good afternoon readers! I hope some of you had good meetings yesterday and that the rest of you will attend one today. the philly one is at 7:30pm tonight and at 34th and chestnut on drexel field. simple enough. we’ll probably also move the meetings back to thursdays. a lot of people (including myself somewhat) don’t wanna give up our weekend, which is understandable.
last night i went to gameriot at the TLA. and oh boy, it was insane. it’s amazing what a fake press pass will do for you. i was up on stage hosting with mtv2, interviewing everyone left and right, and watched world halo 2 champion zylos kill everyone hardcore. you can find a writeup of that with 40 pics and video on joystiq later today/maybe tomorrow. be sure to check it out.
i have to admit, it’s a very interesting form of advertising. [christian]
wicked! a bluetooth pistol mouse. [bt]
make a master key for master locks for a buck. [w1cked]
getting laptops cool creatively and for a good cause! [ian]
discontinued, but someone should start it back up. [crash]
about as ghetto of a hack as you can think of. [_nic]
make a zipit wireless backlight. very useful when doing other zipit hacks. [ben]
Now, for your lazy afternoon hack, we have one that’ll come in handy for when you travel. If you’re staying at a Hilton hotel, there’s a way you can get every single tv and movie channel from them. Sure it involves disconnecting the cable etc., but there’s no harm in that. Reader [psiveteran] did a great writeup about it in detail and how you too can ahh…..accquire cable. He even linked back to us. How nice. You can view the article here.
i love the laptop cooler from wood, i think i might build myself one of those since it started to chuck rain down today.
im thinking a usb hub would be quite handy and the fan would plug into there. May be a mains multi socket too.
My difficulty is finding 5v fans, all fans are pretty much 12v now-a-days
Check to see if hotel TV’s are already PPV hacked. First time I encountered something similar to this was at an Embassy Suites in Atlanta GA. Stayed there twice and each room came with two TVs; one in the bedroom with a PPV box attached and one in the front living area without. The TV in the front room was “semi-unlocked” in that only certain channels were displayed when you “surfed” with the arrow buttons, but it would let you directly enter channels outside the preprogrammed range with the remote’s numeric keypad. Their PPV system was setup to use channels 52 through 70 on the even channels. Dunno if these were pre-hacked TVs or just a lazy setup crew, but there ya go…
Now my question is; what angle is optimal for a laptop stand? (And what height in the front.)
really like the laptop cooling hack, and yep, a usb hub is a good idea (comment #1), since both of my usb ports are taken. my laptop likes to overheat in the summer when i am too cheap to run the air conditioner, could go for a portable version of this hack for my florida trips (my laptop hates flordida, it told me so itself, especially the treatment it receives in the airport ;) ps, has somebody benchtested this? before i break out the skillsaw and crack open the old tower to cannabalize a fan or two, be nice to know the gains.
“Bring your own TV-decoder” was hilariously clever. I gotta try that.
Although, it seems just as practical to drag the flat-panel display in from the car (typically I have the company display with me for presentations & it has a TV tuner built in).
in regards to the hotel tv article:
the iron that most hotels keep in the closet removes that plastic cover nicely ;)
I modded a Powerwheels Barbie Jeep a few years back for remote control.
Nothing as elegant as you see in this mod. Mine was pretty low tech, but featured a pan/tilt camera and microwave transmitter to make it a remotely operated vehicle.
“Probe I” was it’s name.
“Probe II SG” is what the project evolved into.
email for details if interested.