First Whoppix and Auditor then Whax and now finally everything has come together to form remote-exploit’s latest Live CD project BackTrack. The very first beta of the new system was released today. I downloaded it and tested it on my 600m. It had a nice uncluttered feeling right from the beginning by not offering the scads of boot options found in Knoppix. The system came up really quick and stopped at the command prompt instead of going to a GUI which is another nice touch. The CD also doesn’t automatically bring up the network interfaces since you may have something special in mind. The default windowing environment is KDE, but Fluxbox is included if you’re on a diet. Kismet started up and set up my Intel 2200 card without any assistance. I really think the team has put together a great product and I look forward to future releases. Try it out for yourself.

[thanks steve]

Continue reading “BackTrack Live CD” →

Trixter pulled off this awesome hack, proving that the demoscene is alive and well. It started as a silly joke “well, I can display video on my XT!” , but Trixter thought about it and came up with a way to do it on his Model 5150. The production needs 10MB of disk space, a Soundblaster Pro, a CGA card and monitor. Trixter notes at the end of the page that he’s had to use text mode to get 16 colors out of the CGA instead of the standard 4. Check out the video of the XT being pushed to its limits at his site. (video on Google Video)

[thanks ex-parrot]

Continue reading “Full Motion Video On An 8088” →

 
Dennis had been working on this project for over a year before recently releasing it in the Amiga.org forums (photos). The Amiga was notable for its use of unique, dedicated processor chips for tasks like real time video effects. Dennis has recreated these chips in a Xilinx Spartan-3 400K gate FPGA. His development board also features a MC68000 processor and an MMC card for storage. He’s got everything, but sound and keyboard support working. He is able to run Lemmings though, and isn’t that what’s really important?

[thanks Seantech]

Continue reading “Amiga In An FPGA” →

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]

Continue reading “Video Card Used As A Digital TV Modulator” →

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.

Continue reading “Build Your Own Computer Rack” →

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.

Continue reading “Homemade Heat Pipes” →

 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