Hackaday Links

Well, it doesn’t look like the PSU meeting happened. Moving on:

Yesterday I was moaning about the price of Cobalt Flux‘s dance mats. [SilentCircuit] says the cheaper mats from LikSang work great. There’s always the really cheap option.

I’ve been avoiding a the Flying Spaghetti Monster links, but I couldn’t help chuckling while playing the new FSM flash game. [via] To bad I’m already a minister for a different religion.

Did anyone pick up an iPod nano yet? Have you started hacking? Here is the iPod nano disassembled.

Every so often someone suggests we adopt the hacker emblem from Conway’s Game of Life. I guess I was always adverse to it since a glider in a 3×3 grid would die in the next timestep.

[lain]’s buddy built a drill powered bike. Includes “automatic” transmission.

External hard drive case from an old tape player. [thanks Gene kaufman]

Another OSx86 install. It discusses compatible hardware you should purchase if you’re building a box from the ground up. There is no way to tell if you’ll need the TPM chip with future OSx86 functionality though. [via]

The facebook list keeps growing.

Thanks for all the links.

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Homebrew Battery Tab Welder

battery tab welder

[Phil Pemberton] has been building quite a few battery packs over the last year and decided he needed a better method than soldering. Soldering can often damage the end caps and cell seals. He decided to build a simple capacitance-discharge resistance welder to assemble the packs more efficiently. It doesn’t take many parts, but you’ll have to do some tuning to get it to work correctly.

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Hackaday Links

The other day I mentioned that Jason Striegel is a robot. Well, the situation was given a little bit of clarity when a Slashdot commenter said Googling for “sex bots” turns up Jason’s Hack-A-Day article. At one point someone told Jason he was “worse than Eliza”. Funny you should mention that since the second google link is a sex bot built on Eliza and then turned loose on the IRC. Hilarity ensues.

[Hermann] built a laptop ventilador out of cardboard.

[mike forbes] provided some links for hacking the Netgear DG834G here and here.

You can transcode movies and use your CVS camcorder as a cheap video player. [enigma-]

You don’t have to spend a lot of money on your MAME cabinet. [tIM cATCHPOLE]

[Haon] started working on our Wikipedia stub.

[PK]’s better way to add a garage remote to your car.

This Linux DDR machine looks cool till you price the mats. [Incudie] I guess that is the price you pay to avoid getting carpal tunnel doing this. [via]

Also [via Dirk], a good roundup of USB key friendly software.

Don’t worry [smouldering dog] your gift arrived safe and sound.

Over 225 Hack-A-Day readers have added me as a friend; at least 4 are girls. The Folding@Home team has grown too.

Keep sending us the quality links.

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How-To: Upgrade The Processor On An Older Macintosh G4

proc19

Yes there’s still a how-to this week, even though we pretty much how-to’ed a hack-cake yesterday for our HADA01 celebration.  Here’s the low down on today’s how-to up on engadget:

I bought an older graphite 400 mhz G4 tower from ebay.de (germany is a great place to buy tech here in europe) a while back. The motherboard and the manufacturing of the AGP G4 series, codenamed “Sawtooth”, are really good (i.e. there weren’t huge amounts of AGP G4’s that failed in weird ways over time). After doing some preliminary reading I learned that doing a processor upgrade for a G4 can sometimes require messy heat sink paste. Some other mac proc upgrades use the same heat sink provided with your original proc. I decided on a choice that does not require thermal paste and has a larger new heat sink and fan included: the PowerLogix PowerForce47 G4/2.0GHz with 512K 1:1 L2 Cache Per Processor. (note: I was not payed by Powerlogix nor did I receive free merchandise for this how-to nor is this article a review of comparable mac proc upgrades). After having a really hard time getting this proc upgrad to work, I just  wanted to put this information out there to help who it may as clearly as possible, after all I never enjoy seeing macs in the trash (unless I get to take them home and adopt them!)

Click to read “How-To: Upgrade the processor on an older macintosh G4” on engadget

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HADA01 – Logo Cake

hadcakecolor2

We usually post stuff related to case mods rather than cake mods, but today is an exception. It’s our 01-th anniversary today and to celebrate we decided to bake a Hack-A-Day logo cake! The cake is a vanilla cake with vanilla frosting served on a homebrew circuit board platter. Celebrate our 01 Hack-A-Day style.

For this cake-mod you will need:
vanilla cake
frosting
various knives (spreading knife, box cutter, sharp kitchen knife)
chopstick or other square ended small clean tool
large green circuit board (like our motherboard isa bus extension card found on the street)
clear plastic from a zipper lock bag (to protect your cake eaters from solder lead and to protect your circuit board from cake and frosting)
black foam core board or similar
green lighting (super bright green led’s, green christmas lights, etc.)

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Hack-A-Day Anniversary 01 – First Post!

A year ago today, Phillip Torrone posted the first hack of the day: a redbox built from a RadioShack phone dialer. We’ll be celebrating all day and you should be able to find us in the #hackaday channel on Efnet.

Since this about the first post I thought it would be fun to cover “first post!” phenomena on Hack-A-Day. Our audience has gotten huge over the last year, but the behavior of “first post”ers is still silly. Here’s why:

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