Why settle for the standard home icon on your browser? If your home button brings you to hackaday.com, why not make the icon reflect that destination? This hack is quick and simple. We’ll take you through it using Firefox 3 and the default theme with standard sized icons. Read the rest of this entry »

[Kenneth Maxon] is a wizard who only does things one way, beautifully. While out of the average hacker’s production capabilities, his injection molding machine is amazing to behold. The machine has all features a commercial model would. It heats and cools the mold, produces over a ton of pressure to inject plastic with, and ejects parts automatically to name a few.

[Josh] sent in a home automation project he did a little while ago. It has a total of eight switched outlets. The main focus of the project was WAP access for remote control from any cellphone. The control box is based on a design by [Ashley Roll] for controlling eight servos using a PIC microcontroller. A listener app written in Java monitors the control web page and sends signals to the board via serial port. He used opto-isolated 240V solid state relays for each of the outlets. All the pieces are available on the site and he might even do a custom control board design if there is enough interest.

Last week Sony launched the public beta of Home, their virtual world for the PlayStation 3. It wasn’t met with much fanfare and has proven to be quite buggy. Many were less than charmed by scarcity being ported to the virtual world. Others took it upon themselves to hack the service. Connections between the user’s home console and Sony’s server are unencrypted. You can sniff the requests and responses off the wire and modify them live. It seems you need the console to establish the initial connection, but after that you’re free to use builtin tools like Download.jsp, UploadFileServlet, and Delete.jsp to modify any file on the host server. You can also set up a proxy server to modify content, but that will only affect what your console sees.

[photo: nic0]

[via Joystiq]

In part 1 we showed you how to build your own prototype RGB keypad. Today we’ll show off some new ideas we worked on to create the project and turn it from prototype to fully functional battle station er door lock.

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