was, entering books (BEEP!), when I decided I’d had enough of that and needed to try adding more features. I cracked my knuckles and asked the chat-thing if it could make it so the search works across all fields — title, author, year, genre, or barcode. It said, cool, we can do that with a simple SQLAlchemy or_ query. I was like, whatever, boss; let’s get crazy.

Can you make it so the search works across all fields?

It had me import or_ and update the search route in app.py to replace the existing barcode search route with a generalized search using POST. Then I was to update index.html to rename the input to a general query. Cool.

But no. I messed it up some how and got an error about a missing {% endblock %}. In my GPT history it says, I’m confused about step 2. Where do I add it? And maybe I was just tired. I swear I just threw the code up there at the top like it told me to. But it said:

Ah! I see exactly why it’s confusing — your current index.html starts with the <h1> and then goes straight into the table. The search form should go right under the <h1> and before the table.

Then I was really confused. Didn’t I already have a search box that only handled barcodes? I sure did, over in base.html. So the new search code ended up there. Maybe that’s wrong. I don’t remember the details, but I searched the broader internet about my two-layer error and got the thing back to a working state many agonizing minutes later. Boy, was I proud, and relieved that I didn’t have to ask my husband to fix my mistake(s) in the morning. I threw my arms in the air and looked around for the cats to tell them the good news, but of course, I was the only one awake.

Moar Features!

I wasn’t satisfied. I wanted more. I asked it to add a current count of books in the database and display it toward the top. After that, it offered to add a count of currently-checked-out vs. available books, to which I said yes please. Then I wanted an author page that accepts an author’s name and shows all books by that author. I asked for a new page that shows all the books that are checked out. Most recently, I made it so the search box and the column headers persist on scroll.

I’m still trying to think of features, but for now I’m busy entering books, typing up check-out cards on my IBM Wheelwriter 5, and applying library pockets to the inside back covers of all my books. If you want to make your own personal library system, I put everything on GitHub.

On the Shoulders of Giants (and Robots)

I couldn’t have done any of this without my husband’s prompts and guidance, his ability to call shenanigans on GPT’s code whenever warranted, and ChatGPT itself. Although I have programmed in the past, it’s been a good long time since I even printed “Hello, World” in any language, though I did find myself recalling a good deal about this and that syntax.

If you want to make a similar type of niche system for your eyes only, I’d say this could be one way to do it. Wait, that’s pretty non-committal. I’d say just go for it. You have yourself and the broader Internet to check mistakes along the way, and you just might like some of the choices it makes on your behalf.

We’ve all been there. You’ve found a beautiful piece of older hardware at the thrift store, and bought it for a song. You rush it home, eager to tinker, but you soon find it’s just not working. You open it up to attempt a repair, but you could really use some information on what you’re looking at and how to enter service mode. Only… a Google search turns up nothing but dodgy websites offering blurry PDFs for entirely the wrong model, and you’re out of luck.

These days, when you buy an appliance, the best documentation you can expect is a Quick Start guide and a warranty card you’ll never use. Manufacturers simply don’t want to give you real information, because they think the average consumer will get scared and confused. I think they can do better. I’m demanding a new two-tier documentation system—the basics for the normies, and real manuals for the tech heads out there.

Give Us The Goods

Once upon a time, appliances came with real manuals and real documentation. You could buy a radio that came with a full list of valves that were used inside, while telephones used to come with printed circuit diagrams right inside the case. But then the world changed, and a new phrase became a common sight on consumer goods—”NO USER SERVICABLE PARTS INSIDE.” No more was the end user considered qualified or able to peek within the case of the hardware they’d bought. They were fools who could barely be trusted to turn the thing on and work it properly, let alone intervene in the event something needed attention.

This attitude has only grown over the years. As our devices have become ever more complex, the documentation delivered with them has shrunk to almost non-existent proportions. Where a Sony television manual from the 1980s contained a complete schematic of the whole set, a modern smartphone might only include a QR code linking to basic setup instructions on a website online. It’s all part of an effort by companies to protect the consumer from themselves, because they surely can’t be trusted with the arcane knowledge of what goes on inside a modern device.

This Sony tv manual from 1985 contained the complete electrical schematics for the set.
byu/a_seventh_knot inmildlyinteresting

This sort of intensely technical documentation was the norm just a few decades ago.

It’s understandable, to a degree. When a non-technical person buys a television, they really just need to know how to plug it in and hook it up to an aerial. With the ongoing decline in literacy rates, it’s perhaps a smart move by companies to not include any further information than that. Long words and technical information would just make it harder for these customers to figure out how to use the TV in the first place, and they might instead choose a brand that offers simpler documentation.

This doesn’t feel fair for the power user set. There are many of us who want to know how to change our television’s color mode, how to tinker with the motion smoothing settings, and how to enter deeper service modes when something seems awry. And yet, that information is kept from us quite intentionally. Often, it’s only accessible in service manuals that are only made available through obscure channels to selected people authorised by OEMs.

Two Tiers, Please

I don’t think it has to be this way. I think it’s perfectly fine for manufacturers to include simple, easy-to-follow instructions with consumer goods. However, I don’t think that should preclude them from also offering detailed technical manuals for those users that want and need them. I think, in fact, that these should be readily available as a matter of course.

Call it a “superuser manual,” and have it only available via a QR code in the back of the basic, regular documentation. Call it an “Advanced Technical Supplement” or a “Calibration And Maintenance Appendix.” Whatever jargon scares off the normies so they don’t accidentally come across it and then complain to tech support that they don’t know why their user interface is now only displaying garbled arcane runes. It can be a little hard to find, but at the end of the day, it should be a simple PDF that can be downloaded without a lot of hurdles or paywalls.

I’m not expecting manufacturers to go back to giving us full schematics for everything. It would be nice, but realistically it’s probably overkill. You can just imagine what that would like for a modern smartphone or even just a garden variety automobile in 2025. However, I think it’s pretty reasonable to expect something better than the bare basics of how to interact with the software and such. The techier manuals should, at a minimum, indicate how to do things like execute a full reset, enter any service modes, and indicate how the device is  to be safely assembled and disassembled should one wish to execute repairs.

Of course, this won’t help those of us repairing older gear from the 90s and beyond. If you want to fix that old S-VHS camcorder from 1995, you’re still going to have to go to some weird website and risk your credit card details over a $30 charge for a service manual that might cover your problem. But it would be a great help for any new gear moving forward. Forums died years ago, so we can no longer Google for a post from some old retired tech who remembers the secret key combination to enter the service menu. We need that stuff hosted on manufacturer websites so we can get it in five minutes instead of five hours of strenuous research.

Will any manufacturers actually listen to this demand? Probably, no. This sort of change needs to happen at a higher level. Perhaps the right to repair movement and some boisterous EU legislation could make it happen. After all, there is an increasing clamour for users to have more rights over the hardware and appliances they pay for. If and when it happens, I will be cheering when the first manuals for techies become available. Heaven knows we deserve them!

Headlights. Indicators. Trunk releases. Seatbelts. Airbags. Just about any part of a car you can think of is governed by a long and complicated government regulation. It’s all about safety, ensuring that the car-buying public can trust that their vehicles won’t unduly injure or maim them in regular operation, or in the event of accident.

However, one part of the modern automobile has largely escaped regulation—namely, the humble door handle. Automakers have been free to innovate with new and wacky designs, with Tesla in particular making waves with its electronic door handles. However, after a series of deadly incidents where doors wouldn’t open, regulators are now examining if these door handles are suitable for road-going automobiles. As always, regulations are written in blood, but it raises the question—was not the danger of these complicated electronic door handles easy to foresee?

Trapped

A number of automakers have developed fancy retractable door handles in recent years. They are most notably seen on electric vehicles, where they are stated to have a small but measurable aerodynamic benefit. They are often paired with buttons or other similar electronic controls to open the doors from the inside. Compared to mechanical door handles, however, these door handles come with a trade-off in complexity. They require electricity, motors, and a functioning control system to work. When all is well, this isn’t a problem. However, when things go wrong, a retractable electronic door handle often proves inaccessible and useless.

It’s not hard to find case reports of fatal incidents involving vehicles with electronic door handles—both inside and out. Multiple cases have involved occupants burning alive inside Tesla vehicles, in which electronic door handles failed after a crash. Passengers inside the vehicles have failed to escape due to not finding emergency release door pulls hidden in the door panels, while bystanders have similarly been unable to use the retracted outside door handles to free those trapped inside.

In response, some Tesla owners have gone so far as to release brightly-colored emergency escape ripcords to replace the difficult-to-spot emergency release pulls that are nearly impossible to find without prior knowledge. In the case of some older models, though, there’s less hope of escape. For example, in the Tesla Model 3 built from 2017 to 2023, only front doors have an emergency mechanical release. Rear passengers are out of luck, and must find another route of escape if their electronic door handles fail to operate. No Tesla vehicles feature an easily-accessible mechanical release that can be used from outside the vehicle.

It’s worth noting that in the US market, federal regulations have mandated glow-in-the-dark trunk releases be fitted to all sedans from the 2002 model year onwards. You could theoretically escape from the trunk of certain Teslas more easily than a Cybertruck or Model 3 with a failed electrical system.

Tesla isn’t the only company out there building cars with retractable door handles. It does, however, remain the most prominent user of this technology, and its vehicles have been involved in numerous incidents that have made headlines. Other automakers, such as Audi and Fiat, have experimented with electronic door handles, both for ingress and egress, with varying degrees of mechanical backup available. In some cases, automakers have used smart two-stage latches. A small pull activates the electronic door release, while a stronger pull will engage a mechanical linkage that unlatches the door. It’s smart engineering—the door interface responds to the exact action a passenger would execute if trying to escape the vehicle in a panic. There are obviously less concerns around electronic door releases that have easily-accessed mechanical backups; it’s just that Tesla is particularly notable for not always providing them.

Over the years, national automotive bodies have thrown up their arms about all sorts of emerging automotive technologies. In the United States specifically, NHTSA has famously slow-walked the approval of things like camera-based rear-view mirror systems and replaceable-bulb headlamps, fearing the worst could occur if these technologies were freely allowed on the market.

Meanwhile, despite the obvious risks, electronic door handles have faced no major regulatory challenges. There were no obvious written rules standing in the way of Tesla making the choice to eliminate regular old door handles. Nor were there strict regulations on emergency door releases for passengers inside the vehicle. Tesla spent years building several models with no mechanical door release for the rear passengers. If your door button failed, you’d have to attempt escape by climbing out through the front doors, assuming you could figure out how to open them. Even today, the models with mechanical door releases still often hide them behind interior trim pieces or carpets, where few passengers would ever think to look in an emergency.

Obvious Mistakes

Things are beginning to change, however. Chinese regulators have led the charge, with reports stating that electronic retractable door handles could be banned as soon as 2027. While some semi-retractable styles will potentially avoid an outright ban, it’s believed new regulations will require a mechanically redundant release system as standard.

As for the US, the sleeping giant of NHTSA has finally awoken in the wake of Bloomberg‘s reporting on the matter. As reported by CNBC, Tesla has been given a deadline of December 10 to deliver records to the federal regulator, regarding design, failures, and customer issues around its electronic door release systems. The Office of Defects Investigations within NHTSA has already recorded 16 reports of failed exterior door releases in the a single model year of the Tesla Model Y. It’s likely a drop in the ocean compared to the full population of Tesla vehicles currently on roads. Meanwhile, the US automaker also faces multiple lawsuits over the matter from those who have lost family members in fatal crashes and fires involving the company’s vehicles.

In due time, it’s likely that automotive regulators in most markets will come out against electronic door handles from a safety perspective alone. No matter how well designed the electrical system in a modern vehicle, it’s hard to beat a lever flipping a latch for simplicity and robustness. The benefits of these electronic door handles are spurious in the first place—a fraction of a percent reduction in drag, and perhaps a little more luxury appeal. If the trade-off is trapping passengers in the event of a fire, it’s hard to say they’re worthwhile.

The electronic door handle, then, is perhaps the ultimate triumph of form over function. They’re often slower and harder to use than a regular door handle, and particularly susceptible to becoming useless when iced over on a frosty morning. For a taste of the future, lives were put at risk. Anyone could see that, so it’s both strange and sad that automakers and regulators alike seemed not to notice until it was far too late. Any new regulations will, once again, be written in blood.

Today, if you can find a pneumatic tube system at all, it is likely at a bank drive-through. A conversation in the Hackaday bunker revealed something a bit surprising. Apparently, in some parts of the United States, these have totally disappeared. In other areas, they are not as prevalent as they once were, but are still hanging in there. If you haven’t seen one, the idea is simple: you put things like money or documents into a capsule, put the capsule in a tube, and push a button. Compressed air shoots the capsule to the other end of the tube, where someone can reverse the process to send you something back.

These used to be a common sight in large offices and department stores that needed to send original documents around, and you still see them in some other odd places, like hospitals or pharmacy drive-throughs, where they may move drugs or lab samples, as well as documents. In Munich, for example, a hospital has a system with 200 stations and 1,300 capsules,  also known as carriers. Another medical center in Rotterdam moves 400 carriers an hour through a 16-kilometer network of tubes. However, most systems are much smaller, but they still work on the same principle.

That Blows — Or Sucks?

Air pressure can push a carrier through a tube or suck it through the tube. Depending on the pressure, the carrier can accelerate or decelerate. Large systems like the 12-mile and 23-mile systems at Mayo Clinic, shown in the video below, have inbound pipes, an “exchanger” which is basically a switchboard, and outbound pipes. Computers control the system to move the carriers at about 19 miles per hour.  You’ll see in the video that some systems use oval tubes to prevent the tubes from spinning inside the pipes, which is apparently a bad thing to do to blood samples.

In general, carriers going up will move via compressed air. Downward motion is usually via suction. If the carrier has to go in a horizontal direction, it could be either. An air diverter works with the blower to provide the correct pressures.

History

This seems a bit retro, but maybe like something from the 1950s. Turns out, it is much older than that. The basic system was the idea of William Murdoch in 1799. Crude pipelines carried telegram messages to nearby buildings. It is interesting, too, that Hero understood that air could move things as early as the first century.

In 1810, George Medhurst had plans for a pneumatic tube system. He posited that at 40 PSI — just a bit more than double normal sea-level air pressure — air would move at about 1,600 km/h. He felt that even propelling a load, it could attain a speed of 160 km/h. He died in 1827, though, with no actual model built.

In 1853, Josiah Latimer Clark installed a 200-meter system between the London Stock Exchange and the telegraph office. The telegraph operator would sell stock price data to subscribers — another thing that you’d think was more modern but isn’t.

Within a few years, the arrangement was common around other stock exchanges. By 1870, improvements enabled faster operation and the simultaneous transit of multiple carriers. London alone had 34 kilometers of tube by 1880. In Aberdeen, a tube system even carried fish from the market to the post office.

There were improvements, of course. Some systems used rings that could dial in a destination address, mechanically selecting a path through the exchange, which you can see one in the Mayo Clinic video. But even today, the systems work essentially the way they did in the 1800s.

Famous Systems

Several cities had pneumatic mail service. Paris ran a 467 km system until 1984. Prague’s 60 km network was in operation until 2002. Berlin’s system covered 400 km in 1940. The US had its share, too. NASA’s mission control center used tubes to send printouts from the lower floors up to the mission control room floor. The CIA Headquarters had a system running until 1989.

In 1920 Berlin, you could use the system as the equivalent of text messaging if you saw someone who caught your eye at one local bar. You could even send them a token of your affection, all via tube.

In 1812, there was some consideration of moving people using this kind of system, and there were short-lived attempts in Ireland, London, and Paris, among other places, in the mid-1800s. In general, this is known as an “atmospheric railroad.”

As a stunt, in 1865, the London Pneumatic Despatch Company sent the Duke of Buckingham and some others on a five-minute trip through a pneumatic tube. The system was made to carry parcels at 60 km/h using a 6.4-meter fan run by a steam engine. The capsules, in this case, looked somewhat like an automobile. There are no reports of how the Duke and his companions enjoyed the trip.

A 550-meter demonstration pneumatic train showed up at the Crystal Palace in 1864. Designed by Thomas Webster Rammell. It only operated for two months. A 6.7-meter fan blew air one way for the outbound trip and sucked it back for the return.

Don’t think the United States wasn’t in on all this, too. New York may be famous for its subway system, but its early predecessor was, in fact, pneumatic, as you can see in the video below.

Many of these atmospheric trains didn’t put the passengers in the capsule, but used the capsule to move a railcar. The Paris St. Germain system, which opened in 1837, used this idea.

Modern Times

Of course, where you once would send documents via tube, you’d now send a PDF file. Today, you mainly see tubes where it is important for an actual item to arrive quickly somewhere: an original document, cash, or medical samples. ThyssenKrupp uses a tube system to send toasty 900 °C steel samples from a furnace to a laboratory. Can’t do that over Ethernet.

There have been attempts to send food over tubes and even take away garbage. Some factories use them to move materials, too. So pneumatic tubes aren’t going away, even if they aren’t as common as they once were. In fact, we hear they are even more popular than ever in hospitals, so these aren’t just old systems still in use.

We haven’t seen many DIY pneumatic tube systems that were serious (we won’t count sucking Skittles through a tube with a shop vac). But we do see it in some robot projects. What would you do with a system like this? Even more importantly, are these still common in your area or a rarity? Let us know in the comments.