DVB-T is a standard for broadcasting digital television over the air and is found in many countries outside of North America. This hack involves using a video card to generate the DVB-T signal. This project was inspired by Tempest for Eliza, which we covered recently. To pull this off you have to add some custom settings for an additional screen in your X server configuration. When you start up the server and switch to the new screen it will generate the proper signal. The signal strength is pretty weak though and the card has to be wired directly to the DVB-T set-top box. The box will display two different channels, each with a test image. The signal isn’t actually generated directly, but is a product of the VGA card’s DAC’s harmonics.

[thanks james]

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Most geeks dream of rackmounting their gear. The fact that most rack equipment is purchased by companies means it’s way too overpriced. Seriously, $60 for a drawer? The best solution for us is to build our own. Here’s a build from the ground up. It starts with the basic 19″ rack. Then adds fileservers and other components. Make sure you check out the homemade power rails.

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Heat pipes are used to passively transfer heat from one area to another. On pcs they’re usually found moving heat from the processor to large heatsinks on the case exterior. Heat pipes contain liquids that vaporize when heated. The vapor moves up the pipe and is cooled by the external heatsink. This transfer of heat cools the vapor and returns it to liquid form. The liquid then returns to the processor end of the pipe. This project involved building a heat pipe and charging it with R134a. While testing the pipe in a water bath the refrigerant is bled off till the pipe maintains a steady state of phase change. Even though performance could not match that of manufactured heat pipes, it’s still impressive.

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 While contemplating how to turn my new heat pumping Xbox into a foot cozy, I remembered some links that [h-tech] had sent in.

The first is cooking an egg on a processor in a functional PC. The proc in question is an AMD Athlon XP1500+. The tray is supported by a stack of 1p and 2p sterling coins. After approx. 4 minutes of warm up it took 11 minutes to cook the egg.

The second is a hotplate constructed from 7 Cyrix chips. The chips are wired in parallel to an AT power supply. A piece of cookie sheet is attached to the surface with thermal paste and the power supply is enhanced with

Last week the free VMware player was released. It lets you run virtual machines, but not create them. [Faileas] contributed today’s how-to for creating your own virtual machines.

Programs required to carry out hack:

1. Copy of VMware Player

2. Browser appliance or another virtual machine(browser appliance is the smallest one, by size, and thus I am using that)

3. Notepad or other text editor

4. ISO image or CD/floppy of FreeDOS (I’m using the ripcord distribution) or MSDOS 7.1 would work as well, but i haven’t tried it yet.

5. Replacement OS (must have SCSI HDD support)

Continue reading “How-to: VMware Player Modification” →

Even though PCI is really common it usually doesn’t see experimentation by amateurs because of its high performance nature. ChaN decided to build a system to demonstrate that PCI is within the reach of hobbyists. He does this with just 1 GAL, 2 identity comparators, and 4 latches. To pull this off a couple design rules have to be violated. For example: There is no configuration register so the target address has to be set with DIP switches. Something you would never see in real life. ChaN has been posting electronics projects for quite a few years and his site is well worth further investigation.

[thanks BoomBox]

Continue reading “PCI Simplified” →

UPDATE: For troubleshooting your F@H setup head to the unofficial Team Hack-A-Day forum.

After announcing the Hack-A-Day Folding Team last week it has become one of the fastest gaining teams. [BillytheImpaler] put together this great guide for not only getting started with folding, but also getting the best folding performance out of your machine. Read on and join the team so we can break into the top 1000!

From Wikipedia

Folding@home is a distributed computing project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding. The project’s goal is to add greater understanding to protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. Such diseases include BSE (mad cow), Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, among others.

Folding@home does not rely on powerful supercomputers for its processing; instead, the primary contributors to the Folding@home project are many thousands of personal computer users who have installed a small client program. The client runs in the background, and makes use of the CPU when it is not busy. In most modern personal computers, the CPU is rarely used to its full capacity at all times; the Folding@home client takes advantage of this unused processing power.

Continue reading “HOW-TO: Folding@Home Competitively” →