posted Feb 18th 2009 1:54pm by Caleb Kraft
filed under: news
Warning: this link contains graphic images depicting removal of a fingernail by giant freaking magnets. [Dirk] likes to collect odd things. A few of those odd things, just happen to be massive Neodymium magnets. Even though he was really really careful, somehow two of them ended up close enough to attract each other. After a brief flight, the two collided with his finger tip in between them. It is probably still there now.
We know these things can be pretty dangerous and usually warn people when doing projects that require them, like building a wind turbine.
[Andrew] sent us this great breakdown of an LCD monitor repair. After his wife’s monitor developed an issue with rippling in the picture, he was forced to decide between trashing it, or fixing it. He decided for the latter, possibly to his wife’s disappointment. The rippling image could easily be attributed to a failed filter in the power supply. Knowing that capacitors are a prime suspect in these cases, he tore in, looking for failures. He found that there were, in fact, 2 bad capacitors on the back light circuit. After replacing them with newer, higher quality ones, the monitor was as good as new.
posted Feb 17th 2009 7:00pm by Eliot
filed under: tool hacks
Hobby electronics manufacturer SparkFun has started offering various classes at their Boulder, CO facility. [Landon] has been attending as many as possible and posted about his experience during their Stencil and Solder Paste class. Solder paste is used when manufacturing boards with a reflow oven. He took quite a few pictures of the process and posted notes and audio. He says it’s definitely something you’d have to learn hands-on, but his numerous photos give you an idea of what’s involved. Below, you can watch a video of the paste clean-up pass and stencil removal.
We spotted this odd piece of geek couture on DVICE today. It’s a bracelet that displays incoming calls via Bluetooth and also vibrates. The intended use is kinda interesting, but we wonder what else could be done with it. Could you update it with any text you want by creating fake caller ID messages? You could have your laptop in your backpack and have the bracelet update when it finds an open access point or any other sort of notification. The display shows the word “Connecting” in pictures, but apparently only displays numbers for incoming calls. It also includes a button to reject calls.
Do you have a project that needs a wireless display? Are there other options like this? At $25, this might be worth a try.
Yo dawg, we heard you liked macs. [Charles] got sick of his Mac mini looking nice and pretty and decided to cram it into an old beige box. This old beige box just happened to be an old Apple II disk drive, so we guess that gives it some more street cred. The original disk drive sold in 1978 for $500. Man times have changed.
[Mr. Hasselhoff] is using a disposable cell phone to trigger his fireworks. He has wired into the speaker leads for the speaker phone. When the phone rings, the current sets off a thyristor allowing for a battery pack to be discharged into a rocket fuse. These fuses heat up and ignite, so you can use them to light fireworks fuses pretty easily. This is pretty simple and cheap, considering the price of the cell phone was only $10. His next idea was to have it recognize dial tones and set individual fuses off, but that would require a microcontroller and a much more complex hack. At that point, you might as well just build a fully fledged wireless fireworks launching system and possibly add rocket launching abilities too.
When we first saw [Chris Paget]‘s cloning video, our reaction was pretty ‘meh’. We’d seen RFID cloning before and the Mifare crack was probably the last time RFID was actually interesting. His ShmooCon presentation, embedded above, caught us completely off-guard. It’s very informative; we highly recommend it.
The hardest part about selling this talk is that it has to use two overloaded words: ‘RFID’ and ‘passport’. The Passport Card, which is part the the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI), is not like the passport book that you’re familiar with. It has the form factor of a driver’s license and can only be used for land and sea travel between the USA, Canada, the Caribbean region, Bermuda, and Mexico. They’ve only started issuing them this year.
The first day of The Pirate Bay’s trial has concluded. The prosecution, representing many large media companies, is attempting to prove that the defendants are directly responsible for copyright infringement. The members of The Pirate Bay are treating the trial as a reality TV farce. From TorrentFreak’s coverage, it sounds like it’s off to a great start: “For several minutes, listeners of the live audio could hear mouse-clicks as Roswall [the prosecutor -Ed.], who earlier claimed to be an expert on computer crimes, tried to get his PowerPoint presentation on the screen.”
