Control your tree from anywhere

We honestly never thought we would see an internet controlled Christmas tree before, sure maybe a remote controlled claw or online soccer robots, but a tree? Regardless, team [Schwippy] did just that. 5 separate sets of lights are connected to 5 individual x10 modules. The x10s are listening over the household’s AC lines for commands from a server … Read the rest

Server not as think as you drunk it is

server-in-whiskey-bottle

[Janos] pulled off a unique case mod by fitting a computer system inside of a whiskey bottle. Inside you’ll find a 733MHz processor, 256MB of ram, a 40GB hard drive, and a 60 watt power supply. The specs seem a little light but since this mod is from 2006 we certainly understand. Using the right server software this will … Read the rest

Eee PC NAS

eeePC NAS

Hack a Day reader [The_Glu] shared with us a project of his. He used an Eee PC 701 he had lying around with a broken LCD, along with three 1TB SATA drives to create a custom NAS server for his house. The server features a number of other interesting components, including USB2SATA converters to connect the hard drives, as well … Read the rest

Hackit: SheevaPlug

plugserv

A few months ago, we introduced the SheevaPlug, a 1.2GHz ARM processor with 512Mb of RAM, 2 usb ports, an ethernet port, and an SD card slot. In that article, we asked: “What would you do with one?”. We received tons of responses, 118 comments and counting. Scientific American had a similar idea and asked some “hackers”(MIT students) what Read the rest

Googles servers revealed

googleservermedium

We’ve often wondered what kind of hardware the giant of the internet, Google, used to handle it’s data. They’ve recently revealed what their main workhorses are. It’s a custom motherboard made by Gigabyte with two processors, and eight RAM slots. The main point of interest on these is the fact that each server and piece of network equipment has it’s … Read the rest

Standalone Eye-Fi upload

eye-fi

Former Hack a Day contributor [Will] has been using a Eye-Fi SD card to automate his photo transfers. Unfortunately this requires using Eye-Fi’s software and talking to their servers. He used [Jeff Tchang]‘s replacement server written in Python to recieve the images from the card. [Will] manages his own online photo gallery using Gallery 2. To get the … Read the rest

Company shutdown causes 2/3rds drop in all spam

The Washington Post is reporting that the shutdown of one hosting company has caused the total volume of spam to drop by 2/3rds. The company in question is McColo Corp. Both Hurricane Electric and Global Crossing pulled the plug today after a damning report revealed a number of illegal activities happening on McColo’s servers. McColo already had a reputation … Read the rest