USB Bluetooth Without Sacrificing A Port

bluetooth

Myriam a.k.a. [tnkgrl] decided that the the Averatec 1050 laptop was sorely in need of some Bluetooth and was tired of losing a port to a USB dongle. The AV1050 reports 3 usb ports in the device manager, but only features two external ports. She disassembled the laptop and went looking for the third port. The end result is 2 fully functioning USB ports and internal Bluetooth. There’s enough detail in the post you should be able to pull this off with other laptops as well.

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Porting Firefox Extensions To Flock

flock

Flock is the new “social” web browser based on Mozilla’s Firefox source code. They recently released a “developer preview” for those of us that must try every piece of bleeding edge software. Flock’s claim to fame is its ability to integrate with web services like Flickr, del.icio.us, and blogging software. Most people aren’t willing to jump ship without their Firefox extensions though. You can force an extension to install by unpacking the .xpi and replacing the version checking code. Whether the extension works or not is still up in the air. Geoff has all of the details you need to port extensions to Flock.

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Vegetable Oil Benz

biodiesel tank

Biodiesel has moved into the spotlight recently due to rising gas prices. It’s an attractive solution because of the minimal modifications needed for the conversion and the abundance of fuel. The original Diesel engine was designed to run on vegetable oil, but fossil fuels proved much cheaper.

This particular conversion is on a 1980 Mercedes Benz. It uses a second fuel tank mounted in the trunk to store the filtered waste vegetable oil. Vegetable oil can gel and even solidify when the outdoor temperature drops so the tank has a built in heat exchanger to warm the oil with engine coolant.  The fuel supply line is bundled in with the warm water lines as it travels to the engine compartment.  The car is started using the normal fuel tank and then switched over to the vegetable oil after it has properly warmed up. It is important to switch back to regular diesel before turning off the engine to make sure the oil is flushed out of the injectors and supply lines.

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Solderless Breadboard Transporter

solderless breadboard case

[Adam Wolf] sent along this great tip for transporting projects. He chopped out the center section of a tackle box clearing the way for two breadboards to be stuck to the lid. The boards are spaced for a DIP40 chip. Two binding post are epoxied in place to provide power. Now you can move your projects and parts without knocking wires loose. More details at his blog.

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JuiceBox Custom Linux Cart

rom cart

The JuiceBox is a personal video player that was sold by Mattel that no one cared about. It was capable of playing MP3s off of an SD card and this summer you could pick them up for cheap as retailers dumped their stocks. [prpplague] has been hard at work creating a custom bootable rom cartridge. The MP3 adapter is a simple pc board with a SD card holder attached to it. The card is modified so the JuiceBox believes it is a video cartridge. An xD memory card is then soldered onto the back to act as storage. Using the JTAG connection on the JuiceBox and a serial console you can flash the bootrom, kernel, and ram disk from the SD card onto the xD. Once flashed the new custom cartridge will work on any JuiceBox. [prpplague] is still cleaning up the flash code, but it should be ready to go shortly.

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Hackaday Links

MAKE:Blog has posted photos from their Make Faire at Euro OSCON. Have a look and you’ll see my co-conspirator Fabienne and regular commenter [Markie]. I know [led] was planning on attending. Did anyone else get a chance to go?

We were included in PC Mag’s Top 101 Web Sites under the category Computing – Experts. From the text it sounds like someone actually reads the site, which makes me even happier. [DigitalDame]

The Duxbury high school hacking contest entry deadline was the 14th. Have a look at some of the projects.

[Aleksandyr] wonders why anyone would settle for less than full cellphone SSH. You could even use J2MEVNC if you’re crazy enough.

VGA over Cat5 He says 800×600 works at over 50ft. [jubilantjeremy]

Google Random Number Generator [ravidgemole]

Beautiful mechanical clock that is accurate for 10k years

Palm pilot controlled tattoo machine [dANIEL]

[eric]’s guide for destroying CDs using duct tape.

A roundup of all of the ways to add a Firefox download counter to your site

The tip line

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How-To: Automatically Download And Convert TV For Your IPod

itunes
The good folks at Videora have recently released the Videora iPod Converter. Using this tool you can make almost any video iPod ready. They have a handy how-to for ripping and transcoding your own DVDs. Our goal is to automatically download TV using Bittorrent and convert it to an iPod friendly format saving ourselves $2.

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