Case mods aren’t usually enough to make Hack-A-Day, but we all drooled a bit when the Dark Blade started back in 2004. Now, it’s finally finished. Everything on the case was custom machined just for this project. I cropped the base for the shot – check out the full pics in this thread. Thanks to [Jake] for the tip.
computer hacks1399 Articles
computer hacks
Serial Port Power Booster
This one(coral cache) is a bit of a head slapper, but I thought it might come in handy. Laptop (or usb) serial ports are pretty notorious for being stingy on power output. [Roberto] came up with a clever solution. He used a MAX205 (sort of a double+ MAX232) and a singe capacitor to convert the low power serial connection on his laptop to a TTL signal and back again to RS-232. The result is a simple dongle that needs 5v and gives you a high power serial port for those power hungry devices – like [Roberto]’s PIC programmer.
Bulletproof PC Case
Not our typical fare, but I can’t resist. [RCarter] is building a PC from scratch with a single unique feature – it’s designed to be bulletproof. Apparently, when it’s done he’s going to take it out back and teach it a lesson. Right now he’s more concerned with shock-proofing the hardware. Most people do this sort of thing at the end of the PC’s useful life.
Checkpoint VPN To Mediacenter
[Sasha] sent along this video. It’s a rather long (8 minutes) log of converting a checkpoint firewall into a home media player. The one in the video just needed a PCI video card, a and a USB hub to become a normal (yet still 1U) machine. I’m not sure what CPU was in it, but it was enough to run XP.
Bonus: Buffalo Terastation Hacking
Just a bonus hack in honor of my new toy: a 1GB 1TB buffalo Terastation NAS. These puppies run embedded Linux, and have a decent user base. Mine came with 128MB of ram, four Samsung drives (each with their own IDE bus), RAID support, gigabit ethernet, USB 2.0 and a Motorola Sandpoint cpu. (Putting it on par with my old Powermac 8500) The wiki has instructions for all the the basic hacks. Installing some hacked firmware was pretty easy, and yielded telnet and root access. It has a serial port for UPS control, but there’s a nice clean hack for enabling serial console access instead.
DIY Dvorak Keyboards
Meet the DIY Dvorak keyboard. I’m feeling nostalgic this week, and I was surprised that we’ve never mentioned this simple, but useful hack. Heresy history lesson: the qwerty keyboard was created to slow down typing – because old typewriters jammed too easily. The Dvorak keyboard is more efficient because the letters that are most often used are positioned closer to the fingers natural position. [Anders] swapped the keys on his Swedish thinkpad, and even customized the map a bit further to his own taste.
Printer Networked Light Control
[Andy] sent in his ‘Network Something‘ hack. For his proof of concept, he used a parallel port printer network adapter to create a set of network controllable LEDs. The virtual printer was implemented with a set of shift registers and a set of nand gates. (and a power regulator). Old print servers can be had pretty cheap – my HP $8 on ebay. Definitely an interesting way to get inexpensive network control of your projects.
Note: We’ll be making some server changes today and tomorrow, so comments will be offline for a bit. They’ll be back.
