Hack-A-Day Extra

wires

We’re a Top 100 Folding@HOME team! Take that Tom’s Hardware Community! No, seriously, we are that freakin‘ huge now. I celebrated by buying some more hardware to fold with. You can find out more at the Team Hack-A-Day Forum.  If you don’t know what this folding thing is all about, check the team wiki. You could always drop by our long standing IRC channel, #hackaday on EFnet.

On the topic of distributed projects. Did you see that someone was suggesting we could get hacked by aliens through SETI@HOME? Sure, first SETI would have to actually find something and by that point someone would have hacked it locally. Aliens’ computers are unfortunately very similar to ours though.

I wrote up How-To: Stream almost anything using VLC for Engadget. I know I used the most basic method for streaming, but a lot of people really enjoyed it. Anybody else in love with this program? [Brent Norris] has some Linux related VLC info.

Slashdot (and others) picked up our XBox 360 post. I had begun to think they had forgotten about us.

bunnie is going to wait till 360s are easily available before buying one, but if you’ve got one that’s broken and not covered by warranty he’ll buy it from you.

Did you see Llama‘s entry for Joystiq‘s faceplate contest? His prep advice:

Painting tip, clean with alcohol before painting plastic. There are other sensitizers but alcohol works fine and is cheap and readily available. Disassemble everything completely, this means cutting plastic in some cases like the little doors on the face.

Kismet for Windows It’s been bundled with all of the necessary Cygwin DLLs so you don’t have to install Cygwin separately. [steve]

Podtropolis HAS RSS feeds. Maybe they’ve been there all along and I just missed it the first time around. [yuro]

Prince Rupert’s Drop is created by dripping molten glass into water. The rapid cooling of the outside of the drop sets an enormous tensile stress in in the droplet. Hit the droplet with a hammer and it won’t break, but if you break a little bit of the tail the droplet will explode. Here’s a video of Prince Rupert’s Drops. [Frogz]

[Underwater Spiderman] noticed some weirdness while playing with magnets around his Sony Ericsson Z600.

FreeMAC is an ambitious project to write GPL firmware for Conexant chipsets. [lekernel]

Another Christmas light controller. Unfortunately lacking plans. [sabre]

[Sean Shrum] upgraded the drive in Iomega‘s cheap NAS-100d.

Tis’ the season to harvest cheap LEDs from Christmas lights. [nate]

Quick leather RAZR case

The engine used by Lucasart‘s adventure games has been ported for the DS: ScummVM DS. [elg0nz]

Robosapien V2 mods [Manion]

Simple Skype VoIP adapter [lordofheat]

Disassembly of a Dell DJ Ditty [Auger Duval]

Office gun built from binder clips [tutejszy]

Adding rubber grips to a Treo 650 [anonyomouse]

It’s the time of year to give and [Matt Westervelt] told us about SeattleWireless.net’s Towertop Node fundraiser. They are off to a great start. I am personally going to be donating to the EFF this year.

Donate tips to us.

30 thoughts on “Hack-A-Day Extra

  1. on that article about the scientist who claimed aliens could hack seti:

    how can this guy be a physicist and claim that this is remotely possible.

    section ‘.dataseg’ data writeable readable
    section ‘.codeseg’ code readable executable

    anyone remotely programming in 32 bit x86pmode knows that executing binary in a datasegment makes a general protection fault.

    oh wait i forgot, “scientists” talk about creationism too.

  2. Overclockers Australia produces about 20,000 points every hour. We produce about 3,700 points every hour. To make a run at first place we’d need to increase our output… by about 550%. At that point we would be producing at about the same rate. If we wanted to pass them we’d need significantly more processing power. If we wanted to pass them while I’m still young we’d need even more somewhere on the order of a 1500% increas over current rates.

    Nevertheless we’re definitely headed for a top 20 position. Does anybody have any good ideas on how to advertise/pimp THaD F@H?

  3. teamhackaday.com is down :(

    maybe too much bandwidth… come join the irc channel #hackaday on efnet with questions or comments, im sure the site will be back up ASAP. PocketLnt the admin has done a great job so far, but the site was on borrowed space… he may have gotten an inch and taken a mile, we’ll see.

    as for pimpage, I’d consider………
    maybe getting a digg.com article *cringes*
    and having all of us dig it to the front page.
    Then weve got the whole risk of kevin rose deciding to make a digg.com team…. which would probably be quite large and own our asses.

    I’m not gunna make the call.

  4. Its impossible, the aliens would have to sound encode the virus (after they programed it to run on a X86 based processor) and then beam it to a radio telescope it wouldnt happen…… ever

  5. okay, I want to install the folding@home on the home computer but my parents don’t want it on here. Is there any was to keep it low so that it won’t effect performance at all because even if I can get it on If it lags things up I’ll have to take it off.

  6. Ez, set it up so that you say “no” to WUs over 5MiB. Then enter the advanced settings and tell it to use some low number for the CPU usage percentage. Use your judgement when choosing a percentage. 50% would be good but I like to use 75% befcasue I’m hardcore even when I’m trying to not lag the system.

  7. actually for #20, it will not lag you system at all, as it runs at a ‘low priority’ task, so it will only use the processor when it is not being used by something else.

    If you are tight on ram (<512mb) then set no to big wu, but if you have ram a plenty then go ahead for the biggens...

    I have been running it for 95% proseccor usage on my laptop and descktop (1.6 ghz pm and a 2.6ghz p4 both with 512mb ram) for several weeks and the only way to tell if they are running is to open the task manager... And that is with the bug wus going.

  8. zorz! I too am in love with VLC! I don’t use anything else to watch my DVDs and videos. Its pwnzorz. I still hadn’t figured out how to stream though, so thanks for that link!

  9. as far as folding goes, I’ve resurrected an old Intel Celeron 500mhz 256mb RAM 6gb HD laptop whose screen had been destroyed by using remote desktop with XP to install a network card. Now it whiles away it’s days crunching numbers for the hackaday team :) nice peaceful way to go. also makes a nice space heater, that processor runs a little hot.

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