Weekly Roundup 1/21/12

ru1.21.12

In case you were asleep at the wheel, here are our top stories of the week. Our most popular post was one that shows you how to make your own 'personal assistant' using Wolfram Alpha, text to speech software, and the phone network. It still won't get your coffee though. You'll just have to do that yourself. Coming in at second place was a post about how to use your Android camera phone as … [Read more...]

PVC Magnetometer to measure magnetic storms

magnetlaser

In the hopes of getting a heads up on when the aurora borealis will be visible from his back yard, [Alex] built a magnetometer to measure disruptions in Earth's magnetic field. The build is extremely simple, too. It's amazing what you can build with a few components and a trip to the dollar store. The design or [Alex]'s project is called a torsion magnetometers. In this setup, two mirrors are … [Read more...]

Overlaying video on encrypted HDMI connections

HDMI

[bunnie] is up to his old tricks again. He successfully implemented a man-in-the-middle attack on HDCP-secured connections to overlay video in any HDMI video stream. There's a bonus, too: his hack doesn't use the HDCP master-key. It doesn't violate the DMCA at all. HDCP is the awful encryption scheme that goes into HDMI-compatable devices. Before HDCP, injecting video overlays or even chroma … [Read more...]

FLORA: a better Arduino LilyPad

Flora

[Ladyada] has been working on FLORA, her wearable electronics platform, for a few months now. Even though it has just been announced the specs look much better than the previous queen of the hill, the Arduino LilyPad. Going down the spec sheet for both the FLORA and the LilyPad, we see that FLORA has twice as much flash and SRAM as the LilyPad. The LilyPad has more options for I/O, but … [Read more...]

Trashed Hard Drive? Why not an Engraved Clock?

cu-clock-orange-paint-pen

So your hard drive quit working.  Don't despair, with a "little" work your disk can be repurposed into a clock like the one seen above. I made this clock after several iterations of various success, including the first revision, which was simply the platter with a clock kit from a hobby store screwed into the middle. Still a very neat effect, but if you want to actually tell what time it is, it … [Read more...]