Make any gloves work with a touch screen

gloves

The chill of autumn is upon us, and with it comes the awkward sport of trying to work touch-sensitive phones and gadgets with gloved fingers. One can try toughing it out with fingerless gloves, or we’ve seen some costly solutions in the forms of specialized gloves and capacitive-compatible styluses, but sometimes simple is best: all it takes is a few stitches of conductive thread in the … [Read more...]

Recover borked HDD after Xbox 360 ban

xbox-360-hdd-unscrambling

[Incudie] tipped us off about a method to fix a borked HDD in your Xbox 360. Many of the one million consoles banned earlier in the month also had the hard disks scrambled making off-line gaming impossible as well. It turns out that this is caused by having a ban flag in the NAND chip on the motherboard. It has been discovered that because of wear levelling, the NAND will have two copies of the … [Read more...]

Turkey fryer; awful, bad, and worse

2009-thanksgiving-turkey-rigs

Tomorrow's turkey day here in the United States. Do you fully expect your trashy neighbor to burn down his house while trying to cook a holiday feast? To see what's in store for your neighborhood we've rounded up a great collection of idiots deep frying turkeys. … [Read more...]

Voice controlled lock? Almost…

If you watched the video before reading the article (like we did) and started shaking in your boots at a voice controlled lock system, prepare to be disappointed. His spoken commands are actually to his son to press the appropriate keys on a keypad off screen, the lock is not actually voice controlled. But still, [Michael Krumpus'] door lock is pretty astounding. By using a torn apart CD drive … [Read more...]

TI sports watch for hacking

rf-development-platform

How would you like to have a 3-axis accelerometer, pressure sensor, temperature sensor, RF wireless, and an LCD screen in a development package?  What if we told you that you can have it in the form factor of a wristwatch offering from Texas Instruments? How much would you pay for such a device? Quit guessing, you can pick it up for just $49 with an estimated delivery in mid-February of next … [Read more...]

Digital BMXing through San Francisco

guts1

[Alpay] sent in this project he did recently. He was hired to produce a kiosk that would stand out to the kids at the event. He chose to make a bike riding game utilizing open source hardware and software. There was some thought put into what interface to use to make it easiest for people to just pick up and use. The ultimate decision was a simple one. Use real handle bars from a bike. As for … [Read more...]