Hackaday Links

By popular demand: Please post your favorite TV torrent sites with RSS feeds in the comments. When I was putting the how-to together I was using Mininova.

[Tom]’s silly Skype hack to get out of meetings.

[DeeJay] posted instructions on his site for region unlocking a Philips DVP 3007/69 DVD player. He lucked out since it is the same method as a 3005.

Increase the signal strength of your iTrip. [chphilli]

[evan b] pointed out the Bluetooth vibrator. I hope for their sake they aren‘t using a default PIN. Makes me wonder if anyone ever built a vibrator with a MIDI interface. I should stop thinking out loud.

[Willb3rg] sent in a site that has been a favorite of mine purely for its recipe structure: Cooking for Engineers.

GEN H-4 Personal Helicopter Fly with all the grace of a dandelion caught in an updraft. Video

Cellphone Unix Terminal [weijie90]

[sprocket] continues to mod the roboraptor, adding tail tilt sensors this time.

How-to control stepper motors using a parallel port and some VB. [monkmo]

The tip line

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Hacking The Motorola A780

A780

The Motorola A780 is a Linux based quad-band GSM phone. Kernel hacker Harald Welte has picked up one of these phones and started poking around in the system. The first thing of note is that the phone doesn’t use the typical lightweight tools found in most embedded systems. Instead of busybox or uClibc it uses their heavier counterparts. The phone also has a 2.4 kernel and switching to the 2.6 kernel is a long term goal. Harald has successfully built a compatible toolchain and has netfilter/iptables running on the A780. It should be possible to construct a firewall between the GPRS and the USB connection. Other hackers are working on adding the stock Linux bluetooth codebase; this may be one of the first phones supporting A2DP stereo headsets. The future looks bright for hackers with new exploitable features emerging everyday like JTAG pads for both processors and debugging callbacks built into the factory code. Harald Welte will be presenting these and future discoveries at the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress in December.

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Hackaday Links

[Dancerman] sent us a couple pdfs covering the Navy’s research on railguns which might show up on new platforms like the DD(X): first is NRAC’s Electromagnetic Gun Technology Assessment, second is slides from the Annual Gun & Ammo Symposium which covers the problems encountered when scaling a system up for ship use.

I was pretty tired of railguns by the time someone sent in the obligatory Powelabs link. So, I read about Sam’s Subaru 2.5RS engine swap and watched the sandboarding videos instead.

[george] knows that these a pretty common, but his laptop picture frame looks pretty good. He added WiFi and Bluetooth adapters to the empty battery bay so that he could have remote access and control the frame with his phone.

[Douglas J. Hickok] used a solar powered yard light to illuminate his Jack-O-Lantern. It ends up looking like a hat.

[tio.chorizo] doesn’t want to pay for the Nano lanyard headphones so he modified his stock ones. He made a large loop and then used heat shrink tubing to hold it in place. Here is a Coral Cache of his photos.

[seth fogie] pointed us to airscanner’s page of iTunes DOS/Spoofing attacks with flash demos.

If your Folding@Home system is chugging away and your looking for another project you could try setting up some diskless clients. [Grendup]

With a little butchering you can make your own in car DVD player. [the_eye]

A completely useless 2.5cc gas-engined turntable

This Engadget post has links to commercial clothing that has integrated controls and power. Now someone just needs to do it for cheap.

Cool Tools featured a blackbox for your car. It plugs into your OBD-II port and records the signals coming from your ECU. If you are in an accident it will have the information from right before the impact.

Cinematical highlighted the documentary Project Grizzly. It’s the story of Troy Hurtubise who built a bear proof suit and is now claiming he can see through walls/cure cancer.

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DIY Railgun

railgun

We’ve hit on a few EM projectile systems recently, so [Jason Rollette] thought it would be a good time to cover his railgun. I couldn’t agree more. Jason has been keeping his Railgun Blog up-to-date from nearly day one. Right now he is assembling a larger capacitor bank to power the gun. The PVC piping you see in the picture is part of the injection rig; If the projectile is stationary when the gun is fired it would get welded to the rails (if not worse). Check out Jason’s Railgun Blog for details on his project plus a lot of informative links.

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EFF Reverses Color Laser Printer Fingerprints

blue led

The EFF has broken the tracking code for the Xerox DocuColor. The DocuColor prints a faint 15×8 grid of yellow dots on every page. To see these dots you need a magnifying glass. You can also use a blue light to make the dots appear black. The EFF page has a built in application for decoding the dots which hide the time, date, and serial number of the printer. The EFF also maintains a list of printers which do or don’t have this “feature”.

Andrew “bunnie” Huang helped out a lot with this research. To speed up analysis of submitted printer samples he modified a scanner to use blue light. The scanner does a white balance calibration before each page scan so the blue lights need to be turned off during that period otherwise the scanner will compensate. bunnie also opened up his HP 2600N to determine where the watermark was implemented. Studying the boards he decided that most color laser printers are probably using Canon engine boards. By coercing one manufacturer the government was able to get watermarking into a majority of the laser printers sold.

[via BoingBoing]

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Hacking Sleep

eye

Polyphasic sleep is a method for increasing the amount of time you spend awake during the day. By sleeping only twenty to thirty minutes every four hours you can stay awake longer. The short time you do spend sleeping the body is in REM sleep, which is the most restful phase. This technique has been used by many famous inventors. I first stumbled across this idea in an article on Kuro5hin. This mode of life can be very difficult to adjust to. In the first few days you probably won’t be asleep when you are trying to. You must strictly follow the sleep schedule. Skipping a nap will probably cause a major crash. With limited sleep a nutritious diet will become very important. Hack-A-Day reader [Nick Busey] is a week into his second attempt at switching to the Uberman cycle and is blogging his progress. If I were to attempt this I would probably get something like the Earlarm to help out. Of course if you’d rather sleep more you’re probably better off with the 28 hour day.

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Portable Electromechanical Slug Thrower

pest

The P.E.S.T. is a “centrifugal” launcher using a rotor powered by a DC motor to accelerate plastic BBs. It has a 50 round magazine and 3 fire modes: semi-auto, 3 round burst, and full-auto. Fire is not instantaneous because it takes 0.75 seconds for the rotor to spin up. If you follow this “read” link you’ll find a detailed description of the device. Photos can be found here.

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