Jared and Dan from Inventgeek have just posted their latest how-to: The air cooled mouse pad. They know that there are air cooled mice that you can buy, but why should you have to use an inferior mouse for gaming just for one feature? They decided instead to convert an Antec laptop cooler into the ultimate gaming mouse pad; One that keeps your hand cool and lets you use whatever mouse you prefer.
Hack-A-Day reader [Lee Olivares] stuffed a Macintosh Plus full of new hardware without butchering the case. From the original test fit he could see that the Mac Mini’s DVD slot lined up well with the original floppy slot, so it just needed to be widened a little bit for clearance. The monitor is black and white, but a separate VGA port has been split off for an external monitor. The original motherboard was cut down so that the original power switch and ports could be used. Any new ports were hidden behind the battery cover.
FON hit the news recently because it acquired some venture capital from Google and Skype. Its goal is to create a global network of access points run by home users. The users can either offer access for free or resell their bandwidth. The actual FON software is based on DD-WRT, a Linux based firmware for the Linksys WRT54G wireless router and others. DD-WRT features a captive portal, QoS, and many additional features. FON is selling 3,000 routers with their software pre-installed for 25USD/EUR plus shipping. This is a great way to pick up a WRT without paying Linksys’s Linux penalty and it comes with a great firmware already installed. Oh, unless you have broadband from a friendly company like Speakeasy, becoming a fonero is probably a violation of your “terms of service”.
First Whoppix and Auditor then Whax and now finally everything has come together to form remote-exploit’s latest Live CD project BackTrack. The very first beta of the new system was released today. I downloaded it and tested it on my 600m. It had a nice uncluttered feeling right from the beginning by not offering the scads of boot options found in Knoppix. The system came up really quick and stopped at the command prompt instead of going to a GUI which is another nice touch. The CD also doesn’t automatically bring up the network interfaces since you may have something special in mind. The default windowing environment is KDE, but Fluxbox is included if you’re on a diet. Kismet started up and set up my Intel 2200 card without any assistance. I really think the team has put together a great product and I look forward to future releases. Try it out for yourself.
[thanks steve]
Reader [Franz Gabel] purchased a POV kit from ladyada and started modifying it for his own application. He assembled the POV without a PCB so it could fit inside a small metal pipe and attached a leather lanyard. He’s still in the early stages of the project. It is fully assembled, but he’s working on additions like a docking station to recharge and download new messages. He’s also developed a Flash based system for generating new .c files based on text input. Here is his forum post about his project (Coral CDN, so ladyada doesn’t break my arm).
Well, we’ve come to the end of my Shmoocon 2006 coverage. The conference wasn’t all presentations though, there were a lot of other fun activities:
The Hacker Arcade featured arcade games that had been modified to generate USB tokens that you could later redeem for prizes. The folks at 757.org modified a skill crane so that it could be controlled from the web. Of course, toys like this at a hacker convention spawned some creative solutions. David Rhodes scripted the skill crane’s web interface so that it would try every possible coordinate pair and ended up with an armful of prizes. Another attendee discovered that the USB tokens weren’t case sensitive and generated a couple hundred thousand prize tokens.
Hack or Halo was different from your standard tournament. You could take the other team on in either Halo 2 or drag race hacking. From what I heard it’s pretty easy to get up to speed and be competitive, just know your way around a sniffer, Metasploit, and an energy sword and you’ll be good to go.
Grey Frequency managed to find all twenty different conference badge outlines needed to make a fully interlocking set. Shmooballs were handed out to attendees so that they could physically manifest their disagreement with the speaker; speakers were given paddles. During the closing ceremony a t-shirt cannon was brought out to help distribute swag.
I’d like to thank The Shmoo Group for putting together an excellent conference, the boys from Midnight Research Labs for keeping things interesting when I wasn’t in talks, and atlas, RenderMan, Jason Scott, Abend and all the other speakers who have stopped by to leave comments on Hack-A-Day.
You can thank reader [Alexandre Novello]’s laziness for generating this hack. Actually, as a self-proclaimed “software guy” he would have never approached this project if it wasn’t for the situation he was in: having to walk across the room to open the door for people, a door which has an electric opener right next to it. He’s got a thorough write-up on how he built the client and server portions of his software in Delphi. He also covers the hardware switch which is attached to the server via parallel port.
