We’ve printed [John Keppel]’s winning t-shirt design. They’ll be available for purchase in the vendor area at Defcon. If you’re at the con, pick one up because we don’t have any plans yet to distribute them online. We will have a small number of women’s tank tops as well. See you there!
The silicon hacker behind the Chumby, [bunnie huang], was browsing through the Mobile Phone Megamarket in Shenzhen, China and stumbled upon an unusual repair book. It turns out the book had the schematics to hundreds of Nokia phones. It’s hard to tell if they are legitimate, but the amount of information makes them seem so. [bunnie] claims that the book is a learning experience because it shows how some sub-circuits are implemented. Also, it can be a good reference for sourcing parts. Since Nokia buys millions of each component, the supply of parts they use are stable. There are also editions for other brands, such as Motorola and Samsung.
Defcon, the world’s largest hacker convention, is this coming weekend in Las Vegas. While the convention generally focuses on breaking new technology, digital archivist [Jason Scott] has an interesting surprise for attendees this year. With some help from VintageTech, he’ll be assembling a massive den of retro computing machinery. They’ll have fully functional systems like the PDP-11/70 for people to play with. It sure to be one of the more unique things to see at the con.
A few weeks ago we held a preorder for the Bus Pirate universal serial interface tool. We split the preorder into two parts due to a shortage of PIC 24FJ64GA002-I/SO chips. The first preorder is arriving worldwide now, the second preorder has a longer lead time. Here’s everything we currently know about preorder 2, it’s subject to change, but we wanted to keep you up to date.
Preorder 2 contains orders for 563 Bus Pirates. Seeed Studio noticed an error in our quality control testing routine that misclassified about 50 preorder 1 Bus Pirates as defective. We updated the test and passing units will ship immediately to preorder 2 participants on a first come, first serve basis. Another 500 PICs are scheduled to arrive after August 1, which should take care of most remaining orders.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMpJLTU9qCA%5D
[onezerothrice] has been working hard on creating ARtisan, a flash library for bringing augmented reality to the browser. His goal in creating the library was to make AR projects quicker and easier to develop. The library can provide the location, size, and rotation of multiple markers on screen with little work from the developer. It is licensed under the GPL and comes bundled with Papervision3D, another flash library for manipulating objects in 3 dimensions. He has posted several demos with source and accompanying video.
Every year, the Defcon badge takes a technological step forward. The details are starting to emerge for this years hardware lineup. Last years badge, pictured above, had LED status indicators and an IR transceiver. There’s no telling what this years badge will do, but we do know it has a new processor. They have chosen the Freescale MC56F8006 to build everything around this year. We think it would be cool to see some RFID, maybe a heat map of the traffic in the facility. Maybe some distributed computing would be cool. What could we do with an embedded camera? We eagerly await more details.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTsXlTKaFq0]
Solving the age old problem of… wait, what problem are they solving? These students at UC Berkeley have built a toilet paper dispenser prototype. Not only does it meter out an exact amount for you, it will fold it and cut it as well. They mention this being the perfect accessory for a high tech bathroom, and we can agree. To be serious though, in public places, metering out limited amounts of toilet paper at a time could possibly result in major cost savings. We think the next prototype should have different preference settings such as; wadded, folded, or wrapped around your hand. Anyone else’s mind suddenly filled with unpleasant imagery?
[via Makezine]
