Misc Hacks

4182 Articles

Saturday Morning Extra

October 7, 2006 by 12 Comments

Storage element keychain. Allright, it’s cool, but almost criminal.

Hack a wireless doorbell into a remote relay. It’s allright, but I like the Mr. House + APRS tracking better.

[Josh and PsychoRNGD] both sent in the mindstorm NXT laser hack (Replace the LED in a light unit with a laser pointer diode)

Matt sent along his XBox 180. I dig it just because it gets rid of all those friggin wires.

[XanTium] points out that MS’s latest drive in the 360 takes things to a few extremes to block firmware hacking.

[Mike] let us know that after all the grief he got here, he built an aux to female ipod cable for his sound-dock. (He got his femal ipod connector from Ridax, but Sparkfun now carries a surface mount version)

You guys sent in some great tips this week. Keep em comin. I’ve been busy, but I’m going to hunt down the floating ads and get them taken care of.

Toorcon Anonymous Presentation

October 6, 2006 by 2 Comments

I promised that I’d follow up on some Toorcon stuff later this week, so here it is. I believe I was present for the first ever anonymous presentation at a con. I’ve been waiting for the presentation information to get posted on the TOR wiki, and today I finally found it. The presentation is from the TRON: HE FIGHTS FOR THE USER talk. The idea worked out very well. We could hear the presenter quite well the entire time The combination of TOR, VNC, and Ventrillo was unique. We were even able to ask the speaker questions at the end. The talk opens up some very interesting possibilities. Instead of being able to arrest someone before/after a talk, someone could present on a controversial issue with less fear of corporate/government fallout. Check out the wiki page for more information.

Hackaday Extra

October 2, 2006 by 19 Comments

I spent 14 hours at airports today, after staying up all night. My internet access at Toorcon was bandwith starved, so I wanted to catch up a bit. I’ll try to highlight more Toorcon stuff later in the week.

[Clinton] and [bart] both sent in Clinton’s electric shock alarm clock. (Don’t even think about building one of these things, it could kill someone if you’re not careful.)

[capagotks] sent in his USB refitted hand crank LED flashlight.

I got this a few times, so here’s a simple work surface made from an old PC case. (I use self healing cutting mats.)

[Ian] presents us with a bunch of cell phone repair (and upgrade?) information. Let me know if you actually rebuild a broken phone. The most likely scenario would be LCD replacement.

[Jim] sent in these candy(sugar) powered rockets. sweet!

Finally, [Leigh Norton] in Essex (Yes, Essex.) has an HP pen plotter like the one used to make a vinyl cutter. Post if you want it and maybe he’ll give it to you.

Toorcon Day 1

September 30, 2006 by 3 Comments

[12am] We hit the opening keynote by Cory Doctorow. He had some interesting things to say about patterns in eula agreements and the restriction of rights to enforce business models.

[Simple Nomad] followed up with his talk called ‘State of the Enemy State’ – his observations regarding government security, just how advanced real time encryption cracking probably is and predictions on some forthcoming laws and how they’ll affect the security industry. The most interesting one: encryption key escrow was enacted a couple weeks ago by Blair in the UK, and it’ll probably come to the US next.

The talk on the apple airport security flaw was canceled, so it was replaced by ‘lightning talks’. Think open mic night on the floor of a security conference. Johnny Cache opened it up with some observations about why the talk was canceled. He had to skirt around the issue to keep from getting in trouble, but he was definitely pissed.

There were a few others, but I’ll leave it there for now.