This is just a friendly reminder that our Santa-Pede challenge will be ending soon. Please send your submissions to us by emailing them to bbb@hackaday.com or by posting them in the projects section of our forum (did we mention we have a forum now?) by the end of January to be considered. We don’t care how silly, stupid, simple,or slick it is, just send it to us! We have some fun prizes from Adafruit and Make and even have [Phillip Torrone] as a judge. Get those submissions in ASAP.
We went “live” with our forums less than 24 hours ago and we already have our first project ready for the front page. [Elementix] has shown us his touch screen jukebox build. Using an assortment of car audio speakers and amplifiers hooked up to an old Pentium 4 PC with 120 Gigs of storage, he put together the base cabinet. The touchscreen is an ebay find and he built a custom enclosure for that part. For the interface, he started with “Jukebox Arcade”, a jukebox front end for mame cabinets but found he could easily manipulate the layout since it used an xml file for the settings. After some trial and error, and a little work with the gimp, he got it looking the way he wanted. If you haven’t been there already, you should really check out our new forums.
This post on Reddit by [superangryguy] caught our attention today. He’s put together a video explaining the basics of how to build balancing robots, focusing on a 555 timer based one. He’s got two main versions, the 555 based one and another that is based off of two transistors. He says the 555 based one is much easier to build. This has all come about due to the upcoming 555 timer contest. if you go to the Reddit post you can get schematics for both versions as well as a sneak peak at what he plans on building for the contest. You can see the video after the break.
In an effort to clear out some warehouse space, 2600 magazine has dropped the price for issues from 1984 to 2000 down to $2.50 each. If you haven’t read 2600, the Hacker Quarterly, shame on you. Pick some up and get reading. They are a resource beyond any other magazine out there for hacking and security related issues. They don’t gloss over the good bits either, they give detail because they know what they are talking about. Just to further prove that point, we present to you, the image above. Yes that is a schematic of a bluebox on a child and yes, you can buy it in their store(the shirt).
Yes, finally, we have a forum. We get regular requests, both in the comments and in our email for a hackaday forum. We put it in operation a few days ago and started letting people trickle in and it hasn’t completely blown up in our faces. Please join us there and help build our community. Also, notice there is a button for it over on the right column now.
Some items of interest or common answers to common questions:
That’s it, enjoy and be civil.
This very informative talk given at Shmoocon 2011 has been posted over at IronGeek. Covering all kinds of angles that a person could attack someones computer through the USB port, this should be read by anyone who is security minded at all. No matter which side of the port you tend to be on, this article has great information. They cover some common attack methods such as keyloggers and fake keyboards as well as some common methods of securing your system against them. We’ve actually seen this in the news a bit lately as people have been using the keyboard emulation method in conjunction with android phones to hack into systems.
[thanks Adrian]
One of the most fun aspects of a LAN party was exploring the shared files of all the other users on the network. There were people that would show up, solely for the file swapping. That is exactly what this project is about. From the projects wiki, the Pirate box is a mobile p2p sharing and collaboration platform. Basically it is a wireless hotspot with a slick interface and a shared folder. It doesn’t connect to the internet, and it doesn’t log any connections. You can have a file swapping session simply by flipping it on and sharing its space with other people. They’ve included a step by step guide to setting up your own, but if you’re going to do some subversive file swapping we might suggest putting it in a less conspicuous enclosure. Imagine this as a portable verion of dead drops.
