Once upon a time, a car phone was a great way to signal to the world that you were better than everybody else. It was a clear sign that you had money to burn, and implied that other people might actually consider it valuable to talk to you from time to time.
There was, however, a way to look even more important than the boastful car phone user. You just had to rock up to the parking lot with your very own in-car fax machine.
Continue reading “The Rise And Fall Of The In-Car Fax Machines”
If you’re looking to edit an image, you might open it in Photoshop, GIMP, or even Paint Shop Pro if you’re stuck in 2005. But who needs it — [Patrick Gillespie] explores what can be done when editing a JPEG on a raw, textual level instead.
As the video explains, you generally can’t simply throw a JPEG into Notepad and start making changes all willy nilly. That’s because it’s very easy to wreck key pieces of the image format that are required to render it as an image. Particularly because Notepad likes to sanitize things like line endings which completely mess up the structure of the file. Instead, you’re best off using a binary editor that will only change specific bytes in the image when you tell it to. Do this, and you can glitch out an image in all kinds of fun digital ways… or ruin it completely. Your choice!
If you’d like to tinker around with this practice, [Patrick] has made a tool for just that purpose. Jump over to the website, load the image of your choice, and play with it to your heart’s content.
This practice is often referred to as “datamoshing,” which is a very cool word, or “databending,” which isn’t nearly as good. We’ve explored other file-format hacks before, too, like a single file that can be opened six different ways. Video after the break.
Continue reading “Messing With JPEGs In A Text Editor Is Fun And Glitchy”
The Commodore 1541 was built to do one job—to save and load data from 5.25″ diskettes. [Commodore History] decided to see whether the drive could be put to other purposes, though. Namely, operating as a standalone computer in its own right!
It might sound silly, but there’s a very obvious inspiration behind this hack. It’s all because the Commodore 1541 disk drive contains a MOS 6502 CPU, along with some RAM, ROM, and other necessary supporting hardware. As you might remember, that’s the very same CPU that powers the Commodore 64 itself, along with a wide range of other 1980s machines. With a bit of work, that CPU can indeed be made to act like a general purpose computer instead of a single-purpose disk controller.
[Commodore History] compares the 1541 to the Commodore VIC-20, noting that the disk drive has a very similar configuration, but less than half the RAM. The video then explains how the drive can be reconfigured to run like the even-simpler MOS Technology KIM-1 — a very primitive but well-known 8-bit machine. What’s wild is that this can be achieved with no hardware modifications. It’s not just a thought exercise, either. We get a full “Hello World!” example running in both BASIC and machine code to demonstrate that it really works.
Code is on GitHub for the curious. We’ve featured hacks with the chunky Commodore 1541 before, too.
Continue reading “Commodore Disk Drive Becomes General Purpose Computer”
In the world of social media, “keeping receipts” refers to the practice of storing evidence that may come in handy for a callout post at a later date. For [Teddy Warner], though, it’s more applicable to a little printer he whipped up to record the very best banter from his cadre of friends.
[Teddy’s] idea was simple. He hoped to capture amusing or interesting quotes his friends made in his apartment, and store them in a more permanent form. He also wanted to allow his friends to do the same. To that end, he whipped up a small locally-hosted web interface which his friends could use to record quotes, along with proper attribution. Hosted on a Raspberry Pi 5, the web interface can then truck those quotes out to an 80 mm thermal receipt printer. The anecdote, epithet, or witticism is then spat out with a timestamp in a format roughly approximating a receipt you might get from your local gas station. What’s neat is that [Teddy] was also able to install the entire system within the housing of the Miemieyo receipt printer, by 3D printing a custom base that could house the Pi and a suitable power supply.
Beyond being fun, this system also serves a critical purpose. It creates a paper trail, such that in-jokes, rumors, and insults alike can be traced back to their originating source. No more can Crazy Terry claim to have invented “the Malaga bit,” because the server and the receipt clearly log that Gerald dropped it first at the Boxing Day do.
We’ve seen similar projects before, too. There’s just something neat about holding a bit of paper in your hand.
Humans have lots of basic requirements that need to be met in order to stay alive. Food is a necessary one, though it’s possible to go without for great stretches of time. Water is more important, with survival becoming difficult beyond a few days in its absence. Most of all, though, we crave oxygen. Without an air supply, death arrives in mere minutes.
The importance of oxygen is why airway management is such a key part of emergency medicine. It can be particularly challenging in cases where there is significant trauma to the head, neck, or surrounding areas. In these cases, new research suggests there may be an alternative route to oxygenating the body—through the rear.
Continue reading “Rectal Oxygenation Could Save Your Life One Day”
These days, it can be hard to remain competitive in online shooters without spending your entire life dedicated to the sport. This leads some to explore the world of competitive aids. (AKA: cheating.) A great example is [Nick], who built a mechanical aimbot to help in this regard.
[Nick’s] build moves a mousepad underneath the mouse opposite to the desired movement direction, in order to simulate the mouse movements required to aim at targets in game. This is achieved with the aid of a XDraw A4 pen plotter, which served as a cheap prebuilt X-Y motion platform. The plotter responds to simple serial commands, which makes it easy to control. The X-Y gantry was mounted underneath the desk so the mousepad sits seamlessly on top of the desk, sliding neatly on low-friction mouse skate stickers.
With the mousepad control system built, it was then necessary to figure out how to turn it into an aimbot. [Nick] already had a machine vision tool to detect enemies in shooting game, so it was merely modified to make the right mousepad movements to get the crosshairs right where they needed to be before firing. In testing, it proved more than capable at helping a new player achieve far superior aim, as a good aimbot should.
We’ve featured similar projects before that use complex mechanical contraptions to aim for you. Yes, it’s still cheating, but it’s a lot harder to detect than a traditional aimbot. That doesn’t make it right, per se, just more subtle. Video after the break. Continue reading “Moving Mousepad Is An Elegant Aimbot”
[Geeksmithing] and [When Geeks Craft] recently came together for a glowing collaboration. They wanted to build ever more attractive lanterns for a local parade event. They recently discovered a fantastic material that can really improve the look of whatever project you might be building with LEDs.
The material is commonly referred to as “Black LED Acrylic” or similar. In this case, it was sourced from TAP Plastics, though you can source similar acrylic from other vendors, too. From first glance, it looks like any other piece of black acrylic plastic. However, shine an LED through it, and it will be beautifully diffused and smoothed out to wonderful visual effect. A simple test of a 3×3 array of LEDs behind a 3D-printed grid shows how good this can look. It almost entirely eliminates hot spots, and the result looks like a display built out of juicy glowing cubes. The duo used this material to produce giant pixel art lanterns for their local parade. We only get a glimpse at the final build, but it appears giant Pacman and Blinky totems are on the way.
If you’ve been struggling to find a good way to diffuse the light from LEDs, you might want to give this stuff a try. Alternatively, you might explore some other methods we’ve looked at before, and don’t discount ping pong balls, either.
Continue reading “Building Beautiful LED Lanterns With Black LED Acrylic”
