Replace batteries with USB power

battery-sized-adapter

[Mark Bog] thought it was a waste to use batteries for his desktop touch pad. Quite frankly we agree that if you can avoid using disposable cells you should. He ditched the dual AA batteries inside of his Magic Trackpad and built a battery-sized adapter to feed it some juice. It consists of a dowel of similar diameter with a screw in each end. He scavenged a USB cord, connecting hot and ground … [Read more...]

Performance oddities

marios-magic-props

[Mario the Magician] wrote in to let us know that he makes Hackaday a priority every morning with his coffee. Well, so do we. He also included a link to his homepage when submitting this revelation. The juicy details that are as much of a fix as the caffeine in the coffee are missing from his posts. But the hacks are solid. Magicians are hackers. If you could go out and buy the props, the … [Read more...]

Hackaday Links: December 7 2009

glowing_wooden_sculptures

Ah the beauty of watching molten solder pull SMD components into place. Yeah, we've seen it before, but for some reason it never gets old. The glory days of wardriving are certainly behind us but if you're still hunting in certain areas for access points you can leave the laptop at home. A homebrew program called Road Dog can turn your PSP into a WiFi search device. You must be able to run … [Read more...]

Magic clock knows your location

Straight out of the fiction of Harry Potter is The Magic Clock. Just like in the novel this clock (is it still a clock even thought it doesnt tell time?) shows the current location of family members, from home to the doctor's office, even to mortal peril (We hear its nice this time of year). The clock hands are driven by 4 separate servo motors, which are maintained by an Arduino. The location … [Read more...]

Why I Hate Django

[Cal Henderson] delivered a keynote titled Why I Hate Django at the first annual DjangoCon. Django is an open source BSD licensed web framework written in Python. Google has posted the keynote in its entirety to YouTube, which you can find embedded above. While the talk is humorous (and takes many jabs at Rails developers) it does provide insight into what makes a good web framework. [Cal] is … [Read more...]