How-to: Thermite hard drive destruction

After the overwhelming response to the Hackit we posted about automated hard drive destruction last fall, we finally decided to test out some thermite hard drive destruction ourselves. This has been done on The Screen Savers but they did not show up close results of the platters. So, aluminum and black iron oxide were procured through eBay, and until it … Read the rest

Why I Hate Django

[Cal Henderson] delivered a keynote titled Why I Hate Django at the first annual DjangoCon. Django is an open source BSD licensed web framework written in Python. Google has posted the keynote in its entirety to YouTube, which you can find embedded above. While the talk is humorous (and takes many jabs at Rails developers) it does provide insight … Read the rest

Antec Skeleton case

Maybe you saw the previous post and thought, “Well, that’s all well and good, but why is such a stylish case being used to ventilate cat feces?” Antec has heard your cries and has created a computer case with all the lovely curves of a litter box and just as much airflow. The Skeleton case has an open frame design … Read the rest

Hack your litter box


Cat poo stinks.  We all know it. Those of us who have cats, though frequently amazed at the sheer magnitude of stench our cuddly friends are capable of, do little to remedy the situation.  Sure, sometimes we buy the fancier kitty litter or the special food.  [agraham999] decided to be a little more proactive.  He built an automated exhaust system Read the rest

VLC media player 0.9.2 released

VideoLAN just released VLC media player 0.9.2. VLC is probably the best known open source media player, and supports most audio/video formats without additional codecs. Before VLC, we usually installed buggy codec packs to watch videos in Winamp or Windows Media Player. We’ve found the nightly builds to be pretty stable for the past month, but it’s nice to see … Read the rest

Arcade cabinet that plays every game in the universe


Ok, maybe we’re exaggerating a little bit. It may not play every game in the universe, but the CMACC gets pretty close. CMACC stands for “Complete – Multi Arcade Console Computer System” and is comprised of a giant pile of gaming goodness. [Mayhem] packed a PC, Xbox, Xbox360, Dreamcast, Wii, PSP, and a DS into the … Read the rest