My What the Hack! experience was very much a positive one due to the cute bunnies and the fun atmosphere of the BSD tent where I resided during my stay (the blue arrow points to my spot on the bench).  Hardware people were a bit few and far between, but one day when I was in severe need of resistors for a project I went wandering and found stephanie at the wireless village: thanks! My DECT phone was in a state of severe disrepair/hackage so I may have missed out on meeting a ton of people that were trying to call me using the free DECT network. All in all I managed to not stay glued to my computer/soldering iron the entire time and actually attended some talks and geeked out with friends and new peeps. I’ve chosen to highlight three talks from WTH to share with you.

Continue reading “What The Hack!: Some Post-conference Highlights” →

Tom has written up how he built his automated chicken feeder. First he constructed a large funnel inside the chicken coop. This feeds into a hardwood block where the auger is located. He had originally tried using a drill bit run by a slow moving copier motor, but it couldn’t slip so it would jam occasionally. The bit was replaced with a coil of stiff wire. It didn’t have as fast a feed rate so it needed to be run for a longer time period. The final piece is modifying an outlet timer so it will drive the motor directly using battery power. The power circuit has low enough requirements that it could eventually be driven by a solar panel.

Continue reading “Automated Chicken Feeder” →

I haven’t really been into lock picking, but after seeing the “bumping” demo from What the Hack I was shocked. The technique is really quick and will work on 90% of locks you’ll come across. You need to create a bump key, also know as a 999 key. This is made by cutting down a key (that fits the lock) to the deepest setting (pictured). Then a little bit of metal is removed from the tip of the key and the shoulder. You insert the key into the lock and because of the removed metal you can give the key a little whack and the key will travel slightly farther into the key way driving the pins vertically. That’s it! Here is a white paper on the subject that will clear it up a little more. Here is the full video from WTH. If you want to skip ahead to 51 minutes you’ll see Barry demo cutting down a key and bumping a lock in about 3 minutes. At 1:02 Han presents bump proof locks TOOOL has tested. Fabienne will be covering some more interesting stuff from WTH on Friday.

UPDATE: Check the comments for Azureus magnet links.

Continue reading “Lock Bumping Revisited” →