Month: March 2005

Foxblocker Filters Out Fox News

March 31, 2005 by 63 Comments

Fox Blocker

oh yes folks, just what you’ve always wanted. the foxblocker is a little piece of metal that screws into your coaxial cable on the back of your television (or cable box) and will block out the news channel, FOX News. this is a very interesting concept because in theory, you could start to daisy chain these together and filter out whichever stations you wanted. i think it’d be fun to see these made into “nickelodeon blockers” or something to that effect. whatever will make your little brother cry.

it’s available now for $8.95 from the official website. thanks to off the hook for informing me.

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Hackaday Links

March 31, 2005 by 3 Comments

wow, such heated debate!  the fox blocker is what’s called a band-stop filter.  you can make your own and block whichever cable frequency you wish.

sidenote: in the old days, cable companies would screw a few of these on your line to block premium channels that you hadn’t paid for.  good samaritans would occasionally crack open the cable box and remove all the filters for everyone on their block.

i thought the band-stop filter post was a nice juxtaposition to yesterday’s amp, but that’s just me.  if you are more interested in making things louder, the chu moy amp circuit used in two of our previous posts might be a good place to start for your dreamcast amp guts:
portable minty amp
covert desk lamp mic

jim younkin, shufflephones inventor, has started a new site devoted to shuffle hacking.  read my article on safely disassembling a shuffle and get to work.  we could all use a good shuffle hack now and then.

picture of a paper shuffle case [trilly]
oragami 35mm slide adapter for your scanner [paul]
help put linux on the playstation portable
follow linux development on the nitendo ds
tivo your favorite news program for your psp
more tivo hacks [david gould]
take your psp apart
ebooks on your psp [david the link machine]

last, but not least: a giant, eight foot nes controller

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Hackaday Links

March 30, 2005 by 6 Comments

hackaday links

ah, fresh hackaday links – i’ve missed you so.

i’d like to a send a big shout out to our new hackaday conspirator, vince.  with this new hackaday upgrade, you can expect hackaday links more regularly, twice as many howtos and hackaday originals, and 50% of the posts will come with better humor.

vince will also be driving solo here for a little while once my wife gets her act together and decides to have our baby.  in case you are wondering, baby has no name yet – my best attempts (tron, neo, and project 2501) weren’t really well received

Gm Onstar Hacking

March 29, 2005 by 27 Comments

onstar serial hack

this site shows you how to jack in to the gps receiver inside any gm onstar system.  it’s as simple as soldering a up a serial cable.  you can then connect to it and either run some gps diagnostic software, or switch the device to nmea mode so that you can use it with your gps mapping software in your car pc.

if you’ve got an onstar system but aren’t paying for the service this might be just the hack for you.  thanks for the link leo!

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HOWTO: Put Linux On A ZipIt Handheld

March 28, 2005 by 19 Comments

Linux ZipIt

AiboHack of all places has come up with quite an interesting hack. Turns out someone actually can make good use of the $100 ZipIt Instant Messaging device. The ZipIt (in case you didn’t know) has built-in 802.11b WiFi, a really cheap 320×240 LCD screen, and the ability to IM with MSN, Yahoo!, and AOL Instant Messenger. Groovy, but what good is this to us if we don’t have a WiFi spot to use? Not much. So with a little tweaking and some re-flashing, you’ll be running a sub-2mb version of Linux in no time. Here’s what you’ll need:

  • A Zipit device you are willing to screw up

  • A Windows PC (Windows XP recommended)

  • A WiFi card, or WiFi access point, attached to the Windows PC

  • Optional: Linux PC or cygwin running on Windows PC (for compiling your own Linux ARM apps)

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Cut Sheet Metal With Your Homemade Laser

March 27, 2005 by 24 Comments

co2 lazer

i recieved an email from owen the other day:

fellow hackologists may be interested in a year and half long project of mine to build a computer controlled sheet metal cutting system. It uses a 100 watt CO2 industrial laser.

there are some videos on his site showing the co2 laser milling machine in action. it’s absolutely fantastic. just the control system itself is pretty intense. if you are interested in doing something like this, you should also check out his blog that chronicled the whole contruction.

i’m pretty sure i need one of these.

update: apparently i can’t spell (thanks pedant). i was thinking it was z for zippy.