We’re sure you’ve heard about Xbox 360s facing an other round of bans from Xbox Live last week. It seems that living in a hole, or even in Grenora, North Dakota couldn’t help you escape hearing this from every news source possible. Apparently, this has caused a slew of banned consoles to go up for sale in a buyer-beware quagmire. This is a joke in several ways; didn’t the hardware problems of the machine already make the used market risky enough? Now consumers will be even more wary, losing game sales because less people are buying used consoles.

If you have just the right kernel, and a copy of your CPU key, and a second unbanned Xbox 360, you may be able to reactivate your machine. But how many people have those things available to them? Undoubtedly an Xbox 360’s desirability is greatly diminished if Xbox Live is removed from the equation. This is something Nintendo could learn from when it comes to the Wii (no online multiplayer with New Super Mario Bros Wii?… Really?). So whether you are the one who was banned, or you decided/were tricked in to purchasing a banned console, what are you going to do with it now that online play is out of the picture?

We’ve seen the console emulating SNES games and even XBMC run with the help of Ubuntu. Leave us a comment and tell us if you are planning to just go without Xbox Live, use the machine as a desktop running Ubuntu, or spearhead the effort to repurpose this powerful (and flawed) hardware platform. Will you go out and capitalize on cheaper hardware, or have you been burnt by the grim reality of a crippled rig?

[Cory Doctorow] has published a novel about the near future and a couple of hackers who can make anything from the stuff lying around. We like a good sci-fi novel, and have no shortage of recommendations (go read Snow Crash) for those who need them. We’re adding ‘Makers’ to our must read list.

Not only is this book about you, but its release most likely agrees with your life philosophy. You can download this book, right now, for free, legally. This is because it has been release under the creative commons license. Best of all, if you like the book and want to make a donation, you are directed to purchase a book on behalf of a school or other program that has requested a copy but doesn’t have the funds to acquire it themselves.

So, buy the book if you want a physical copy, download it if you prefer that method, but either way we think this is better than stealing the printed word.

Today we’re going to take a look at writing scripts for the Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox. This add-on allows us to use JavaScript to make changes to the way webpages are displayed on our browser. These changes can only be seen by a copy of Firefox that is running a particular script. As an example, we’re going to write a script that adds a border to the banner image of each article on Hack a Day by overlaying the image you see above. Find out how it’s done after the break.

Our Goal:

We want to make the top image for each article look like it has been printed with a white border and then taped on each corner to the page. This is an effect that we used to use on our posts and a Greasemonkey script is a good way to re-implement the effect if you miss that image style.

What You Need:

1. Install Firefox
2. Install the Greasemonkey add-on.
3. Download and install our script: hackaday_nostalgia.user.js

How It Works:

Greasemonkey runs JavaScript on top of the pages that have been loaded by Firefox. The first part of the file is a set of comments that tell Greasemonkey what it’s dealing with:

// ==UserScript==
// @name           Hackaday Nostalgia
// @namespace      http://hackaday.com
// @description    Overlay photograph border and taped corners for article images at Hack a Day.
// @include        http://hackaday.com/*
// ==/UserScript==

The name, namespace, and include lines are all required for the script to work. Name is what you want to call your script. Namespace is a URL that identifies the script uniquely in case there are two scripts with the same name. Include tells Greasemonkey what pages this script should be applied to. In our case we only want to monkey with the images on hackaday.com so we’ve included all addresses from that domain.

Now that we’ve identified what pages we want to alter, we can parse the document and pull out the elements we want ot change. The first thing to do is examine the page source of our target:

<div class='snap_preview'><p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-17747" title="plotter-with-300w-laser" src="http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/plotter-with-300w-laser.jpg?w=470&h=313" alt="plotter-with-300w-laser" width="470" height="313" /></p>

With a little digging we can find the line you see above that includes the IMG element for the title of a post. We’re in luck, the page builds each post wrapped in a DIV of the Class ’snap-preview’. We can use Greasemonkey to parse the page looking for these DIVs and then alter the first IMG element in each one:

//get all DIVs of the snap_preview class
var allDivs, thisDiv;
allDivs = document.evaluate(
 "//div[@class='snap_preview']",
 document,
 null,
 XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE,
 null);

In the code above we are using the evaluate function to pick out DIVs that are in the ’snap-preview’ class. We load them into an array called allDivs which we can then step through:

//step through each DIV
for (var i=0; i<allDivs.snapshotLength; i++) {
 thisDiv = allDivs.snapshotItem(i);

 //Alter the first img of each DIV
 var image = thisDiv.getElementsByTagName('img');

 //Make sure we've got an IMG in this DIV
 if (image[0]) {

 //Save original source URL
 var orig_src = image[0].src;
 //Concatenate for CSS use
 orig_src = 'url(' + orig_src + ')';
 //Set original as background
 image[0].style.background = orig_src;

 //Set Hack a Day overlay as image
 image[0].src = 'http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/had_frame.png';
 }
}

This block of code is where the magic happens. A loop is used to step through each DIV we grabbed in the previous code snippet. We grab the IMG element by using the getElementsByTagName function. All IMG elements are put into an array called ‘image’, but we only want to alter the first image in each post so we’ll always reference image[0].

For the image border and tape effect, we used the GIMP to create a PNG file that has transparency where we want the original picture to show through. We need the original picture to be behind the overlay so we’re making it a background image using the CSS property ‘background’. The PNG overlay is then set as the new SRC for the IMG element.

That’s all it takes, now images will be overlayed with the border image you see at the top of this post.

Benefits and Drawbacks:

There are some drawbacks to using this system; the overlay covers up the borders of the original image, older posts that already have this image effect will have it applied again, the overlay will be stretched to match each original image which can look weird depending on image height, and the overlay image we’ve provide is of rather low quality (you can probably do better yourself).

Our method uses a very small amount of code and doesn’t require the original image size to be recalculated.

The Next Step:

Now that we’ve showed you how to do this much, you may want to take it one step further. The original picture style also made the images black and white. Can you make the script do this as well? To get started in the right direction, you might want to look at the Pixastic JavaScript image manipulation library and its desaturate function.

Overwhelmed?

If you need some help deciphering what we did here just use your online resources:

• Dive into Greasemonkey: An online book to help you learn greasemonkey scripting
• HTML Dog: A best practices guide to HTML and CSS

If you give a mouse a cookie, he will ask for a glass of milk. If you give a team of geeks a box full of parts ranging from aluminum to plywood to motors to RF interfaces, they will build a robot. Introducing Best Robotics, a volunteer group that gives schools a box of hardware and 6 weeks to build a robot that will compete against other schools for the title of champion.

This past Saturday the17th, the OKBest regional competition was held and I, HaD writer [Jakob], was lucky enough to be invited personally to not only watch – but compete. Check out our full breakdown after the jump.

First an explanation of the competition. Each year the ‘goal’ changes but always includes several of the same concepts. Remote controlled robots must pick up different items for points, assemble something for multipliers, and signal a tie breaker. This year the robot’s task was to scavenge and collect tennis balls, racket balls, soup cans, beach balls, and 6inch PVC pipe sections – easy right?

Well not when those tennis balls are catalysts, racket balls are water, soup cans are energy, beach balls are CO2, and the PVC represents benzene. See where we’re going, if not think chemistry. It gets harder when you learn almost none of those game pieces are in play unless you send an IR signal to the game field. We haven’t even gotten to the 2 foot size restriction in all 3 dimensions and the finite parts list. Those who want to read more about the game and rules this year can find it here.

So how did I get the chance to compete? Well, being team captain really helps. Meet team ENHS. The past two years we’ve come nearly in last place and this this was our third, and potentially final time to partake within Best; it was time to stop being the underdogs.

Our robot design included an undercarriage ’stomach’ and frontal ‘mouth’ that could be raised and lowered to capture the tennis balls, racket balls, and soup cans. We decided against attaining CO2 and benzene after finding we could achieve a max score of about 21 million points without them. The control system, programming, and IR commands were all handled by yours truly – while the rest of the team did most of the construction – and painting.

The great thing about Best is that if you don’t have an engineering degree, or even know what a motor does. There are awards that can actually get you to first place by best documentation, most enthusiasm, best T-shirt design, most interesting interview, and several others. But it still exposes people to robots and their construction, hopefully to influence them towards a career in technology.

So how did we actually do? 5th place overall out of 12. Not to bad considering last year we got 18th out of 17 teams (we don’t know how we managed that either). Win or lose, the experience, knowledge, and fun we gained from the competition will last a lifetime. The competition however will not, as funding for Best has declined over the years and our region next year will not play host. Hats off to the best year of Best.

It’s hard to believe that we haven’t covered this one before. If you enjoyed out Barcode challenges from last week, perhaps now is the time for you to take the Python Challenge. We made it through the first 18 levels about a year back but with a total of 33 levels we’re not even close to being finished.

This is an excellent opportunity to learn Python if you’ve never tried it, or test your skills if you’ve already got them. We’d suggest using IDLE which is available as part of the Python language download. Because Python is an interpreted language, IDLE allows you to try out each line of the code you are writing and add it to your program as you get different sections working.

The levels start out fairly easy and require some sniffing around, such as looking at the source code, and dissecting images with Python’s various libraries. As you pass each level, you will be granted access to the Python Challenge forums in order to see how others solved the level. By solving each level and then seeing what different solutions entail you grow your knowledge of the language and reinforce your understanding of how to use it.

[fidepus] put together a pretty nifty version of the game Space Invaders. This is an analog version that involves an ink and paper based display system.

He printed out one piece of paper for each different enemy, mother ship, laser beam, and player vehicle. The human-based controller is used to move the pieces in all directions. When it comes time for a row to move downward, the pieces are removed from the game grid and relocated to their new position using a scotch-tape-actuator.

We think the most successful part of this hack was [fidepus'] ability to integrate sound effects into the controller system. The human-based controller puts out mono sound with a “pew-pew” for laser blasts and a “dirnk-dirnk… dirnk-dirnk” for the enemy movements.

Although there is no code nor a schematic provided, we think this system shouldn’t be too hard to reverse engineer.

Yesterday we issued a barcode challenge in honor of the Barcode’s birthday. Congratulations to [The Moogle] for winning this challenge. His submission offers a very detailed explanation of how he solved the puzzle using Photoshop, OpenOffice Calc, and some web resources. We’ve got a detailed writeup on it after the break.

Honorable mentions go to [nex] for putting up a Java solution and to [jwmaag] for showing a Python solution. Finally, kudos to all who used a CueCat in one way or another to decode the string. Just having one of those still around is pretty hack-it-y.

Because of the ubiquity of Barcode scanners and online image translation programs the challenge might have been a bit too easy. Do you think you’re up for a greater challenge? Download the new barcode and get to work. This one should be quite a bit harder to decipher. Once again, leave a comment that includes the message stored in the Barcode. Please remember, only entries that solve the puzzle and include a full description of the process will be considered. Good luck, and let the games begin.

Update: It only took [JP] 19 minutes to post a correct solution to the new Barcode.  Great work!

[The Moogle's] winning solution:

First, [The Moogle] opened up the barcode in Photoshop, zoomed in, and added a grid of lines below to help in reading out the binary code. The red markers were used to help delineate between data chunks.

The image was then put into a spreadsheet program (OpenOffice Calc in this case) and the binary for each chunk was read out by hand.

He formatted the binary in order to make sure he hadn’t made errors, then used a lookup table for code 128 to generate the characters from each data chunk.

Nice work! This solution was executed with tools that everyone has and knows how to use.

This morning we logged into Google to find a Barcode instead of the normal logo (how strange that Google would change their graphic!). Apparently today is the anniversary of the Barcode. This method of easily labeling items for computer scanning is used for every type of commodity in our society. But do you know how to get the cryptic information back out of the Barcode?

Here’s the challenge:  The image at the top of the post was created by the devious writers here at Hack a Day. Leave us a comment that tells us what the message says and explains how you deciphered it. There are programs that will do this for you and some smartphones can do this from a picture of the code, but we’re looking for the most creative solutions.

The winner will be decided in a totally unfair and biased way and gets their name plastered all over Hack a Day (and possibly slandered a bit).  So get out there and start decoding that machine-readable image.

Update: We’ve announced a winner for this challenge.

By now you’ve probably heard something about Google Wave which saw a private preview release last week. The video above is an eight minute overview of the core functionality that the Wave offers. Wave development was based on the premise that email, invented 40 years ago, has not kept pace with our working needs as a technological society. Wave looks to improve on the email model by combining real time chat features, in line conversations, and web tools like document sharing and real-time translation.

The team here at Hack a Day uses a collaborative effort to bring you the best hacks we can find. To do so, we use a combination of email, instant messaging, document sharing, IRC, and old-fashioned conference calling. We’re waiting patiently for our invitation and although we’ve been skeptical of some past Google offerings, we hope the advertised features of Google Wave will allow us to improve our team coverage for the benefit of our readers.

Are you already using Google Wave? Please share your experiences with us in the comments.

Google has unveiled their latest web app. It’s called Google Sidewiki and makes it easy to “Contribute helpful information to any webpage”. We’re not quite so sure. If you have the Google Toolbar installed on your browser, Sidewiki allows you to open a side-panel, add your comments about the page, and read the comments of others.

In a Utopian Internet (Utopernet?) the world’s most predominant experts on all subjects would be browsing websites dropping off clairvoyant nuggets of wisdom like Greek oracles. In reality, letting anyone add to any web page does not equate to instant insight. We’re all familiar with long comment threads and forum posts that contain very low percentages of useful information.

Google considered this “white noise” as a possible problem and implemented a ranking system for which comments are displayed first. This raises another flag, will this become a type of advertising? At some point in the future will comments linking to other pages be ranked based not only on popularity, but on a kickback to the Big G in return for increased exposure?

There is also the consideration that web pages might not like what comments are being left in Sidewiki. We’ve noticed that emails referencing the Labor Movement often have link advertisements in Gmail about how to prevent Unionization. What would the Sidewiki for pages covering controversial topics such as religion, sexual persuasion, and abortion look like?

We will admit this is a well intentioned idea with a lot of potential. But everything depends on how well it is executed.

We’d like to spend some time talking about documenting your project and sharing it with the world. For many, the goal is to become an Internet sensation, hopefully for the right reasons. Taking a bit more time to make certain you do a great job of sharing your information will pay off. Here at hackaday.comwe focus on technological wonders but these guidelines should work well at improving the desirability of anything you might want to share on the interweb.

1. Pictures

Yes, you need to have a picture to go with your project. Even if you did something that can’t be captured on camera you must have a photo. An example of this is the main photo for our recent udev rules post. It’s just a udev logo with some words but it immediately shows what the article is about.

This is doubly important for concept illustrations, flow control charts, schematics, assembly diagrams, etc. Visual materials complement your writeup. They also encourage readers to spend more time looking at your project, once again increasing the chance that they’ll share this with others.

Multiple pictures are a huge plus, even if some of them are just links to photo sharing sites. There are many examples of posts that show a few pictures and then have a linkpointing to more. Having several eye-catching shot options to choose from increases the chance that someone will blog about your project. Think of the extra photos as your press kit.

2. Descriptions for all levels of readers

Have you just completed something that is cool for everyone to look at but the gory details require specialized background knowledge? Make sure you include a layman’s description of what you set out to do and what was accomplished. But don’t make the mistake of dumbing everything down, many readers are looking for things they can learn from and adapt into their own projects. Strike a nice balance that includes a general overview at the beginning, details in the middle, and a conclusion that gives a broad overview of your accomplishments.

3. Submit it yourself

Hoping that everyone you know will head to your site and then tell your friends about it? Why not be more active? You can submit your project directly to Hack a Day; most popular sites have some way of doing this. If you’ve asked questions on your favorite forum throughout the project, make sure you post an update to all of those threads with a link to the finished project page. We always want to see the fruits of one’s labor so we subscribe to threads that look interesting. This added step will bring the kind of traffic you want: the admirers who wish theyhad pulled off the feat that you completed.

4. Site stability

Often called the Digg effect or the Slashdot effect, having your site go down because of traffic is a bad thing. If you want everyone in the world to take a look at your project, make sure you have chosen a host that can handle the traffic. Clicking through to a dead link will turn readers away (obviously). If you’re hosting on your home server, keep the link to yourself and your closest friends.

5. Post follow-ups

Did you find a way to make your project better? Make sure to post a follow-up, then link it at the bottom of the original post and vice-versa. A great example of this is the twatch, which had a twatch-in-a-picture-frame follow-up. The original project was an interesting one, the follow-up is eye-catching and fun; each builds on the popularity of the other. Once you’ve posted a useful followup, go back to step 3 and promote it!

6. No Spamming, no cheating

Flooding forums or emails that are unrelated to your project is Spam. The same goes for leaving links in comments that don’t have any relation to what you accomplished. If you are trying to syphon hits by tricking people into clicking a link then you are cheating. Become a sensation for the right reason: because people love your project.

Conclusion: it didn’t work

Well, there’s only room for so many sensations. But, if you followed our advice you have a quality writeup of your post and we’re certain many people took a look at it. This builds your reputation and increases the chances that your next project could go viral.

We were fortunate enough to StumbleUpon the most useless machine ever. Delightful! Eclipsed perhaps by the world’s most useless machine copy. We say that because the doll arm looks more realistic which creeps us out in a very entertaining way. So these machines aren’t useless, they provide entertainment.

We, on the other hand, have had some projects that really fell on their faces. With that in mind, show use your most useless machine. Please leave a comment after the beep.

(beep)

Google has acquired reCAPTCHA and plans to use the system for digitizing books. Wait… what? CAPTCHA is the method of requiring a user to type in a visually obscured word to prove they are human. How can this digitize books? The answer is a bit obscure and takes some time to discover, but you’ll have fun along the way.

The Google blog links to a Google TechTalk video on Human Computation as an example of how they plan to use their new acquisition. It’s embedded below but at 51 minutes we figure most won’t watch it all so we did it for you. This fascinating discussion looks at how people are already being tricked into solving CAPTCHA challenges, and shows several tested implementations of getting people to input cognitive data computers cannot, under the guise of playing games.

Spammers have to beat the CAPTCHA system in order to get large numbers of free email accounts.  There have been examples of software overcoming this test such as the greasemonkey script that beat MegaUpload’s security, or Time Magazine’s poll being hacked. But, for the most part, only humans can pass the test. People seeking to bypass millions of CAPTCHA challenges either pay for sweatshop laborers to solve them or, more creatively, they get you to solve them when cruising for porn. This is the proof of concept; we can use people to interpret words computers cannot if we use the right carrot.

Talked about in the video, the ESP game was written in order to correctly tag photographs.  Players are shown pictures and asked to type what they see.  The round keeps going until the two have typed the same word. With a lot of players, and proper safeguards, these tags are incredibly accurate. Furthermore, the game has been very popular and has the potential to accomplish herculean feats in short amounts of time (namely, tag every image in Google’s image search in just a few months).

It seems that Google plans to use these methods to digitize books that are otherwise very difficult to scan with Optical Character Recognition. According to the video, 9 billion human hours were spent playing solitaire in 2003.  What if a small portion of this time could be diverted over to playing games that added to the digitized knowledge cache? If the right type of verification game can be developed it will allow Google to tap society as their typing minions. It’s an interesting proposition and frankly we hope to see it happen.

We’re starting to think that phone numbers are deprecated; it may be time to integrate how we connect telephones with the new digital millennium. To get a firm grasp on this topic it is important to take a look at the reason we started using phone numbers, why we still use them, and the why’s and how’s of transitioning to a new system.

History of phone numbers

Telephone numbers started out as a way of physically addressing a telephone extension. Whether connected by an operator at a switchboard or through a magnetic exchange, each number corresponded to the hardware switch that connected the handset you were trying to ring. This originally started with named exchanges such as Pennsylvania-6-5000. The geographic location of the extension was  shown in the name and this system gradually transitioned over to area codes and prefixes.

Continued usage

The proliferation of cell phones means that numbers are no longer tied to a physical location but are routed to the nearest tower to which each wireless phone is currently connected. So why have we continued to use telephone numbers? Backwards compatibility is paramount. Cell phones overtook land lines years ago but there are still millions of people connected to the telephone companies’ wired networks. Most of the phones used on these land lines rely on the touch tone system to function. Even the advent of Voice over Internet Protocol implements the same system of connecting calls by dialing a number.

What works better than phone numbers?

How many different phone numbers does your family have? Many households have a home phone, a cell phone for each family member, and a work phone for each adult. What if all of these numbers were addressed similarly to how the Domain Name System works for internet addresses? Something like this:

phone://famiy.johndoe2155.voice/john_at_home

phone://family.johndoe2155.voice/jane_at_home

phone://www.your_company’s_domain.com/customer_service

This can be accomplished in the near future. All cell phones and many land line phones already have the ability to store numbers so that you only have to enter them once. Cell phones can already input web-style addresses and a firmware upgrade would allow for a new system of addressing and storing voice connection information. Service providers like Comcast and Charter are already providing phone service that utilizes VOIP, paving the way for dialing from your computer. For legacy hardware an inexpensive interface box similar to the digital cable converter boxes could be implemented. The new box would have a keyboard and character LCD and be rolled out in the same way that caller ID boxes were.

Conclusion

No one wants to change their telephone number and be in the position of trying to inform everyone who might ever call them. This is why laws were enacted to allow you to keep your telephone number if you change carriers. If each family owned their “voice domain”, changing carriers, cities, or even countries would be as simple as editing the domain registration. Transitioning to a new system of dynamically addressed telephone extensions is the next logical step in voice communications. Although it would be a change for billions of people, it is possible and worth taking a look at.

[photo credit Projekt Runeberg]

In 2006, Defcon 14 premiered a unique electronic badge. All it did was blink, but it raised the bar for what was expected from a hacker conference badge. In 2007, they went from 2 LEDs to 95 in a scrolling marquee. Along with a POV mode, the badge had two capacitive switches to let the user edit the displayed text. Defcon 16’s badge featured an IR transmitter and receiver for transferring files from an SD card. It worked as a TV-B-Gone and had pads to access a USB bootloader. That was the same year that The Last Hope debuted their RFID tracking badges.

This year the official Defcon badge reacted to sound, but they were no longer the only game in town. Ninja Networks brought their 10 character party badges with a built in debugger. The Arduino compatible HackTheBadge 1.0 also made an appearance. With these new entrants into the field, we wondered what you’d want to see in your ideal badge. What badge would you want to see at next year’s Defcon? Leave you comments below and keep in mind that it should be an idea that is easy to cheaply mass produce.

UPDATED: Forgot to mention the Neighborcon 2 badge based on the GoodFET20.

[Photo: Ninja Networks]