Month: June 2007

Sunday Night Game Hacks

June 24, 2007 by 6 Comments

We got news of a pair of interesting gaming hacks today. [XanTium] let us know the latest on XBox 360 kernel hacking. It’s a little catch-22, but if you have the cpu id on your 360, you can downgrade your kernel even if it’s been updated. (But, you need to have the old kernel already if you want to retrieve it.)

The boys over at engadget just put this up a little while ago. Thanks to [Noobz] and [Archaemic], it’s now possible to run homebrew on any firmware version of your PSP – but you’ll need a copy of the game Lumines.

Automatic Cable Modem Power Cycling

June 22, 2007 by 21 Comments


If you’ve got a cable modem, you know the drill when it goes offline. Unplug it, wait 30 seconds, plug it back in, reset your dhcp request. I’m pretty sure that [brian] mentioned this in a comment a while back, but now he’s written it up. He’s using a cron job on his linux box to check the internet connection, and if the test fails, power cycle the hardware with some X10 hardware and a little scripting. (Just don’t tell your friends or they’ll be outside trying to guess the code.)

DIY Beatbox

June 21, 2007 by 5 Comments

[formathirn] sent in his latest project, his Beatbox 2.0. He was kind enough to write up an instructable (Don’t whine about it, they’re giving away a friggin $6k laser etching machine.)
It features a 600 watt amp, four internal mid/fullrange speakers and it’ll run external subs, if you don’t mind carting them around. He used some p3 heat sinks to reduce the space needed by the amp and fit everything into an old ‘Grundig Bandmaschine’ case. For extra bling, he put used fiber optics in the side.

DIY Camcorder

June 20, 2007 by 15 Comments


[Jonas] sent in a surprisingly retro concept given the number of small cheap funky video recorders on the market. He built his own. At the heart is a sony Digital8 recorder, combined with a security camera and a SLR lens. It’s finished out with an LCD viewfinder and a handful of AA batteries to power the security camera.

Heat Pipe Wine Chiller PC Cooling

June 19, 2007 by 29 Comments


[Gordon Johnson] sent in one of the odder active cooling mods I’ve seen. Initially he planned to use lots of pennies to create the heat pipe, but ended up using some copper pipe with some pennies tacked on to mate to the cpu. The pipe carries the cpu heat from the case into a… wine cooler. Judging from the size, I’d guess that the cooler is one of the peltier variety. To see the final creation, I had to go through the slide show youtube video.

Dammit We Missed A Day Extra

June 19, 2007 by 14 Comments


I finally ponied up for an ev-do card to make sure that I have no excuse for missing a post short of being trapped in a hole by bizzaro superman.

Check out this short video how-to on making your own glow in the dark inkjet ink. via [boing boing]. Probably the best inkjet mod since the diy cd printer.

If you remember the diy ups, you might like the attach a giant battery to a stock ups version. I did this myself years ago. It works well, but use a maintenance free battery to minimize hydrogen off-gassing. In fact, I’d suggest some proper ventilation for the battery pack. Miata batteries have a vent tube if you want to keep the parts count to a minimum. (but they are a bit pricy)

Something a little oldschool – [Alexandre] added a serial port to his newton message pad 2000.(Not in english, but easy enough to understand.)

After seeing the superglue fingerprinting post, [Anton] sent in this fingerprint falsification how-to from the ccc.