[nickjohnson] sent in today’s hack. Mike removed the extraneous hardware, just leaving the UART on this IBM PCMCIA modem and replaced it with a SMD MAX241 ttl-rs232 converter. He added a new end to the original cable and ended up with a nice, finished PCMCIA serial port. That fine SMD soldering is hard to do. Impressive work.
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computer hacks
Thursday Mini-extra
[Russ] sent in his Great Pumpkin computer case mod. (Non-biodegradable)
[Nuke] sent in his $10 ipod dock. It makes me think of doom for some reason.
[phnx] sent in this amusing case mod.
These have been around, but they’re excellent, so deal. Evilmadscientist.com has a couple of great pumpkins.
Check out the Cylon Jackolantern and the R/C Dalek Pumpkin
[Daedalus] sent in this one – adsl via sound card. 96kbs. The sound card is interfaced
with an audio transformer to the line at each end.
And this one just came in from [Eric]. Make a magsafe connector for thinkpads! Awesome.
Environmental Monitoring
[Daniel Klien] sent me his thermd environmental monitoring project. It’s written in perl, but the cool part is the sheer number of supported devices. It’s pretty rare when a single developer is given test hardware so he can add support for it.
Sure, this isn’t a hardware hack, but temperature logging is one of those irritating problems of hardware hacking. I’ve got loads of uses for it – coffee roasting, house management, battery charging, monitoring for my EV motorcycle project.
Wake On Lan Network Tester
[Jachin] sent in his network port tester built from a network card, wake on lan cable and a battery holder. Three AAs supply 4.5v DC just like the motherboard would to the card via the WOL cable. Nice trick, I’d consider adding a static bag at the least to keep the card from getting zapped.
Pre Geek-o-ween Mini Extra
[Zodiac] sent in this pumpkin computer. Gutted laptop, dvd drive, need I say more?
[max] sent along this ‘flaming’ led modded pitchfork.
I ran across Woz lighting himself up.
[Jon] and [Shawn] sent along this freaky project. [Warning: Involves taxidermy] [Jon] suggests a bluetooth headset… Dude.
Removable Laptop Water Cooling
[Bard] just sent me a nice water cooling hack. He built a simple water cooling system that can be manually inserted into the cooling system of his laptop. He wanted it for watching movies sans annoying fan noise. He soldered the parts together using a stove instead of the standard propane torch. Necessity is definitely the mother of invention. I hope he relocates the water cooling supply. When he wants to go mobile, he just unplugs the cooling fins.
Toorcon Anonymous Presentation
I promised that I’d follow up on some Toorcon stuff later this week, so here it is. I believe I was present for the first ever anonymous presentation at a con. I’ve been waiting for the presentation information to get posted on the TOR wiki, and today I finally found it. The presentation is from the TRON: HE FIGHTS FOR THE USER talk. The idea worked out very well. We could hear the presenter quite well the entire time The combination of TOR, VNC, and Ventrillo was unique. We were even able to ask the speaker questions at the end. The talk opens up some very interesting possibilities. Instead of being able to arrest someone before/after a talk, someone could present on a controversial issue with less fear of corporate/government fallout. Check out the wiki page for more information.
