Here are plans for building a noise canceling headphone circuit. Noise cancellation works by placing microphones close to the ear and then playing the recorded sound out of phase causing destructive interference. Commercial headphones have the mics and power supplies built into the headphones. The page has some other fun suggestions for playing around with the stereo mic setup. If you’re looking for a cheaper route, there is this.
[thanks flybri and h-tech]
The Telecrapper 2000 is designed to intercept telemarketer calls. It checks the caller ID when a call comes in and picks up if the ID is “out-of-area”, “unavailable”, or “private”. A script then begins playing a series of WAV files. A new file is played when the script detects silence indicating the marketer has finished speaking. The entire conversation is recorded for later amusement.
[thanks h-tech]
Well, it doesn’t look like the PSU meeting happened. Moving on:
Yesterday I was moaning about the price of Cobalt Flux‘s dance mats. [SilentCircuit] says the cheaper mats from LikSang work great. There’s always the really cheap option.
I’ve been avoiding a the Flying Spaghetti Monster links, but I couldn’t help chuckling while playing the new FSM flash game. [via] To bad I’m already a minister for a different religion.
Did anyone pick up an iPod nano yet? Have you started hacking? Here is the iPod nano disassembled.
Every so often someone suggests we adopt the hacker emblem from Conway’s Game of Life. I guess I was always adverse to it since a glider in a 3×3 grid would die in the next timestep.
[lain]’s buddy built a drill powered bike. Includes “automatic” transmission.
External hard drive case from an old tape player. [thanks Gene kaufman]
Another OSx86 install. It discusses compatible hardware you should purchase if you’re building a box from the ground up. There is no way to tell if you’ll need the TPM chip with future OSx86 functionality though. [via]
[Phil Pemberton] has been building quite a few battery packs over the last year and decided he needed a better method than soldering. Soldering can often damage the end caps and cell seals. He decided to build a simple capacitance-discharge resistance welder to assemble the packs more efficiently. It doesn’t take many parts, but you’ll have to do some tuning to get it to work correctly.
The other day I mentioned that Jason Striegel is a robot. Well, the situation was given a little bit of clarity when a Slashdot commenter said Googling for “sex bots” turns up Jason’s Hack-A-Day article. At one point someone told Jason he was “worse than Eliza”. Funny you should mention that since the second google link is a sex bot built on Eliza and then turned loose on the IRC. Hilarity ensues.
[Hermann] built a laptop ventilador out of cardboard.
[mike forbes] provided some links for hacking the Netgear DG834G here and here.
You can transcode movies and use your CVS camcorder as a cheap video player. [enigma-]
You don’t have to spend a lot of money on your MAME cabinet. [tIM cATCHPOLE]
[Haon] started working on our Wikipedia stub.
[PK]’s better way to add a garage remote to your car.
This Linux DDR machine looks cool till you price the mats. [Incudie] I guess that is the price you pay to avoid getting carpal tunnel doing this. [via]
Also [via Dirk], a good roundup of USB key friendly software.
Don’t worry [smouldering dog] your gift arrived safe and sound.
Over 225 Hack-A-Day readers have added me as a friend; at least 4 are girls. The Folding@Home team has grown too.
[Ben Hou] had originally sent in Godfried-Willem Raes’s automated sousaphone project, but digging around the site reveals a ton of other instruments (seriously, autosaw!). All of them are wired to accept MIDI input and there are schematics of the microcontrollers on almost every project. Quite a few mp3s are available too. Watch out for the unexplained pr0n
A year ago today, Phillip Torrone posted the first hack of the day: a redbox built from a RadioShack phone dialer. We’ll be celebrating all day and you should be able to find us in the #hackaday channel on Efnet.
Since this about the first post I thought it would be fun to cover “first post!” phenomena on Hack-A-Day. Our audience has gotten huge over the last year, but the behavior of “first post”ers is still silly. Here’s why:
