Rogue Server In A UPS

January 16, 2006 by Eliot 19 Comments

ups

InventGeek‘s newest contributor, Dan Williams, has just posted his first project: hiding a server in a UPS surge protector. Dan found himself with a dead UPS surge protector and decided to do something fun. The brick has two built in RJ-45 connectors and power so he figured he could easily hide a server in it. There are three main components involved: a 4-port router, an NSLU, and a USB enclosure for a laptop hard drive. The router and the NSLU were both stripped of their cases to save space. The wall warts were stripped of their cases as well. There aren’t a lot legitimate reasons to make one of these. It is still a fun project and if a burglar runs off with your laptop, but not your disguised file server, you might feel a little better.

[thanks Jared]

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DIY Fig Rig

January 15, 2006 by Eliot 9 Comments

fig rig

The Fig Rig is the brain child of director Mike Figgis. The Rig is designed to provide stability while using a handheld camera. If you’ve seen the continuous 90 minute takes in Figgis’s Timecode you know what prompted him to come up with this contraption. Like most digital video camera accessories the Rig comes with a premium price. KingVidiot has a forum post detailing his attempt at creating a homemade Fig Rig. He used an old steering wheel, a piece of aluminum plate and a wooden dowel. It isn’t that pretty to look at, but it definitely didn’t cost him $300 and it works pretty well too.

[thanks DVguru]

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Amiga In An FPGA

January 14, 2006 by Eliot 15 Comments

mini amiga
Dennis had been working on this project for over a year before recently releasing it in the Amiga.org forums (photos). The Amiga was notable for its use of unique, dedicated processor chips for tasks like real time video effects. Dennis has recreated these chips in a Xilinx Spartan-3 400K gate FPGA. His development board also features a MC68000 processor and an MMC card for storage. He’s got everything, but sound and keyboard support working. He is able to run Lemmings though, and isn’t that what’s really important?

[thanks Seantech]

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Lightweight Eye Tracker

January 13, 2006 by Eliot 15 Comments

[Jason S. Babcock] and [Jeff B. Pelz] put together this paper on building a simple, lightweight eyetracker (PDF) to foster the creation of open source eyetracking software. All of the components are mounted to a cheap pair of safety glasses. The eyetracker uses a technique called “dark-pupil” illumination. An IR LED is used to illuminate the eye. The pupil appears as a dark spot because it doesn’t reflect the light. A bright spot also appears on the cornea where the IR is directly reflected. An eye camera is mounted next to the IR LED to record the image of eye with these two spots. Software tracks the difference between the two spots to determine the eye orientation. A laser mounted to the frame helps with the initial calibration process. A scene camera placed above the eye records what the eye is viewing. The video from these two cameras can be compared in real time or after the experiment is concluded.

[thanks austin y.]

8GB IPod Nano Hack

January 12, 2006 by Eliot 102 Comments

nano

2,000 songs. Impossibly small. Reeks of fish.

There is something very fishy going on with this conversion of a 4GB iPod nano to an 8GB nano. To start, the obligatory “new capacity” screenshot isn’t provided. Next, it is almost too simple: just piggyback the flash chips on top of each other. Wait, weren’t the chips in the 4GB nano mounted on a daughter card? ([Omikron]’s photos of the daughter card in his 4GB nano) The 2G version had flash chips on the main board, but those were Toshibas not these Samsung chips. There are really basic instructions provided that encourage you to buy a broken nano on eBay and salvage the necessary chips. If that seems a little hard, the author has plenty of the correct memory chips on hand and is willing to upgrade your nano, for a fee. This page is mirrored in an auction. What kind of person has a pile of 2GB iPod flash chips on hand? I don’t know, but they seem to have sold a lot of 4GB iPods in the last month. I wonder what capacity the iPods really were

Hack-A-Day Extra

January 11, 2006 by Eliot 17 Comments

production

ShmooCon starts in two days and? uh? I’m sure I’ll be caught up with work by then. (UPDATE: [Tom] has an interview with Bruce and Beetle from the ShmooGroup) On a more important note: Yehoshua’s borg seems to have gotten lost on its way home from a New Year’s party and our Folding team has taken a hit. We’ve got sitemeter stats now in case you’ve ever wondered. It has only been active for two days, so the math is a little off.

More links after the jump (you should grab a beverage).

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Laptop Keyboard Conversion

January 11, 2006 by Eliot 24 Comments

keyboard

[Leechar] liked the compactness of notebook keyboards and wanted one for his desktop. A friend provided a 486 notebook keyboard and Leechar found an old AT keyboard controller in a junk box. Instead of taking the time to decode the key matrix and make sure that every key was generating the proper scancode he just wired it so that each key generated a unique code. Then using KeyTweak he was able to build a registry key for the correct mapping. Still having fun abusing input devices he decided to marry his Toshiba laptop track ball with the guts of a Microsoft mouse by soldering directly to the photosensor connections.

UPDATE: It looks like we “H-bombed” the 5gigs server within 4 minutes of this being posted. Grynx has a mirror.

UPDATE: Leechar has gotten better hosting, links should be fine now.

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