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.
computer hacks1421 Articles
computer hacks
Toorcon Hard Drive Data Recovery
Eliot and I caught Scott Moulton’s talk on Hacking Hard Drives for Data Recovery. You can catch his slides here – but most of the content was in the talk. It was a great walk through of hard drive technology. Some interesting points: 85% of the time, software recovery is successful. 10% of the time, replacing the controller board succeeds. So, 95% of the time you can probably recover your data fairly easily.
Scott showed off a peltier enhanced drive sled for keeping a drive cooled for optimal operation/recovery conditions. He even got into replacing drive heads. If you’ve ever gutted a drive, you’ll know how fragile those heads are. You can actually fold a postit note to keep the heads apart and tranfer an arm with heads from a donor drive to get your drive working again. The difficulty of the operations seem to increase exponentially as the number of platters increases.
WT-300 Cluster
[Sprite_tm] sent in his latest project. It’s a cluster built from hacked Acer WT-300 windows CE terminals. The resulting speed wasn’t too impressive (10 200Mhz Geode cpus) but the road to get it done is interesting. He had to whip up a flash programmer to get the device to boot from ide devices. Then he added IDE headers and IDE Cf adapters.
Humidor Cluster
This mini-itx mod is pretty slick. It looks great, but inside you’ll find no less than five mobos, an ethernet switch complete with five hard drives. The controller is a Via PD1000 and the four slave machines are Via V8000As.
[yeah, I forgot to publish it earlier. Four words: Two Week Old Baby.]
Ion System Cooling
Jared sent us his latest inventgeek project. We love their work, and this one’s really unique. By combining the ion cooling, lots of heat sinks and ram drives, the machine is truly silent. Ion buildup isn’t just a problem for space ships anymore.
More Keyboard Lighting
[sfriswolker] sent in his progressing black keyboard lighting mod. The first version used a CCFL. When that burnt out, he rebuilt it with LEDs. [google english transations – part 1 and part 2]
Linux On Obsolete Displays
[bryan chafy] has been hacking away to get older non VGA displays running on VGA hardware without using a scan converter. You can pick these old grayscales up for cheap or even free. The tricky part is modifying the BIOS to reprogram the VGA card to output a sync and scanrate that is NTSC compliant. He’s managed to do this with a WYSE Winterm thin-client. Another clever trick is the poor man’s triple head display which stores a different image in each portion of the RGB signal.
