Hack-A-Day Extra

gifts

From the photo above you can see the holidays have been treating me pretty well. [bugloaf] brought a bottle of pisco back from Peru for me. My parents mounted the laser-cut logo that [smouldering-dog] had sent me. They also gave me a copy of The Radioactive Boy Scout: The Frightening True Story of a Whiz Kid and His Homemade Nuclear Reactor. I should have it finished by Shmoocon, so if you see me there and ask for it, I’ll gladly give it up (since I don’t have any swag right now).

Team Hack-A-Day is still cranking away; turning in over 8 million points in 3.5 months. If you’re tired of your family you can always come idle in the #hackaday channel on Efnet.

More links after the jump.

Mikey Sklar will be presenting his latest project at Dorkbot in NYC Jan. 4th: Implanting an RFID chip in his hand. I should have seen this coming when he sent me his last project: Making RFID proof pants pockets. BoingBoing has been compiling related links (I had said the pants were for Dorkbot, but was mistaken, they were for Swap-O-Rama-Rama). I’m torn between the futurism of this and the reality that I’d have security weaker than a garage door opener.

The second part of my Xbox 360 iPod dock how-to was posted this week on Engadget. I’m still reviewing the writer applications.

It seems Microsoft pushed their Xbox 360 kiosks out the door so quickly that they didn’t lock down the media disk. You can’t mess around with the executable code, but you can replace other files. If you download the kiosk ISO you can unpack it and build your own discs that work on the 360. You can replace the videos with your own and there is a group working on porting flash games since the Live Arcade games are flash based. If you strip enough files out you can make the ISO small enough to be burned on a CDR and it will still work. Xbox-Scene has been keeping up with the developments.

The latest version of TwonkyVision MediaServer will let you stream music and photos to your Xbox 360 using a Mac, Linux or other system. It worked on my Gentoo box, but is unfortunately commercial software. I did get a chuckle seeing the Xbox display “Connecting to Windows PC

10 thoughts on “Hack-A-Day Extra

  1. Last time I checked, you can google up David Hahn’s story using “the radioactive boy scout.” There’s just enough info to understand what materials and methods he used – some of which might be a little difficult to come by – several dozen smoke detectors, a bottle of antique radium paint.
    I hope you enjoy the book – the story is very much in the spirit of your website.

  2. Wow.
    That capacitor trick is really cool. My question is as to whether the PIC can be damaged by switching the caps like that when you get the cap discharging through the pic? Is there any limit on the cap value?

    Apart from that, this seems like one of those ‘woah…’ ideas. Good job!

  3. I found out something so i decided to post it here, it is not like a hack or anything just something cool.

    I was looking for firefox extensions when i found one for del.icio.us and i decided to reopen my account, after reopening it i checked out the hackaday link and it said 3233 other people with the link, that’s like at least 50th place or above so great job HAD, you have taken over yet another place.

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