[Tinkerer] bought a small cupboard from an antique store to fit nicely into his kitchen decor. After getting it home, he realized that some of the cubbyholes had originally housed drawers. The originals were long gone but this provided an opportunity for him to make the replacements seen above.

The first design approach that popped into [Tinkerer's] mind was to draw the pieces in an editor like Inkscape. Some consultation with others at the local Hackerspace led him to this script-based parametric SVG design tool. We jumped right in to give it a whirl, clicking on Load –> Construction (category) –> Better Box. Once you’ve chosen the script, click on ‘Parameters’ on the left column and enter the sizing you want for your box. When all values are correct, click the renter tab, then export it as a Scalable Vector Graphic.

We’ve lamented time and again about our lack of a laser cutter, so we were unable to test this out. But we can’t see why it wouldn’t reproduce the same results that [Tinkerer] achieved.

[Brendan Robert] has been sending us forum thread links outlining the things he’s learned while hacking LG televisions. They were a bit hard to follow for the uninitiated, so we asked if he could give us an overview of what he’s been working on. Not only did he do that, but he made a little Hackaday shout-out seen above by adding the skull and cross-wrenches as one of the menu overlays.

He’s using a TV as his computer monitor, which he picked up at a discount because it was a display model. Without the original remote, and wanting to have features like power-saving mode which is standard on monitors but not on this TV, he decided to see what he could accomplish. A couple of things made this quite a bit easier. First, there’s an RS232 port built into the back which removes the need to investigate and solder your own onto the board. Secondly, since LG built on the Linux kernel for the set, you can download some of the firmware sources from their website.

What he came up with is a script that will find and communicate with the TV over the serial connection. The test script used during development polled every possible command, looking for valid return values. Once [Brendan] established which commands work and what they do, he was able to take command of the unit, writing scripts to adjust brightness based on the ambient light in the room as seen from the computer’s webcam. Make sure you check out the sub-pages to his post that detail the brightness adjustments, stand-by functionality, custom overlay graphics, and the extra commands he uncovered.

Automating something involving data from the Internet can be confusing when it comes to pages generated by user input. For instance, let’s say you want to scrape data from a page that loads after using a search box. [Andrew Peng] posted a quick and dirty example to help you write your own scripts. The example he used checks stock on one of the websites he frequents. His process outlines finding the link that all searches are submitted to, establishing the method used to send the search string, and grabbing the resulting data. He parses it and sends off an email if it finds what he’s looking for. But this could be used for a lot of things, and it shouldn’t be a problem to make it alert you in any way you can imagine. Maybe we’ll use this to add some functionality to our rat.

Looks like someone figured out how to game the Reddit system. This probably has been done before, but as far as we know nobody’s actually shared the methods in detail. [Esrun] wrote some scripts that allow him to register multiple accounts and use them to up-vote stories.

The hack goes something like this. A script registers a group of accounts. Each uses a different IP and the only part that requires intervention is typing in the Captcha. This doesn’t take long. You can see the script interface above as well as a demonstration video after the break.

Once the accounts have been acquired a story is submitted and the new accounts vote on it. They’re not all up-votes though, as having both up and down votes puts the article into the controversial section of Reddit (which is desirable), and doesn’t rouse as much suspicion from the moderators. He ran a few tests that he shares and it seems that as long as the article is interesting, this can be quite successful.

Great, more spam with our social media please.

[Thanks Joseph via Reddit]

Straight out of Ghost in the Shell, the Laughing Man makes his appearance in these security camera shots. [William Riggins] wrote us to let us know about his teams Famicam scripts. After taking a screen shot, faces are detected and counted, ‘anonymized’, and the final image is uploaded to Twitter.

The process is rather simple, and sure beats wearing a bunch of white reflective camouflage. All that’s left is detecting specific faces to make anonymous, and of course uploading the script to every camera in the world. Easy, right?

Does anyone else find it a little ironic the electronic retailer SparkFun is advocating scripts to help Digikey have a Sort By Price function? Regardless, to reiterate now Firefox (and we hear Google Chrome too) users with the Greasemonkey plugin can sort Digikey items. Personally, some of us here are just Mouser fans at heart.

[Thanks Charper and Mohonri and Satiagraha, image credit Make]

Google’s Gmail is a highly viable option for email. With numerous features and options like widgets, a task list, labels, and chat, Gmail has a slight tendency to get overwhelming and might force us to loose focus on what it is really all about: email.

What can make Gmail better? For starters, how about no ads; they are cluttering and distracting. What about getting rid of the widgets and unnecessary features like labels and chat that we think are supposed to make us more productive but really only make us lose our focus to send, read and reply to email? Nobody knows Zen better than [Leo] at Zen Habits. We weren’t surprised that he and his friends (with Firefox and Greasemonkey) have found a way to trim all the unnecessary elements from Gmail and make it into an email powerhouse that focuses on a basic productive email client. The minimalist inbox for Gmail consists of Greasemonkey scripts for:

• Removing gadgets
• Hiding labels, chat and footer
• Removing ads
• Removing stars
• Getting rid of the Gmail logo and searchbar
• Removing menu navigation bar
• Cleaning up and removing unnecessary buttons

To get started focusing on email, and only email, head on over to ZenHabits for a list of associated scripts and what exactly they can do to help you on your road to the minimalist Gmail.

The fine folks at Midnight Research Labs have put together a new toy for you to play with. It’s a Python script that makes your WiFi hardware behave more like a theremin. Based on the pyaudio library it monitors the signal strength of the AP you’re connected to and changes the tone accordingly. There’s a sample embedded above (direct link). If you have a second interface, you can use it to modulate the volume. It’s an interesting trick, but they say that there’s enough latency that it would be hard to play actual music with it.

The 25th Chaos Communication Congress is underway in Berlin. One of the first talks we dropped in on was [script]‘s Solar-powering your Geek Gear. While there are quite a few portable solar products on the market, we haven’t seen much in the way of real world experience until now.

[script] selected a four segment folding solar panel after some research. He pointed out that solar is currently more of a necessity technology than money saving since the panels can be very expensive. For connectors, he recommended ones that were safe, polarized, and difficult to short, like the RIA connect 230 series he used. Most of the device plugs were easily purchasable, but some had to be salvaged from old AC adapters. A key component of his setup was the adjustable voltage regulator. It’s based on the LTC3780 buck-boost controller which is 98% efficient and can be adjusted from 4V to 25V.

[script] covered some of the problems he ran into in use. The first was an Nokia that refused to charge until a resistor was added to reduce the current delivered. Less sensitive devices like portable peltier fridges will work without any issue. For laptop use, he ran into problems with demand spikes killing the power delivery. He added a large cap normally used in car audio systems to make power delivery more consistent. Laptops can consume as little as 15W during normal use, but when they’re charging the battery, the draw can jump to 50W. On his ThinkPad, he was able to turn off charging to prevent this. He monitored the performance of the panel by building a Kill A Watt style device using an ATmega8 to measure current and voltage and log it to EEPROM.

In conclusion, [script] stated that he was happy with his experience, but that it was still impractical to use the portable panel in anything other than direct sunlight.

Reader [alex] had a commercial plugin for fisheye lens correction and wondered exactly what kind of magic was behind it. Was it actually doing line detection? He dropped in a square grid to see what it spit out. The warped result indicated that the transformation was completely independent of the photo’s content. Using this result as a guide he was able to create a similar transform using Warp and save it as a script. The script generates almost identical results and now he knows exactly how little magic is involved.

Python 3000 has officially been released. The final bug, Issue2306, “Update What’s new in 3.0″ has been closed. Python 3000, py3k, Python 3.0, is a major release for the community. [Jeremy Hylton] pegs the earliest mention of the beast to January 2000. The new release has grown from PEP 3000, opened April 2006.

Py3k breaks backwards compatibility with previous releases in order to reduce feature duplication and promote one obvious way of getting things done. The first major change is that print is now a builtin function and not a statement. int and long have been unified, and integer division now returns a float. Py3k uses concepts of “text” and “data” instead of “Unicode strings” and “8-bit strings”. You can read about many of the changes in What’s New In Python 3.0. Some new features have been backported to Python 2.6 so you can start implementing them in your current code to ease the transition. 2.6 also has the -3 command line switch to warn you about features that are being removed or changed. Finally, the tool 2to3 is a source-to-source translator that should automate a lot of the changes.

Documentation for the new release is online. Source packages and binaries are available now.

[via johl]