Hack a Day » addon

Nokia N900 control pad is perfect for gaming on the go

Mike Nathan — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:01:03 +0000

[Andrzej] loves his Nokia N900, noting that it makes a great portable gaming device. Since it supports a wide array of emulators, it’s perfect for indulging his gaming nostalgia on the go. He says that the one downside to the N900 is that its keyboard doesn’t make gaming easy, nor comfortable.

To make gaming a big more fun, he built himself an add-on gamepad that fits perfectly over the phone’s keyboard. Connected via the phone’s USB port, it features 8 push buttons along with a PSP joystick. He used an ATmega8A as the brains of the controller, communicating with the phone as a USB keyboard. He says that this sort of configuration makes it extremely easy to do all sorts of custom button mapping on a per-game basis.

As you can see in the picture above the controller is currently lacking a case, but we think that with a bit of clever packaging, it could look as nice as a retail add-on.

Check out the short video below to see his gamepad in action.

Filed under: cellphones hacks, news

Ubiquity, a browser command line

Eliot — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 03:30:00 +0000

During the last day the web has been abuzz about Mozilla Labs’ Ubiquity. It’s an addon for Firefox that can help you streamline how you get things done on the web. In the example above, they show constructing an email with a map and reviews using mostly keyboard driven input. The addon is quick to install and we think you’ll find it saving you a lot of time on tasks you’d normally hit the search box for. In the popup, you can do quick Wikipedia lookups, define words, translate, perform calculations, and many other operations. You can email a page to someone by just typing three words. The best part is: anyone can write a command that will expand Ubiquity’s function. Greasemonkey helped fix broken websites and we think Ubiquity will help make interactions between sites much easier. We can’t wait to see what clever uses people come up with.

Exploit-Me Firefox XSS and SQL scanning addon

Eliot — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 09:40:00 +0000

One of the best tools we saw at LayerOne was the Exploit-Me series presented by [Dan Sinclair]. Security Compass created these tools to help developers easily identify cross site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection vulnerabilities.

XSS-Me is a Firefox add-on that loads in the sidebar. It identifies all the input fields on a page and iterates through a user provided list of XSS strings: opening new tabs and checking the results. When this process completes you get a report of what attacks got through, what didn’t, and what might have. The upcoming 0.3 version will use heuristics to determine what characters can be used and automatically skip attack strings that won’t get through.

The SQL Inject-Me works almost exactly the same way. It does require a little planning though: you need to tell it what you expect the results page to look like when an attack gets through.

The newest tool, Access-Me, surfs along with you while you’re authenticated to a website and checks whether you can see the same page unauthenticated.