Autonomous Game Controllers

January 7, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 9 Comments

[vimeo=2727246]

On the off chance that you want to program a microcontroller to play your games for you, you should check this out. Near Future Laboratories has made a dongle that can allow an Arduino to operate as a PS2 or PS3 controller. You can see the Arduino running a random path generator in Katamari Damacy in the video above. They wanted to see how long it would take to clear a room. It managed to get almost all of them in about 70 minutes, only missing those that you have to cross a narrow bridge for. Actually, this could be quite useful in allowing people to create alternative input methods. You may recall reading about their early progress back in June 2008.

Brute Force Attack On Twitter

January 7, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 22 Comments

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

Wired Threat Level has posted an interview with the hacker who recently broke into several high profile twitter accounts, such as Fox News, and Barack Obama. Since we know how much you all love twitter, we thought you might want to learn more about it. Apparently he used a brute force method to get into a member of the support team. The password was “happiness” which was cracked pretty quickly. This might be a good time to review your own strategies to prevent brute force attacks.

Tour ThinkGeek’s Offices

January 7, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 14 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTOMezmVC-s]

If you’ve ever been curious what it is like to work at ThinkGeek, check out this video. [John Frazier], a purchasing agent, talks about the history of ThinkGeek as well as what daily work is like. Fairly interesting, but the summary is that it’s just like any other job, with more toys. They probably have to test all the products fairly thoroughly, we know we would.

[thanks Yan]

Plasma Thruster

January 7, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 34 Comments

plasma_thruster

Some of you probably have plans to build your own spaceships, we know we do. Well, the propulsion system can be a bit tricky, especially if you plan on using plasma drives. This breakdown and build of a simple plasma thruster should help you on your way. All you really need is some Argon, a large capacitor bank, and a custom nozzle. You’ve already got most of that right? As usual, be very careful. This is high voltage and very hot.

Automated Plant Growing

January 6, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 29 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tnfcTAoggI]

The Cheap Vegetable Gardener sent us his fully automated grow chamber project. In the quest to have fresh strawberries year round, they’ve made some progress in the area of automating their plant care. The whole thing is controlled by a computer that can turn on/off the lights and adjust the temperature. It also takes snapshots and logs the environment conditions so you can chart it all out nicely. The automated watering feature isn’t done yet, but hopefully will be soon.

Make A Plasma Cutter

January 6, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 22 Comments

plasma

For those unfortunate few of you who don’t already have a plasma cutter sitting around, [jandgse812] is here to help. He walks you through the process of building your own plasma cutter from scratch. Adding up the list of parts brings the total project to roughly $300. He has included visual diagrams for all the wiring as well as specific part numbers and where to get them. Be careful, this is potentially very dangerous, but also very cool. You may need to get a copy of the mission impossible theme to play whenever you use it. At least, that’s what [jandgse812] recommends. You can see a video of it in action after the break.

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Twitter IRC Server, Tircd

January 5, 2009 by Eliot 22 Comments

tircd is an ircd proxy for talking to the Twitter API. It should work with any standard IRC client. After running the Perl script, you authenticate to the IRC server using your Twitter username as your /nick. Join the room #twitter and the /topic will be set to your last update. Any message you type will update Twitter and the room’s topic. All of the people you are following show up in the room as users and post messages as they tweet. If you private message one of them, it will become a direct message on Twitter. Other commands work too: /whois to get a person’s bio, /invite to start following, and /kick to unfollow. The project is brand new and will be added new features in the future like Search API support. Follow @tircd for updates.