Sometimes, a little bit of noise can be fun. This little noise synth called the Nandhopper, is a quick simple project to get started. The parts list is pretty short, mainly material for the sensors and a 4093 Quad, 2-input Schmitt trigger and NAND gate. You end up with an easy to use, fairly small 1-Bit synth. If you don’t know what a 1-Bit synth sounds like, watch the demo video. Sure, it just sounds like noise to us, but that’s music to some people.

You may be hoping to subsidize the purchase of an iPhone 3G with the sale of your old one, but since you should wipe all your personal data from the old one first, we brought you [Rich Mogull]’s method for wiping all your private data off of an iPhone. The method, which involves overwriting your data with music, is slightly flawed, mainly because of live files that can’t be deleted while the phone’s OS is working and because the OS reserves a portion of the hard drive as unwritable space, which will make it impossible to completely fill it with music.

For those looking to annihilate every scrap of personal information, check out [Jonathan Zdziarski]’s method. It involves restoring the phone as a new phone, then jailbreaking it. Once the user has shell access, umount is used to force the two mount points into read-only mode. Now the partitions can be overwritten with /dev/zero, which should wipe them clean. The phone should then be forced into recovery mode to perform another full system restore, and the process is complete. As [Zdziarski] notes, several iterations of the process with /dev/random should prevent even NAND recovery, but there is an even better way of ensuring full data destruction: “simply take a sledgehammer to the device.” If you are unfamiliar with the command line though, chances are [Rich Mogull]’s method will be easier for you to handle, but don’t blame us if you sell your phone and the Feds get wise to the evidence you left on it.

[via Engadget]

[ChipD] successfully installed two NAND flash chips into his Wii. He can keep the stock firmware on one and then flip a switch if he wants to boot using the other chip with a modified firmware. This hack is fairly straight forward. All it took was someone with steady hands to try it out. The new NAND chip is identical to the original and was salvaged from a flash drive. The chips were soldered as a stack except for the chip enable pin. The chip enable from each chip is attached to a small switch to toggle between which is active. You could use a TSOP socket to swap the different chips, but it wouldn’t fit inside the Wii case. This little switch could be hidden easily next to the GameCube ports.