Xbox 360 Wireless Visual Interface

September 13, 2008 by Eliot 8 Comments

[jon barber] pointed out another great project on the benheck forums that hasn’t gotten much attention. [techknott] built a wireless video interface for his Xbox 360. Think of it as a sort of video game thin client. It has the form-factor of a portable but doesn’t include the 360’s components. Instead it has a 1.2GHz A/V receiver and the guts of a wireless controller. The specific transmitter was chosen because it wouldn’t interfere with the 2.4GHz controller. The power supply is two 2600mAh batteries running at 7.5V with a built in charging circuit. The draw from the screen is ~500mA. The entire unit is 1 inch thick.

IPhone 2.1 Firmware Jailbroken

September 13, 2008 by Eliot 11 Comments

The iphone-dev team seems to still be on top of their game. Only a day after the iPhone 2.1 firmware update was released, they’ve updated both the PwnageTool and QuickPwn to deal with the release. They haven’t begun work on the iPod Touch 2G yet, since no one on the team has one yet.

We tend to agree with Engadget; jailbreaking is becoming less and less important to casual users. Now average users can buy an iPhone in their own country and run apps from the official store. A much different place than we were only a year ago. We know most of our audience are power users though and definitely want out of Apple’s walled garden, but that’s only a small percentage of iPhone users.

Playstation 3 Boomerang Controller

September 12, 2008 by Eliot 11 Comments

Reader [HotDog-Cart] is an active member of the benheck forums and recently completed this Playstation 3 boomerang controller. The boomerang was originally shown with the Playstation 3 prototype and was severely panned by the press. [Josh] started with a cheap 3rd party controller that was approximately boomerang shaped. He enlarged the controller body ~20% using bondo. The internals were replaced with gear from an official Sony controller. It was finished with a coat of black paint. It’s definitely a nice build and the new internals mean it probably feels as good as any factory controller.

Hack A Day Fail Contest Winner

September 12, 2008 by Eliot 7 Comments

We had a lot of entries for our Fail contest; there can only be one winner though. We liked [Gordon LaPlante]’s entry pictured above most of all. It’s big, it’s broken, and it’s black and white; that certainly sounds like us. [Gordon] wins $100 worth of No Starch Press merchandise.

There were plenty of other honorable entries. You can view them in the Hack a Day Flickr photo pool. We saw a couple themes emerge during the contest and have highlighted some of them after the break. Continue reading “Hack A Day Fail Contest Winner” →

ToorCon Preregistration Ends Today

September 12, 2008 by Eliot 1 Comment

Preregistration for ToorCon San Diego ends today. The current price is $100 and it will be $140. This is the 10th year for the San Diego hacker convention which will happen September 26th – 28th. The schedule for ToorCon X has already been posted. We highly recommend this convention. We’ve attended the last four years and it’s always been a favorite.

Voting Insecurities

September 12, 2008 by Kimberly Lau 13 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWDEZqqqBHE]

UCSB researchers demonstrated how disturbingly easy it is to hack into Sequoia’s e-voting systems and delete or add votes with little more than a USB key. Given the fact that recent elections have been very close, and this upcoming national one looks also to be decided by a close margin, it’s absolutely inexcusable that our voting systems could be so easily rigged. Not only that, Sequoia has fought hard against having its equipment tested and verified independently. Can we really afford to be using such insecure machines in democratic elections, when the risk of abuse is so great?

Continue reading “Voting Insecurities” →

A Console For Retro Games

September 12, 2008 by Kimberly Lau 4 Comments

Like many nerds, we have our share of retro video games and nonworking consoles lying around. Every so often we feel like dragging one out and hoping it works.. Luckily for us, the Super Genintari is available to fulfill our fantasies of beating Ghosts ‘N Goblins. The Super Genintari is an Atari 2600, NES, SNES and Sega Genesis all rolled into one; you can even put in four cartridges at once and hook it up to your television with a simple AV cable.

[via DVICE]