for a while now, i’ve been grabbing cheap used ups boxes to run my home servers off of.  problem is, they are just about useless.  i can run an old p2 (no monitor!) off of one for about 5 minutes before it fails.  even if i were to chain a few of them together, the puny sla batteries in them typically go dead a month or two after i buy them anyway.  consequently, i’ve been going through them like candy.

searching for a solution, i came across this article for building a diy ups.  with an inverter, a power supply or charger, and a car battery you can have yourself a pretty solid dual conversion ups that is expandable to meet your downtime needs.  it’s worth a read even if you just want to know how a proper ups works.

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“This program was written so i could control a tiny $10 remote control car (and to procrastinate homework).  The lpt port pins (6,7,8,9) are used to control Forward, Reverse, Left and Right in the controller. In addition to this program, I had to build a simple circuit to bypass the buttons on the remote control.”

those r/c cars are just chock full of hackability.

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“This project started with a 1/6th scale RC Hummer from NewBright Toys . The idea was to build a fully functioning gaming computer – but to also be able to unhook all the peripherals and drive the truck around, when I got bored and needed a break.”

this mod is off the hook.  thanks for the link filtronic.

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a hardware hack, a software hack, and a case mod all rolled into one.  here is how you can turn an actiontec router into an smb/cifs honeypot that’s contained inside a lamp

sure, you can go out and get a media center pc already configured and good to go–but what’s the fun in that? also, there’s a ton of other components, cases and set ups you might want to cook up, so here’s an excellent guide on making your own media center pc.

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