computer hacks

1414 Articles

computer hacks

Vista On A PS3

August 5, 2008 by 16 Comments


Apparently you can run pretty much anything on a PS3. [mopx0] has managed to get Vista running on his PS3. He used Qemu 9.0.1 to install Vista on a PC. He says it takes “about a day or so”, after using Vlite to speed it up, so be patient. You then make an image of the install and copy it to your PS3. Don’t worry though, your hard work will be rewarded by a speedy 25 minute boot time when you’re done.

Even though it is extremely slow, to the point of being nearly unusable, its good to see people pushing the boundaries of our hardware’s intended use.

[via PS3scene]

XBox Controller USB Labotomy

July 17, 2008 by 10 Comments


[sprite_tm]’s back with one of his excellent Atmel projects. This time he decided to turn an original XBox controller (cause he likes ’em) into a standard USB HID device. He gutted the custom USB chip that Microsoft installed and replaced it with an Atmel ATMega88. The ATMega required a few changes to the board, but nothing too off the wall.

SenseSurface: Custom Inputs On Your Lcd Screen

July 15, 2008 by 7 Comments


[Lindsay Williams] has come up a novel way of constructing custom physical inputs for your programs. SenseSurface is a viable alternative to building a new interface for each application. Simply place the dials, buttons, and sliders on your screen wherever you want them.

A sensor board, placed behind the display, picks up the signals from the inputs. The only limitation to the number of inputs available is the size of your screen. Inputs are held on magnetically, and have a low friction backing to avoid scratching or gouging your screen.

Continue reading “SenseSurface: Custom Inputs On Your Lcd Screen” →

Render Your Next Render Farm

July 5, 2008 by 17 Comments


You might remember [Janne]’s IKEA cluster. Now he’s got a couple of dream rigs in mind, so he started doing 3D renderings of them. Helmer 2 is designed to contain 24 video cards attached to six motherboards with quad core CPUs. (AMD has even taken enough interest to send him some cpus to get started) The rendering really comes in handy for designing the custom copper heat pipes and the aluminum cooling fin enclosure. Still bored, he put together a rendering of a 4 PetaFLOP machine using 2160 video cards.
Update: The Helmer 2 link is fixed.

Turn Your Old Hard Drive Into A Sander/grinder

June 27, 2008 by 22 Comments


[Jipa] over at MetkuMods put up an original re-use for old hard drives: make em into power tools. The tiny servo motor that drives the spindle doesn’t generate much torque, but once the drive is spinning fast enough, the inertial force of the platter is enough to make it usable for small grinding/sanding projects. The platters are re-stacked directly on top of each other to increase strength – we’d suggest a few dabs of epoxy to make em even stronger. Once stacked, a piece of sand paper is cut to size and held on by the center platter washer. [Via hacknmod]

Open Source Data Recovery Tools

June 24, 2008 by 6 Comments


InformationWeek has great article on open source data recovery tools. What type of tools you use will depend on the severity of the situation. You can use live Linux distros designed for recovery like SystemRescueCD or Partedmagic (the latter being more user friendly). Security tools distrubutions like BackTrack can also be helpful; Helix in particular was designed for forensics work. dd is a standard *nix tool for imaging drives, but something like TestDisk can help you repair partition tables for whole disk recovery. Most deletion operations don’t overwrite the data which means you can use file carving to capture the lost files. PhotoRec is able to find files in a number of common formats. Finally, if you’ve got some serious forensic work ahead of you there’s The Sleuth Kit and many other command line tools.

As an addendum, OStatic put together a list of 5 freeware tools for protecting your system.