Plywood Steals The Show From Upcycled Broken Glass Art Lamps

February 4, 2017 by 23 Comments

You can tell from looking around his workshop that [Paul Jackman] likes plywood even more than we do. And for the bases of these lamps, he sandwiches enough of the stuff together that it becomes a distinct part of the piece’s visuals. Some work with a router and some finishing, and they look great! You can watch the work, and the results, in his video embedded below.

The plywood bases also hide the electronics: a transformer and some LEDs. To make space for them in the otherwise solid blocks of wood, he tosses them in the CNC router and hollows them out. A little epoxy for the caps of the jars and the bases were finished. Fill the jars with colored glass, and a transparent tube to allow light all the way to the top, and they’re done.

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Live Counter Revives Old Nokia Phone’s Utility

February 4, 2017 by 7 Comments

Old hardware you may have on hand cannot only inspire projects in their own right, but can facilitate the realization of any ideas you have been planning. Using a Nokia N900, [MakerMan] concocted a light-up sign with a live subscriber and view count of his videos.

[MakerMan] milled out the logo used on the sign with his DIY CNC machine — built from rotary bearings and recycled stepper motors off industrial Xerox printers. The meticulous application of a jigsaw, rotary tool, and grinder resulted in a sturdy frame for the sign while a few strips of RGB LEDs imbue it with an inspiring glow. All that was left was to mount the phone in place and tape it for good measure.

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33C3: Memory Deduplication, The Hacker’s Friend

February 4, 2017 by 11 Comments

At the 33rd annual Chaos Communications Congress, [Antonio Barresi] and [Erik Bosman] presented not one, not two, but three (3!!) great hacks that were all based on exploiting memory de-duplication in virtual machines. If you’re interested in security, you should definitely watch the talk, embedded below. And grab the slides too. (PDF)

Memory de-duplication is the forbidden fruit for large VM setups — obviously dangerous but so tempting. Imagine that you’re hosting VMs and you notice that many of the machines have the same things in memory at the same time. Maybe we’re all watching the same cat videos. They can save on global memory across the machines by simply storing one copy of the cat video and pointing to the shared memory block from each of the machines that uses it. Notionally separate machines are sharing memory. What could go wrong?

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Popular Printers Pwned In Prodigious Page Prank

February 4, 2017 by 40 Comments

A new day dawns, and we have another story involving insecure networked devices. This time it is printers of all makes and descriptions that are causing the panic, as people are finding mystery printouts bearing messages such as this:

“Stackoverflowin has returned to his glory, your printer is part of a botnet, the god has returned“

Well that’s it then, you can’t argue with a deity, especially one who has apparently created a botnet from the world’s printing devices. Printer owners the world over are naturally worried about their unexpected arrival, and have appeared on support forums and the like to express their concern.

We are of course used to taking everything our printers tell us at face value. Low on ink? I hear you, my inanimate reprographic friend! But when our printer tells us it’s part of a botnet perhaps it’s time to have a little think. It is entirely possible that someone could assemble a botnet of compromised printers, but in this case we smell a rat. Only in farcical crime dramas do crooks announce their crimes in such a theatrical fashion, you might say it’s the point of a botnet not to be detected by its host. Reading some of the reports it seems that many of the affected systems have port 9100 open to the world, that’s the standard TCP printer port, so it seems much more likely that someone has written a little script that looks for IP addresses with port 9100 open, and trolls them with this message.

The real message here is one with which we expect Hackaday readers will be very familiar, and which we’ve covered before. Many network connected appliances have scant regard for security, and are a relative push-over for an attacker. The solution is relatively straightforward to those of a technical inclination, be aware of which services the devices is exposing, lock down services such as uPNP and close any open ports on your router. Unfortunately these steps are probably beyond many home users, whose routers remain with their default manufacturer’s settings for their entire lives. It’s a shame our printer troll didn’t add a link to basic router security tips.

If you want to have a little fun, some of the printed pages include an email address for ‘the god’. It would be fun to figure out who this is, right?

Smart Eyeglasses That Auto Focus Where You Look

February 4, 2017 by 24 Comments

A University of Utah team have a working prototype of a new twist on fluid-filled lenses for correction of vision problems: automatic adjustment and refocus depending on what you’re looking at. Technically, the glasses have a distance sensor embedded into the front of the frame and continually adjust the focus of the lenses. An 8 gram, 110 mAh battery powers the prototype for roughly 6 hours.

Eyeglasses that can adapt on the fly to different focal needs is important because many people with degraded vision suffer from more than one condition at the same time, which makes addressing their vision problems more complex than a single corrective lens. For example, many people who are nearsighted or farsighted (where near objects and far objects far objects and near objects are seen out of focus, respectively) also suffer from a general loss of the eye’s ability to change focus, a condition that is age-related. As a result, people require multiple sets of eyeglasses for different conditions. Bifocal or trifocal or progressive lenses are really just multiple sets of lenses squashed into a smaller form factor, and greatly reduce the wearer’s field of view which is itself a significant vision impairment. A full field of view could be restored if eyeglass lenses were able to adapt to different needs based on object distance, and that is what this project achieves.

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Blow Up Your Face

February 4, 2017 by 29 Comments

[Yuji Hayashi] and some of his buddies in Tokyo did a fun project at the Tokyo Maker Faire last August that proved to be a big hit. They built a cardboard box which enlarged the wearers face when it was worn. It’s an amazing effect — high resolution and impossible to look at without plastering your face with a huge smile!

Low Poly paper face mask
Low poly paper face mask which prompted this new technique

This work was the result of their frustration with a previous project they did early last year. They would take multiple pictures of a person’s head and use software to stitch up the images. The resulting print on a large sheet of paper was then cut, folded and glued to create a low-poly 3D paper mask of the person. Their bottleneck was that the whole process took well over 2 hours for each mask. Even reducing the mask mesh complexity, and omitting the back of the head didn’t make it much faster. But the activity was so fun, that they had to figure out a way to repeat it but in a simpler and faster way.

Obviously, a different tack was needed. A team member was visiting a research institute and saw a Fresnel lens lying around. He took a picture of himself behind the lens and shared it with the team. They inquired with a lens manufacturer and obtained a sample. After some fiddling to get the right focal distance, it seemed like they had a winner. Attaching the lens to a cardboard box and fixing it to a volunteer head raised another problem. The inside of the box was too dark for the wearers face to be seen clearly. Nothing that some LED strips couldn’t solve. The initial LEDs were cool white and gave a ghostly, pale blue tinge to the wearers face. Warm white LEDs created a much better effect. Finally, it was time to trim the Fresnel lens (done easily using a sharp blade) and to wrap up the project. On the day the Maker Faire opened, they had a set of four of these “face magnifiers” available for visitors to have fun with. As the pictures show, the result was awesome, and way better than the original, paper mask idea. Not surprising, given that the Japanese love their Animé and Manga comics and are great fans of Cosplay.

If this project stirs up your creativity, then let us goad you towards Hackaday’s 2017 Sci-Fi Contest where you can submit an awesome Sci-Fi Project to win some cool prizes.

Well, That Was Quick: Heng Lamp Duplicated

February 4, 2017 by 20 Comments

That didn’t take long at all! We covered a pretty cool lamp with a novel magnetic switch mechanism, and [msraynsford] has his version laser cut, veneered, a video posted on YouTube (embedded below), and an Instructable written up before we’d even caught our breath.

For those who missed it, the original Heng lamp is a beautiful design with a unique take on a magnetic switch. As with the original, the secret sauce is a switch inside that’s physically held closed by the two magnets. It’s a pretty clever mechanism that looks magical to boot.

[msraynsford]’s version replaces the floating spheres with floating cylinders, which are easier to fabricate in layers on a laser cutter, but otherwise the copy is fairly true to the aesthetics of the original. Pretty sweet!
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