[xander] built this LED valentine for his loved one. It’s interesting because he used Pyralux, a flexible circuit board material from DuPont. He describes the consistency as “tough plastic tissue-paper”, but had no trouble using standard toner transfer etching. It has an ATtiny45 microcontroller that pulses the 16 LEDs at an approximation of his heart beat. To avoid soldering a bunch of surface mount resistors, he used two constant current shift registers.
[tnkgrl] has concluded her Sony Vaio P by adding GSM support. We covered the switch to XP earlier, but this should work on Vista too. The Vaio P is sold in the US with support for Verizon’s EVDO wireless broadband, but it uses the same hardware as the European model that uses GSM. This is possible because of the the Qualcomm Gobi radio module. To get GSM support, you trick the VZAccess Manager into loading a different firmware than the stock EVDO. The difficult part is that the Vaio P doesn’t come with a SIM card slot, so you’ll have to solder in your own. When you’ve got the computer reassembled, just change VZAccess Manager to use your carrier.
UPDATE: Wired has an article on the Gobi chipset.
Facebook’s internal valuation was revealed this week thanks to shoddy PDF redaction. Court documents from a settlement between Facebook and ConnectU showed that Facebook values itself at $3.7 billion, much less than the $15 billion that was speculated during the Microsoft investment. The AP uncovered this by cutting and pasting from the redacted court document. It’s the same thing we showed in our PDF redaction screencast last summer… and it will never cease to be funny.
[photo: Bryan Veloso]
Twitter was flooded this morning with users posting “Don’t Click: http://tinyurl.com/amgzs6”. TinyURL has since terminated the URL. The original page doesn’t seem to be live either. It displayed a button that said “Don’t Click”. If the user happened to be logged into Twitter, it would automatically update their status. The instigator partially describes the method on his blog (translated). The page would load the user’s Twitter page in an invisible iframe. The status would be pasted in and the “Don’t Click” button is placed on top of the update button. You can find the code snippets here and the original author credits this post for the inspiration. Twitter has since added a JavaScript fragment to each page to break out of iframes.
if (window.top !== window.self) { window.top.location.href = window.self.location.href; }
The Remote Exploit Development Team has just announced BackTrack 4 Beta. BackTrack is a Linux based LiveCD intended for security testing and we’ve been watching the project since the very early days. They say this new beta is both stable and usable. They’ve moved towards behaving like an actual distribution: it’s based on Debian core, they use Ubuntu software, and they’re running their own BackTrack repositories for future updates. There are a lot of new features, but the one we’re most interested in is the built in Pico card support. You can use the FPGAs to generate rainbow tables and do lookups for things like WPA, GSM, and Bluetooth cracking. BackTrack ISO and VMWare images are available here.
Many G1/ADP1 owners have been using the app Tetherbot to get internet access on their laptop via USB to the phone’s data connection. The app relied on the Android Debug Bridge to forward ports. It worked, but people wanted a solution better than a SOCKS proxy. The community figured out a way to create a properly NAT’d connection using iptables and then [moussam] rolled them up into easy to use applications. There’s one for setting up a PAN device on Bluetooth and another for adhoc WiFi networking. It requires you to have root on your phone, but hopefully you’ve achieved that and are already running the latest community firmware.
[photo: tnkgrl]
[vimeo 3157584]
Here’s another video demo of [Eric]’s Besmoke interactive fluid simulation that we covered earlier. It was put together for the BIL Conference last weekend. This time around he’s strapped the iPhone to his head (complying with California’s handsfree laws). To make things interesting, he’s also added OCZ’s Neural Impulse Actuator to provide brainwave input.
