[John Park] has managed to snag a couple interesting business cards at Maker Faire. The first is Adafruit’s laser cut Spirograph card. The other is a ATtiny2313 prototyping board from Evil Mad Science; it looks to be the same style as their well-known AVR target board. We’ve also heard rumors that [Jérôme Demers] has bunch of resistor bending cards.
For more business card nonsense, check out: [Goodspeed]’s smart card emulator, [Mayer]’s embedded gears, and our web server business card.
[Soren Coughlin-Glaser] runs a mobile photobooth in the Portland area. It’s built inside of an electric Volkswagen bus. The conversion to electric hasn’t been easy though. He’s spent most of the last few months rebuilding it after an electrical fire. Last fall he installed a 9 inch electric motor from Hi-Torque Electric after his smaller one blew up. We really like this project and look forward to seeing it back on the road… once he replaces his stripped transmission coupler.
[via Boing Boing Gadgets]
Engadget has video from the June 2009 episode of Qore that shows the new PSP Go. It has a slide out gamepad, 16GB internal storage, bluetooth, and a memory slot of some sort. We’re naturally curious about its potential as a homebrew platform. Will Sony take the mature route they did with the PS3 and let you run Linux or will they continue the firmware arms race the PSP is known for? We’ll be hearing more about this platform at E3 next week.
Maker Faire returns to the San Francisco Bay Area this weekend. It’s “the World’s Largest DIY Festival”. We’ve been attending off and on since 2006 and you’re sure to catch many of the projects we’ve covered in the past. Be sure to stop by our favorite hackers that will be in attendance: mightyOhm, macetech, SparkFun, Liquidware, Jeri Ellsworth, Bleep Labs, Noisebridge, Ani Niow, EMSL, and Adafruit. If you’re attending, upload your photos to the Hack a Day Flickr pool and let us know what you see.
[photo: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9dpXHnJXaE]
[phreakmonkey] got his hands on a great piece of old tech. It’s a 1964 Livermore Data Systems Model A Acoustic Coupler Modem. He recieved it in 1989 and recently decided to see if it would actually work. It took some digging to find a proper D25 adapter and even then the original serial adapter wasn’t working because the oscillator depends on the serial voltage. He dials in and connects at 300baud. Then logs into a remote system and fires up lynx to load Wikipedia. Lucky for [phreakmonkey] they managed to decide on a modulation standard in 1962. It’s still amazing to see this machine working 45 years later. He’d love to hear from you if you’ve used a similar device.
[via Waxy]
This month’s Wired magazine has an extensive profile of [Marc Weber Tobias]. He’s a professional lock picker that delights in coming up with new techniques for taking on high security locks. In recent years, he’s run afoul of the US’s premier high security lock manufacturer, Medeco, by publishing Open in Thirty Seconds with [Tobias Bluzmanis]. Medeco still denies that this is even possible. Wired decided to to test the team by purchasing six new cylinders and timing them. Each one was open in under nine minutes. You can see a video of this on Wired’s site.
Last fall we covered a decoding attack against Medeco locks by [Jon King].
[via blackbag]
We reported last week that D-Link was adding captchas to their routers to prevent automated login by malware. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work all time. The team from SourceSec grabbed the new firmware and began poking at it. They found that certain pages don’t require the authentication to be passed for access. One of these is WPS activation. WPS lets you do push button WPA configuration. Once activated, any nearby client can request the WPA key using a tool like WPSpy. Only user level credentials are needed to pull this off, so changing just the admin password won’t prevent it.
[photo: schoschie]
