How-to Make A ‘usb Battery’

January 20, 2005 by 186 Comments

usb battery

found out yesterday that there’s a shuffle shortage and gadget battery life can only be expected to get worse.  bummer.  at least you can make the most of your waiting-for-shuffle blues and solder yourself a ‘usb battery’.  this little gizmo runs off a 9 volt battery and supplies your favorite little device with the proper 5 volts of mobile power.

in lieu of running an ipod off of it, i tested it with an mpx220 smartphone and it should work fine with any low power mobile device that can charge via usb cable.  read more for instructions on how to make your own.

Continue reading “How-to Make A ‘usb Battery’” →

Hack Your New Mac

January 19, 2005 by 45 Comments

mac mini

it’s begun.  you may have seen news of the ipod shuffle disassembly on engadget earlier this week, and now the mac mini is subject to hacking as well.

to begin hacking an ipod shuffle, follow the disassembly photos here.
to begin hacking a mac mini, view how to safely open the case here.

regarding the shuffle disassembly, i’d recommend you don’t remove the navigation pad if you ever intend to reassemble the device.  as for the mac mini, supposedly opening and servicing the machine won’t void your warranty.

unless you break something.

happy hacking and make sure to send us your creations.  we’ll be posting our own, so it only seems fair.  if you can’t find the time to create, send in any ideas you have and we’ll put our team of highly skilled hackers to work.

here are some examples to get the ideas flowing:

  • mac mini media player

  • external battery pack for the shuffle

  • integrated shuffle or mac mini car audio or navigation system

  • the most mini mac mini

Continue reading “Hack Your New Mac” →

MIDIbox SID — Serious C64 Sound

January 16, 2005 by 11 Comments

c64 midi box

sign-language sent us a link to some instructions for turning your old commodore’s sid chip into a midi controlled synth capapble of pumping more grooves than you ever thought possible.  i was really excited to post a commodore hack, but then i scrolled down and saw this image.  c64 slayings are really hard for me to stomach.

let’s keep it clean, folks.

Continue reading “MIDIbox SID — Serious C64 Sound” →

Geocamming — Unsecurity Cameras Revisited

January 14, 2005 by 39 Comments

unsecured security camera

this one is for all the people who couldn’t see the netcams from sunday’s post.  it turns out that the web interface to these cameras can serve both motion-jpeg and traditional jpeg frames (the latter with browser refresh). unfortunately, many browsers (including safari on my machine) don’t appear to handle motion-jpeg.

no need to switch browsers, though. you can use google to filter out the motion-jpeg urls. you’ll even benefit by reducing the amount of bandwidth you use (really nice for the slow camera connections). just google for inurl:”ViewerFrame?Mode=Refresh”

there’s something incredibly cool about seeing what is happening around the world. you can change the interface language to english by setting the language id to 4 in the url.

the cameras i’ve seen all have an image capture feature (brown link on the bottom left of the interface). you can take snapshots of what’s currently going on, or view captures that other people have taken with the camera. i wouldn’t be surprised if people start making a sport of this.

these all appear to be panasonic network cameras, by the way. in all fairness, they work quite well and they aren’t the first device to fall victim to people who don’t set passwords. here are some other nice geocamming start points.
axis cameras: jpeg, motion-jpeg, with interface and canon too.

Continue reading “Geocamming — Unsecurity Cameras Revisited” →