Misc Hacks

4181 Articles

Giants Roam Berlin

October 8, 2009 by 27 Comments

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I can hear the comments now: “Not a hack.” Yeah that might be true, but it’s still enormous puppets running around Berlin – that in its own right is pretty cool. The show, put on by the street theater group Royal De Luxe, is part of the 20th anniversary for the fall of the Berlin Wall. Spectators watched as the Big Giant rose from the water in search of his niece, the Little Giantess. We won’t spoil the ending, but its a happy one. Reminds us of the similar giant marionette group La Machine, and their La Princesse.

Ik-a-sketch Collaborative Scribbling

October 8, 2009 by 6 Comments

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At this year’s PICNIC conference [Neil Mendoza] and [Edwin Dertien] built a giant Etch-a-Sketch to help bring attendees together. The drawing area is a rear-projection screen, rather than a physical powder based setup, and is surrounded by the familiar red frame with vertical and horizontal control knob. Because the two knobs are too far apart for one person to use at the same time, two people must work together to move the stylus.

To help break the ice the device was designed to incorporate social networking. Each knob requires that an RFID (embedded in the conference badges) be scanned by the person controlling it. Both users are then connected as friends through a social network and when they’re done “making art”, the beauty of their creation is delivered to them via email.

We don’t know about you, but our etch-a-sketch attempts have always been crappy. There are some folks who can turn out a masterpiece on the thing, but this is really just meant to grab your interest for a minute or two and help you meet some people. One feature that should be noted, this giant device requires shaking to erase the image.

There I Fixed It: A Blog About Hacking, Poorly.

October 6, 2009 by 24 Comments

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Thereifixedit.com is a site filled with dubious innovations. Some of them are cool, some of them are clever, and most of them are terrifying. Anyone who has ever stood in front of a broken household appliance with a roll of duct tape, one screw driver with a bit chipped off the flat part, and determination will laugh themselves silly browsing through this site. Maybe some of the ghetto hacks we covered before should be in this list.

[Thanks for the link Dad]

Jump Start Your Car With Sega Parts

October 5, 2009 by 47 Comments

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[Jenn’s] family is a single-car household. Because of this, it’s a little more difficult to get a jump start when the headlights run down the battery. Not wanting to ask the neighbors for help, her husband [Richard] decided to come up with his own solution.

Rummaging through the parts on hand, [Richard] went with his old friend Sonic the Hedgehog. He used two 12-volt, 1 amp Sega Genesis power adapters in parallel hooked up to a 12 volt, 3 amp  power supply. The end result is a 12-volt 5 amp source hooked to the car’s electrical system and used to get their road machine started.

We have enjoyed some of [Richard’s] offerings in the past, such as Super Nintoaster and the Super Genintari but this is a bit less… eloquent. A few questions do come to mind. First of all, is this the best way to use parts of your 20-year-old gaming system?  How many amps does your average car starter pull down?  And finally, what kind of issues are we looking at with the lead acid battery under these conditions?  Weigh in on the conversation in the comments.

Dance Of The… (construction) Cranes

October 4, 2009 by 16 Comments

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Hacking is all about using parts and resources in an unconventional way. If stringing a pair of high-rise cranes with LED Christmas lights and making them move to a piece of classical music isn’t unconventional, then we don’t know what is. For nearly a quarter of every hour last night, 2 crane operators, along with two ‘choreographers’, swung and spun the cranes around in a coordinated fashion. The project was created by [Brandon Vickerd] as part of Nuit Blanche.  Its purpose was to showcase the technology that builds the cities we live in. A live video stream from various viewpoints was projected on site, below the cranes.

Machining Gets Wet And Wild

October 1, 2009 by 24 Comments

Electromachining

[Tyler] has had his electrochemical machining hack up for a while now. His final version uses a pump to move electrolyte out through the etching head and onto the workpiece. This keeps fresh electrolyte in the etching region and clears out the insoluble material. We see how this could be attached to a CNC system and used to etch PCBs without the use of a special inkjet printer, toner transfer, or laser etching machine.

[thanks Ian]

Microsoft Unveils Open Source Multi Core OS

October 1, 2009 by 62 Comments

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A new operating system, code named Barrelfish is being developed by Microsoft research labs and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. This operating system is being built with multi core operations foremost in priority. It is supposed to be extremely scalable and able to function on a very wide range of hardware. You can download the current snapshot of it on their site and dig into the source code, released under a 3-clause BSD style license. If you would like to learn the primary differences between this OS and Windows or Linux, you can read this PDF.

[via Engadget]