[Mahavir] sent in his group’s final project for the College of Engineering in Pune (it’s over here). They built an accelerometer based Bluetooth mouse. They ended up creating a mouse that maps rotational movements to x/y motion. From the video movement, it strikes us as responding the same way that touch pointer mice do. You can hit the demo video after the break or get more details from the project page. Even if you’re not into the mouse idea, you can probably learn something from their Bluetooth implementation.
Misc Hacks4181 Articles
Eagle 5 Overview
Not sure how we missed this when it was originally published, but our friend [Ian Lesnet] at DIY Life posted an overview of Cadsoft’s new release Eagle 5. This upgrade seems to be all usability tweaks-it really took 5 versions before you could right click? They also made CTRL+Z undo. Really. Eagle3D works nearly the same as before, but has a few changes to help you figure out why certain parts aren’t rendering. We’re happy to see the OSX version is now Universal and no longer needs X11.
RoboGames 2008 This Weekend
The fifth annual RoboGames is happening this weekend in San Francisco. RoboGames is a broad reaching competition designed to bring together specialists in all areas of robotics. Last year’s event had 800 entries in 62 different events. The biggest audience draw is definitely the combat robots shown in the video above, but there are other skill and task based competitions. If you’re in the area, this is definitely worth your time. Check out ROBOT magazine’s coverage from last year to get an idea of what you’ll see (or in our case miss).
[thanks io9]
Data Recovery Tools
In your zeal to delete your data, you may have accidentally deleted files that you wanted to keep. Lifehacker has posted this handy list of data recovery tools to help you get those files back.
As you may know, whenever you delete a file, the only thing that changes is the file system. The data of the deleted file is still on the hard drive, but the file system sees the space containing the file as “blank” writable space. Data recovery software typically looks into the directory where the file was stored and scans it, finding any files not listed in the file system.
The program you choose for this task will not only be determined by your OS, but also by the specifics of your recovery needs. Do you need to recover a single file? Many files? A whole hard drive? An unbootable drive? A really scratched optical disk? Specialized tools for all of these needs are available, and this article will help you find the right program for yours.
Perceptual Chronograph
All praise to [Limor] for uncovering this incredibly odd project. [magician]’s perceptual chronograph is designed to test whether time “slows down” in stressful situations. The device flashes a random number on the display very quickly so that it is impossible to perceive what is actually being displayed. If you can read the number while under stress, it means that your ability perceive time has increased. It’s hard to believe, but check out the video embedded after the break that investigates the phenomenon. We can’t help, but wonder how [magician] personally plans on testing this.
DIY HID Ballast
HID lights have a major power consumption and lumen output advantage over halogen lights. Unfortunately the ballast component isn’t very cheap. [brian]’s been building his own ballasts for his mountain bike. We couldn’t find any more info on his design, but we did find some interesting stuff. This document lays out the requirements for a ballast. Here’s an older HID ballast design to get rolling. Keep in mind that the lamp requires high voltages – don’t play with it unless you know what you’re doing. If you’d rather use off the shelf components, check out the HID dive light we wrote up a while back. It uses a fairly inexpensive ballast/lamp combo.
DNS Spoofing With Ettercap
[IronGeek] has published his latest video how-to: DNS Spoofing with Ettercap. Ettercap is designed specifically to perform man in the middle attacks on your local network. It can do ARP poisoning, collect passwords, fingerprint OSes, and content filtering. For DNS spoofing, you just need to edit a config file that defines which domains resolve to which IP addresses. You can use wildcards for the domains. In the video, he uses Linux because the network interfaces are easier to remember. Once you’re done playing with DNS spoofing, remember to flush your local cache otherwise your browser will continue to go to the wrong IP.
[photo: mattdork]
