If you’ve got a cable modem, you know the drill when it goes offline. Unplug it, wait 30 seconds, plug it back in, reset your dhcp request. I’m pretty sure that [brian] mentioned this in a comment a while back, but now he’s written it up. He’s using a cron job on his linux box to check the internet connection, and if the test fails, power cycle the hardware with some X10 hardware and a little scripting. (Just don’t tell your friends or they’ll be outside trying to guess the code.)
Misc Hacks4181 Articles
Dammit We Missed A Day Extra
I finally ponied up for an ev-do card to make sure that I have no excuse for missing a post short of being trapped in a hole by bizzaro superman.
Check out this short video how-to on making your own glow in the dark inkjet ink. via [boing boing]. Probably the best inkjet mod since the diy cd printer.
If you remember the diy ups, you might like the attach a giant battery to a stock ups version. I did this myself years ago. It works well, but use a maintenance free battery to minimize hydrogen off-gassing. In fact, I’d suggest some proper ventilation for the battery pack. Miata batteries have a vent tube if you want to keep the parts count to a minimum. (but they are a bit pricy)
Something a little oldschool – [Alexandre] added a serial port to his newton message pad 2000.(Not in english, but easy enough to understand.)
After seeing the superglue fingerprinting post, [Anton] sent in this fingerprint falsification how-to from the ccc.
Handy Bench PSU’s
I thought everyone was going with cheap PC based power supplies(I did), but some people just have to take it to another level. [andrew] built this bench PSU with -12V, -15V, +5V, +12V, +15V, variable and one +35VDC unregulated output. He based it on this design, but added a few tweaks of his own.
Yes, Hack-A-Day took a bit of an unplanned hiatus on Saturday, but I’ll have some extra stuff for you this week as things return to normal. If you’ve got something interesting, use the tips line.
Superglue Fingerprinting
Just a fun one right out of Beverly Hills Cop. [Sam] sent along this handy how-to for obtaining finger prints with CA adhesive(superglue) fumes.
DIY Digital Voice Transceiver
[dk] sent in the DVX project. It’s a complete D-STAR implementation that’s built around a digital transceiver chip, an ATMEL mcu and a digital voice compression chip. Compared to most digital radio’s I’ve seen, this one is pretty simple. The really complex action lives in the main chips with a bunch of caps and resistors to support them. Watch out for Digikey’s pricing – it looks like a major gouge after looking at the tx/rx chips on Analog Device’s site. If you get them at a decent price, they could make great rf links for your projects. The link to the paper seems a bit broken, but here’s the correct one.
Visual Computer Pong Player
I think it’d be more fun if the computer had to actuate a joystick, but [ashish]s visual based computer pong player is still pretty sweet. He’s capturing the game state with his webcam, and the computer processes the image and controls the pong paddle via tcp client connection based only on what it sees.
Voting Rom Swapped In 60 Seconds
It’s been a while since we had a voting machine hack, but this video that [Marcel van der Peijl] sent in not only reminds me of Real Genius, but makes a great point. Maybe one of these voting machine companies will wake up, bring some decent designs to a hacking con and get things right. These guys popped apart a machine and fully swapped the roms in 60 seconds. How’s that for stealing a vote?
