Playstation Network breached, no end to downtime in sight

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If you are not a gamer, or simply a casual player, you may not have heard about the recent breach of Sony’s Playstation Network. In short, the network was infiltrated on April 17th, and the service was completely shut down on the 19th as a precautionary measure. Now, more than a week later services have yet to be restored, but Sony is finally starting to talk a bit more about what … [Read more...]

Be lazy, and get somewhere at the same time

motorized-hammock

Cruise the beach in comfortable Jamaican style with this motorized hammock. [Stephen Shaffer] and his friends built it for the Red Bull Creation contest which has as its number one requirement, the need to include an Arduino. We're basically looking at a hammock frame made out of square pipe that has been put on wheels. Watch the video after the break to see the prototyping, construction, and … [Read more...]

Data scraping and visualization with Python

arduino_dial

[Greg] built himself a small indicator dial with his laser cutter, and wanted to use it for visualizing server performance and load information. Before he started using it for server monitoring however, he thought he should test out his data parsing skills on a simpler data set. Pachube has a wealth of information that can be freely used for whatever project you might have in mind, so [Greg] … [Read more...]

Server room light and temperature monitoring

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[Jaren] is occasionally forgetful, and frequently wonders if he’s left the lights on in his server room. Not knowing if the lights have been left on drives him nuts until he returns to work the next morning, so he decided he had to do something. He figured it would be easy enough to build a small sensor that would allow him to monitor the status of the overhead lights, but he didn’t want to … [Read more...]

DIY lightbox repurposes useless scanner

Lightbox

[James] didn't like losing detail when scanning in photographic negatives, so he repurposed an old scanner and turned it into a lightbox. The Flickr set of the build shows [James] installing a compact fluorescent bulb in the body of the scanner. Aluminum foil reflects the light, and the scanner glass is painted white for diffusion. [James] is quite happy with the result, and is amazed by the … [Read more...]

Motion Controlled Reddit Vote Sign.

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A little while back I attended the largest east coast gathering of folks from the ever popular social news site, Reddit.com. Those of you familiar with Reddit already know that it is all about link aggregation. Users post links to interesting websites and material, and can then vote up or vote down content based on interest or relevance. Through the magical site algorithms original and interesting … [Read more...]

Google’s secret perk? A private hackerspace

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Working for Google has always had many perks, and most of them are pretty well known. Google employees enjoy free food, on-site workout facilities, and one free day a week to work on whatever they like - but you knew that already. One Google perk however, has been kept pretty quiet until just recently. Google has provided a hackerspace on their campus for about four years now, which is open to … [Read more...]