[fbz] wanted to make sure that everyone knows that RFID Guardian has released the latest version of their design. I had a hard time finding a good shot of the hardware, so I went with the Nokia phone control application. There’s a short explanation of the project here. I’d point at the use examples on the site, but it seems that their MYSQL server is running out of memory. After seeing this talk at shmoocon last year, and a bit more reinforcement at defcon, there are definitely some good uses for the guardian. (Once you get past the slow start, Major’s intro is funny as hell. – jump past the first 8 minutes or you’ll be bored.)
Misc Hacks4182 Articles
PySight Post Halloween Entertainment
[John] sent in this setup that he hacked together for Halloween. He used a MacBook Pro with built in camera, a projector, a bed sheet, a kid friendly laser pointer and a hacked together combination of PySight and PyGame. The result was a fairly easy game of shoot Marshie. Nice!
Happy Halloween Extra
Happy Halloween! I’m in the mood for an extra, and I’ve got some stuff that’s been turning to zombies from the tipline.
Pictured above is a nice simple LED pumpkin sent in by [John]- perfect for the hacker with less than stellar art skills.
Let’s not forget [mastershake]s Hack-A-Day pumpkin from last year. Where’s the THAD pumpkin you promised? [Wolfgang] sent in these mini pumpkin bots – they look like toys, but they’re made from XBox parts and radio control cars.
Last year Max sent in his talking Halloween basket. (I always wanted to strap that voice module to a co-workers chair…)
[Brandon] built a budget (~$150) guitar hero controller out of a Gibson Epoch guitar from target.
This scanner cam has been around for a while, but I admire how he keeps fine tuning and tweaking the design. Thanks to [Loopymind] for passing it along.
I keep getting emails telling me that Google Earth has a flight simulator. Yes. We all know about it.
DIY Ultra Wide Band Radar
[Andy] sent in this pdf (mirror) describing a simply diy UWB Radar project. It’s not intuitive, but by using a wide frequency range for low power, short distance purposes, the system should avoid interfering with other radio systems. The paper has a complete circuit schematic, and offers some suggestions for adding communications to the signal. Unfortunately, to really tune the thing, you’ll need a kick-ass oscilloscope.
Speaker As A Microphone
[Nathan] sent in his speaker microphone project. Speakers and microphones are physically similar – usually mics are much smaller to allow decent high frequency response. In this case, [Nathan] wanted something to pick up kick drums or bass guitars, without the cost of a commercial version like the subkick. It’s built around a dual coil 6.5 inch subwoofer. The passive circuit design allows the coils in the speaker to be configured for differing impedance, phase and isolation.
Stroboscope LED Fan Clock
[sprite_tm] sent in one of his latest little adventures – and I love it. To create his stroboscope fan clock, he put a couple of red and green clock hands onto a standard PC fan(I love Panaflo fans), then he built a circuit to strobe a RGB LED to create a set of virtual clock hands on the spinning fan. An ATTiny2313 does all the work, with the help of some transistors to drive the LEDs.
ToorCon 9: URI Use And Abuse
[Nathan McFeters] and [Rob Carter] gave a presentation on the problems with URI handling. URIs are used to send commands to external applications from a web browser. itms:// for iTunes for example. Any application that registers a URI has the potential to be abused through this route. For their first example they showed a stack overflow in Trillian’s AIM handling. The next demo created a “Critical Update Available” button on Picasa’s interface. When the user clicked it, their photos would be uploaded to the attacker’s server. They even display a “download progress” bar to encourage the user to keep the connection open. You can read about the attack on cocontributor Billy Rios’s blog.
