Amongst PDAs, cellphones, portable game consoles, and digital audio players USB host mode isn’t that common. The lack of host mode is why you can’t plug your iPod into your PSP. The iPod camera connector is a partial work-around for this problem. The Linux based GP2X gets more interesting with this new development. Using the GP2X’s USB host requires building a special cable for its expansion port. The port features JTAG, serial, audio, and video pins as well. USB host mode opens the doors for any number of USB peripherals to be used with the GP2X: larger storage from a hard drive/iPod, full sized keyboard for use with a command line, WiFi provided by USB adapter. There is the potential to do anything that you could do with a standard PC. If I had known this I would have bought a GP2X without a second thought… so, after two thoughts I bought one and it showed up last Friday evening. I’ll let you know how it works out.

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Reader [Jakeh] wanted a Bluetooth based game controller for his Axim. Unfortunately, the only commercial option didn’t fit very well. He decided to chop up the Bluetooth controller and wire it into an original Playstation controller. Wiring was slightly annoying because half the buttons in the Bluetooth controller don’t have a common ground. The final touch was modifying two mechanical pencils to provide clamping pressure on the outside of the PDA. Here’s [Jakeh]’s original post about the project and his Flickr photo set.

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I am amazed at how quickly Alex from hackndev was able to get Linux running on the LifeDrive. It looks like the majority of the work only spanned 2 weeks. The Linux system is started using Garux a bootloader that you run in the Palm OS. Garux unloads Palm OS from memory and boots the Linux kernel in its place. Alex has published GPE binaries of Familiar Linux that should be really simple to use. The touchscreen works, but since suspend isn’t working yet it’s still not practical as a stand alone environment.

[thanks andy]

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Well this certainly is somewhat of a new one. our pal machiavel here decided he’d just go ahead and dissassemble a hard drive, a (3-button mind you) mouse, and hook it up with some other stuff and a power supply to create: a lockpicking gun