Hack-A-Day Extra

extra

My biquad how-to was up on Engadget yesterday; lots of good comments. I’d play with it some more, but it is getting way too cold outside.

The Team Hack-A-Day folding forum is growing, but where is kcrone_ (one of our biggest producers)? Found on the forum: Kit’s automated vodka filter.

The big news today was Anandtech disassembling their XBox 360. The things to take away from this: the hard drive and cdrom use SATA connectors and a “hacker-proof” screwless case means fewer screws to lose. I kinda wish I was still in NYC since Joystiq is unpacking their’s. I don’t have any SATA hardware, but I just found this USB to SATA adapter on DVGuru. Now where can I buy one?

The other big story this week is friend of Hack-A-Day Dan Kaminsky counting how many nameservers have witnessed the Sony rootkit calling home: 568,200.

[Greg Lipscomb] from D.I.Y. Live has posted a POV toy built using just EEProm instead of the usual microcontroller. He’s also got a nice post about his experiences on NASA’s KC-135 “Vomit Comet”, bonus low-gravity breakdancing video included.

The GP2x Linux handheld console was released recently and has a lot of potential. Joystiq pointed to GP2x News as a good source for development news.

Inhabitat got a chance to visit the folks at Cargotecture who are building housing out of shipping containers. I got interested in this idea a few years ago after reading that shipping containers were piling up on the west coast because it was cheaper to make new ones than ship them back empty. There wasn’t much in Google at the time, but things have changed. Check out fabprefab’s containerbay, a directory of shipping container based housing projects.

The i2Hub P2P network shutdown. It’s sad to think of all of that bandwidth going unused again.

Freeline skates look pretty easy to build. My former classics professor road around on a single rollerskate, but we already knew he was insane because he programmed in SNOBOL.

Core77 unearthed one of my favorite pictures: the mouse pad couch. Far more comfortable than the Macintosh II couch.

Animated movie of this summer’s hurricane season (mpg) [via Corey]

Exploit for PSP firmware 2.5 is being worked on.

The tips always help.

25 thoughts on “Hack-A-Day Extra

  1. I too have been looking for something similar to what DVGuru posted about… I have seen:
    USB to ATA and USB to SATA, but never both together. It would be very handy to have one adapter for both!

  2. I have a usb>sata adapter sitting in front of me. we use them in the shop to restore people’s data on virus ridden machines. in linux they show up as /dev/sd…. great for restoring data from corrupted ntfs partitions. The specific models we have are the “coolgear” ones, and they are decent. on all 3, the cases had to be hot glued together right away, but other wise, they are nice. Can power using the extra “red” usb connection to gather enough current to spin up large drives (3.5″), and it comes with a wall adapter with a standard power connector on it.
    i think we got them at newegg.

  3. That is NOT the way to make a correct bi-quad. There is way too much loss because the element is exposed too soon. That’s why you have to use copper piping all the way to the [bi-quad] driver.

    If you want to see how a real bi-quad it built check out tv.seattlewireless.net from October 2003.

  4. back in 2001-2004 I tried many many many antenna designs and the most durable and highest dBi antenna that I could come up with is the bi-quad. I made three different diameter cantenna’s with a range of less than 30 meters. I made a single bi-quad attached to a primestar dish and I could pick up networks in Seattle from Bainbridge Island (+16 Kmeters or +10 Miles away).

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