Vacuum forming involves heating up a sheet of plastic and stretching it over a mold known as a “buck”. A vacuum is applied to pull the plastic up to the mold surface. The major parts are a table top grill and a shop vac. The author uses this set up to create studio props, but it can be used for a lot of other things. The acrylic bodies on RC cars are manufactured using this process. So, if you want to start generating your own custom bodies, this is where to start.
Our friends over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog decided reinforce their name by trying out the OSX86. After some bumbling they got it installed (I don’t think they’re going to be Linux converts anytime soon). Conclusion? They were thoroughly impressed that it worked and how incredibly slow it was, deciding that it needed some more tweaking. I’m just happy someone else did this before I had to bite the bullet and sacrifice my only running laptop in the name of hacking.
We’ve been linking to a couple proxy options in the links posts recently and [tom] thought it would be a good idea to write up how to use Privoxy. In [tom]’s case he wanted to route all of his internet surfing at work through an encrypted tunnel to his home machine. The guide is Windows based, but it won’t be to hard to translate to your OS of choice. It starts by setting up an OpenSSH server and new user on the home machine. Then Privoxy is installed. Next PuTTY is used to establish the secure tunnel from the work machine. The last step is to configure the browser to use the proxy. You can use this for IM too. You may not need this at work or school, but it should offer you some decent protection if you’re out using open access points.
I guess today is BlogDay. No, I wasn’t holding my breath for this either. It seems like a good idea though: introducing your readers to other blogs you read, that aren’t necessarily related to yours. So here are five of my favorites that really have nothing to do with hacking.
The Kneeslider is a great motorcycle blog. Paul does a really good job covering the latest news and interesting topics like alternative engine designs.
Preshrunk is a t-shirt blog. This is the place I go to find non-black t-shirts to wear to hacker conventions. They’re also good about pointing out Threadless sales.
Drawn! is dedicated to illustration, art, cartooning and drawing. I read a ton of webcomics so this blog was pretty much a given in my eyes.
The Drunken Lagomorph is the only personal blog I read where I don’t know the author personally. It is written by a former EMT turned RN and is consistently hilarious
I’ve always wondered if HAM radio would be an interesting hobby. Well if I got to design as many antenna launching devices as these guys it would be worth it. The pneumatic gun fires a tennis ball that trails a fishing line. Once the line is in the tree it can be used hoist the actual antenna. The site has plans for a large number of devices with different triggering mechanisms and sizes. Some are even small enough to fit in a ten gallon tub.
[thanks wasted_druid]
Never forget your power supply when you’ve got a 60 mile round trip to go get it.
It was grilled cheese day all day over at Slashfood. I tried googling for a hacker method, but I didn’t find what I wanted. The closest I came was cooking grilled cheese with an iron. I recommend wrapping it in tinfoil so you don’t have to decheese your iron.
Following Xeni’s lead, you can add me as a friend on Facebook.
[pete] sent in the wooden case he built. If you missed it in the comments [zapwizard] pointed out Mr.Red’s 2nd generation wooden laptop.
There is a generic OSX86 generic install DVD patcher in the wild. READ_ME_FIRST [Jim] said it worked fine for him.
[Patrick] decided to make his 4GB PSP adapter a little more secure.
Wayfar hacks NES cartridges so that you can take full control of the sound chip with a midi device, it does visualization based on the input too. [ceedub]
We’ve linked to starting fire with an ice lens before, but you can also pull it off with a bag of water.
[C-S-B] sent in his buddy’s carputer over at mp3car.
UPDATE: Facebook link should be fixed
After seeing last Monday’s snowboard build, [mike] thought it would be cool if we covered longboards too. Toothless Longboards has a ton of information on building these things. It covers everything from alternative deck shaping techniques to different press methods like vacuum bagging. There is some street luge building info too. All around a good site
