Hackaday Links

[Dancerman] sent us a couple pdfs covering the Navy’s research on railguns which might show up on new platforms like the DD(X): first is NRAC’s Electromagnetic Gun Technology Assessment, second is slides from the Annual Gun & Ammo Symposium which covers the problems encountered when scaling a system up for ship use.

I was pretty tired of railguns by the time someone sent in the obligatory Powelabs link. So, I read about Sam’s Subaru 2.5RS engine swap and watched the sandboarding videos instead.

[george] knows that these a pretty common, but his laptop picture frame looks pretty good. He added WiFi and Bluetooth adapters to the empty battery bay so that he could have remote access and control the frame with his phone.

[Douglas J. Hickok] used a solar powered yard light to illuminate his Jack-O-Lantern. It ends up looking like a hat.

[tio.chorizo] doesn’t want to pay for the Nano lanyard headphones so he modified his stock ones. He made a large loop and then used heat shrink tubing to hold it in place. Here is a Coral Cache of his photos.

[seth fogie] pointed us to airscanner’s page of iTunes DOS/Spoofing attacks with flash demos.

If your Folding@Home system is chugging away and your looking for another project you could try setting up some diskless clients. [Grendup]

With a little butchering you can make your own in car DVD player. [the_eye]

A completely useless 2.5cc gas-engined turntable

This Engadget post has links to commercial clothing that has integrated controls and power. Now someone just needs to do it for cheap.

Cool Tools featured a blackbox for your car. It plugs into your OBD-II port and records the signals coming from your ECU. If you are in an accident it will have the information from right before the impact.

Cinematical highlighted the documentary Project Grizzly. It’s the story of Troy Hurtubise who built a bear proof suit and is now claiming he can see through walls/cure cancer.

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DIY Railgun

railgun

We’ve hit on a few EM projectile systems recently, so [Jason Rollette] thought it would be a good time to cover his railgun. I couldn’t agree more. Jason has been keeping his Railgun Blog up-to-date from nearly day one. Right now he is assembling a larger capacitor bank to power the gun. The PVC piping you see in the picture is part of the injection rig; If the projectile is stationary when the gun is fired it would get welded to the rails (if not worse). Check out Jason’s Railgun Blog for details on his project plus a lot of informative links.

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EFF Reverses Color Laser Printer Fingerprints

blue led

The EFF has broken the tracking code for the Xerox DocuColor. The DocuColor prints a faint 15×8 grid of yellow dots on every page. To see these dots you need a magnifying glass. You can also use a blue light to make the dots appear black. The EFF page has a built in application for decoding the dots which hide the time, date, and serial number of the printer. The EFF also maintains a list of printers which do or don’t have this “feature”.

Andrew “bunnie” Huang helped out a lot with this research. To speed up analysis of submitted printer samples he modified a scanner to use blue light. The scanner does a white balance calibration before each page scan so the blue lights need to be turned off during that period otherwise the scanner will compensate. bunnie also opened up his HP 2600N to determine where the watermark was implemented. Studying the boards he decided that most color laser printers are probably using Canon engine boards. By coercing one manufacturer the government was able to get watermarking into a majority of the laser printers sold.

[via BoingBoing]

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Hacking Sleep

eye

Polyphasic sleep is a method for increasing the amount of time you spend awake during the day. By sleeping only twenty to thirty minutes every four hours you can stay awake longer. The short time you do spend sleeping the body is in REM sleep, which is the most restful phase. This technique has been used by many famous inventors. I first stumbled across this idea in an article on Kuro5hin. This mode of life can be very difficult to adjust to. In the first few days you probably won’t be asleep when you are trying to. You must strictly follow the sleep schedule. Skipping a nap will probably cause a major crash. With limited sleep a nutritious diet will become very important. Hack-A-Day reader [Nick Busey] is a week into his second attempt at switching to the Uberman cycle and is blogging his progress. If I were to attempt this I would probably get something like the Earlarm to help out. Of course if you’d rather sleep more you’re probably better off with the 28 hour day.

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Portable Electromechanical Slug Thrower

pest

The P.E.S.T. is a “centrifugal” launcher using a rotor powered by a DC motor to accelerate plastic BBs. It has a 50 round magazine and 3 fire modes: semi-auto, 3 round burst, and full-auto. Fire is not instantaneous because it takes 0.75 seconds for the rotor to spin up. If you follow this “read” link you’ll find a detailed description of the device. Photos can be found here.

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Hackaday Links

There was an Engadget post today about Motorola IMFrees that are free after rebate. From the IMFree hacking forum it appears that the project is still in pre-alpha.

Hack-A-Day isn’t hiring. Weblogs, Inc. is. They’re hiring for a new geek blog: “old skool geek as in comic book/sci-fi/D&D genre geeks”.

MAKE:Blog featured the Travel Tinker Trouble Kit that a lot of sites picked up. Julian has added a couple followup posts since then: one, two. I think a good companion to this would be the Altoids survival kit. [The Mark]

[Robogeek] continues to work on his LED bed design improvements.

[combustible] and his buddy Ken built this vodka filtering rig using four filter stages. The system is pressurized to 120psi. It took about 30 minutes to filter a 1.75 of vodka, but that was because the chilled vodka froze the latent water in the filters.

[JaSon] said that security took away their office’s “unapproved appliances” i.e. microwaves, toasters, etc. He’s looking for some rack mount projects that make these items look more official. Probably something a little more discrete than the 3U wine rack [jesse] found.

[Paul Stamatiou] has posted “Part 3: Azureus Anonymity” or “How to abuse the Tor network” DO NOT DO THIS Read the comments for suggestions that don’t involve hoarding bandwidth used to protect peoples lives.

[laughing man] didn’t like the low volume of his PSP headphones so he removed the resistors.

For those who hate traveling outside you could build a Surroundings Defense System. [Jon]

[Ian Nott] made an iPod video foldy to help people cope while waiting for delivery.

This is how I roll Darn this t-shirt addiction [via Waxy] UPDATE: I just saw BoingBoing’s post about someone hooking up their PS2 controller to an oscillating fan to complete the 10^6 rose level on Katamari. Go look at the screen shots so you don’t have to do it yourself.

The tip line

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Roomba Rover

roomba rover

[heathkit] and a friend built this rover a couple years ago. They picked up a first generation Roomba because it had all of the features they were looking for: a good bump sensor, low profile, wheel encoders. Before removing the brains of the vacuum they put it in debug mode and figured out the control pinout. After wiring in a PIC they had rudimentary control of the device. For some higher level processing power they attached a Virgin Webplayer (defunct internet appliance). The Webplayer has a mini-pci slot so they added a WiFi card. Now they can transmit video and SSH into the device for full control.

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