Giving us a chance to break out the TLAs, [Blair] sent in his latest hack where he embedded an RGB LED into his EeePC to display twitter, pidgin, and email notifications. It is based around the ATtiny45, and requires very few additional parts. He based the project on a foundation of work laid by [Dennis Schulze] on notifications and the work of [Dave Hillier] that used V-USB, a library for implementing USB on AVRs. The entire circuit was done freehand and crammed inside the netbook. He says that it is a lot easier to see notifications, even when the laptop is shut.

Related: Email notification via RGB LED

[Steve] is in the MFA Design and Technology program at parsons, and as part of his studies, has built a couple really interesting projects. First, the Beat boxxx, as seen in the video above, is an 80′s retro looking portable beat looper. You create and loop your beats at the time of playing using simple hand gestures. The look is great, for those who enjoy cardboard and magic marker, though we think some tonal variation and possibly a wider pitch variation would really make this fun.

His second project is Speak to Me/Breathe. This project was meant to be a commentary on security in our daily information. He is visually displaying the braille symbols to spell out his emails. If any person were to spend the effort, they could decipher his emails. The finish on this project is quite nice, you can see a video of the display after the break.

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Google introduced a new Labs feature named Mail Goggles. If you turn it on, on late night weekends, the feature will ask you to perform some math problems before you can send an email. We’re not sure how widespread a problem drunk emailing is, but maybe the delay will allow you to sober up and realize when you’re about to CC your entire company on a rant about your boss, or your adventures with the cute guy or girl in the office. It’s enabled for late nights on the weekends, but once you’ve turned it on, you can adjust the time in the General settings.

A few days ago a lone individual decided to crack [Governor Sarah Palin]‘s private Yahoo! email account. He did this by navigating the password reset procedure. [Gov. Palin]‘s birthday was publicly available and Wasilla only had two zip codes to guess. The follow up question “Where did you meet your spouse” required some more research. They met in high school so a few more guesses turned up “Wasilla high” as the answer. The original poster then read every single email only to discover that there really wasn’t anything of interest there. Frustrated, he posted the details to 4chan to let any wonk have at it. /b/ members began posting screenshots of the account, but very little came of it.

One screenshot of her inbox even revealed her daughter Bristol’s cell phone number. While there was no groundbreaking political information revealed, it is important to point out that it appears that Gov. Palin was using this private account to correspond to her assistants about potentially sensitive government information. This security breach should serve as a wake-up call to many public officials by showing how dangerous it can be to have a private e-mail account, especially when a free web-based service such as Yahoo! is used.

[morcheeba], who you should remember from CVS camera hacking, picked up a Peek and took some pictures while tearing it down. The Peek is a $100 QWERTY device with a simple OS designed only to check email. The device is being sold by T-Mobile with a $19.95/mo data plan. There’s nothing too spectacular to see other than 16MB of flash memory and a TI OMAP processor.

[via Make]