No, I never wondered what meteorologists did when they were bored. I’m happy to discover that they’re building slick little devices like this. It is a mini-ITX based system that uses StormPredator for the generating the display. Everything is housed inside an old marine weather display. It is a really thorough write up covering the entire build process even covering bugs found along the way.
hello los amigos! it’s monday, rainy, crappy, and disgusting outside! so looks like it’s up to us to keep you entertained. because today we most certainly will. i must insist we start off with some fresh links.
this is amazing. i can’t believe it even exists and the cost to make it is nearly nothing if you have a kinkos or fedex store near you. this dude makes furniture out of fedex boxes. that’s so awesome!
thanks for that one [mlynx]
also, the next hackaday podcast will be coming out soon, but not this week. why? because:
a. vince has finals for summer classes thursday. b. live 8 is saturday.
but, the week after that is looking mighty good. so keep your eyes peeled like certain fruits.
it also seems there’s a psp homebrew petition going around. check it out if you want, but it’s pretty much a waste of time. i mean, look how limited net yaroze was. [steyr]
and did you happen to catch the wake n bacon alarm clock on engadget yesterday? mmmm, greasy goodness….for non-jews of course.
make a solar powered generator for “$300”. hey, worth a shot if you really need it. [rufus]
great for a lot of reasons, add extra connectors to ide cables. [sonicvanajr]
oooh, in the world of file-sharing and pirating known as p2p (whatever, you know it is), grokster lost to mgm in their supreme court battle. fair? no. are they screwed now in terms of fines? yes.
look at this! java is turning 10! wow, it’s been awhile! it kind of sucks that i’m currently being forced to learn this silly language right now in order to graduate. pshhhh. but anyways, looks like sun is apparently throwing full source code at you for several “major” applications as a way of celebrating. hey, i’ll totally take that anytime.
we’ll end your monday java sipping (HAHAHAAHAHA WASNT THAT FUNNY? NO IT WASNT.) with (get this) a decent article from cnn on how the internet used to be. remember our pal mosaic? yeahhhh. of course you do. and i quote the movie hackers: “it’s got a 28.8bps modem!!!“
ouch. i burnt myself cooking up all these links. but now that they’re done, I can dish them out to you guys.
if you’ve got some cash and a ton of free time, make your own R2-D2. [xytec]
be a real dork and make an ethernet testing keychain. [2bitwhore]
an interesting method of scanning negatives. [foo]
totally missing my childhood now. this is all about super soakers and water guns. they even have a section on building your own water gun. some of which are pretty insane.
uh, honda apparently is down with letting asimo help kids learn to cross the street. [sarge]
a low cost analog and digital tv modulator. you uhf pirate….arrrrrr. [joe]
whoa! cool stuff! listen to the sound of the data on your harddrive. i never would have thought about doing this. [dryicerx]
Kentaro Fukuchi originally built this simple controller for an art installation. He needed an easy way for visitors to switch effects on an EffecTV system. To avoid writing device drivers he canabilized a cheap game pad. There were 16 available buttons but only 12 were needed. Once the rotary switch was wired to all of the buttons he could use simple scripting to grab the button press events. You could use this to control a variety of things and Kentaro gives a couple possible ideas on his site.
[thanks Jaime Wong]
Okay, so you’ve built your manual boost controller and want to know what to add next? Water injection is the answer. Okay maybe if the original question was “what’s the last thing you want to spray into your engine?” On turbo cars water injection helps cool the injection charge as it enters the engine. Compressing air generates a lot of heat and the hotter the air/fuel mixture is when it enters the engine the more likely it is to detonate. You can use a water/alcohol mixture to cool your intercooler or you can spray it into the intake air. This guide shows you how to assemble a home built water injection system that has been proven to reduce intake temperatures by 90F. It also includes notes on how to do this without hydrolocking your engine. Handy!
to anyone who attended the philly meeting last night, i hope you guys had a great time together and i apologize for not being able to come. some personal matters came up that i needed to attend to. so thanks for understanding.
youse guys (in joe pesci voice) sent in alotta nice lookin links! because of that, i’m totally teasing you guys by only posting 5 links today. plus, this’ll give you more to look forward to! but, as always, if you guys hate it, i’ll stop.
link time!
build your own cockpit. yup. [brett]
haha i love it. the poor man’s raid array. [chappa]
make a simple 1 watt amplifier. [joe]
wicked flickr photoset of a guy learning how to pirate tv.
make a simple spectroscope.
Yes, even the venerable Technics 1200 turntable can be improved. This simple, completely reversible, modification removes the automatic pitch lock from the mk2 model. If your decks have seen a lot of use the true zero point has probably drifted from the one marked on the scale. This is easy to tell by observing the strobe. If the large dots aren’t stationary when the zero is locked, you’re out of adjustment. The other nuisance is that you can’t do minor pitch adjustments when you are close to zero because it constantly wants to lock. Even if you don’t want to mod your turntables this article does show you where to go to move the zero pitch back to the actual zero.
