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SNES Cartridge Wallet

December 31, 2008 by 9 Comments

nes_wallet

[gamemaster87] put together this SNES wallet. It isn’t just a wallet, it also has internal lighting and theme music. He harvested LEDs from Christmas lights, switches and battery compartments from an old all in one joystick, and the sounds from a holiday card. There’s a Plexiglas window to show off his ID and a belt clip, because you wouldn’t want this thing in your back pocket. Match this up with the SNES clock, NES bike tail light, and the NES security system and you’ll be the king of the nintendorks.

Home Made Macintosh For Under $240

December 31, 2008 by 18 Comments

msiosx1
[Steve] sent in this great step by step writeup on how to load Macintosh OSX onto an MSI wind. The MSI wind can be found pretty cheap, roughly $140. It has a 1.2Ghz Atom processor, SATA, and 6 USB ports. Its a pretty decent system for the price. Add a hard drive, DVD ROM and some RAM and you ‘ve got a complete system. You might have to update the bios to install the new operating system, there are more details about that on in the writeup. The only real drawback is that you have to run the USB in 12mbps mode instead of 480mbps.

There are lots of little tips to keep you from hitting roadblocks, so follow the steps closely or you’ll have to redo it. Since downloading the modified version of OSX is probably illegal, [steve] suggests that you go buy a copy of OSX just to try to balance it out.

25C3: Nokia Exploit Stops All Inbound SMS

December 30, 2008 by 21 Comments

[Tobias Engel] released a serious Nokia vulnerability today. By using a specially crafted SMS message, you can block the recipient from getting any future SMS messages. The attacker changes their Protocol Identifier to “Internet Electronic Mail” and then uses any email address 32 characters or more in their message. The recipient will receive no indication that they got the message and no other messages will be allowed until the phone is factory reset. You can see a demo video here. This affects many different varieties of S60 phones and no fix is known.

[Thanks fh]

In Flight Insect Photo Rig

December 27, 2008 by 20 Comments

insect_rig

This amazing looking set up is for photographing insects in flight. While this is similar to a past project we covered, this one seems to have several improvements. There are no longer any arms that you have to position on either side of the insect. This system uses an additional lens, picture at the top, to detect the reflected laser light off of an insect.  Requiring only 40 microseconds to determine if the insect is in focus, capturing a flying wasp shouldn’t be too hard. You can see four lasers in the pictures, two are IR and used for focus, the other two are simply to help the operator target their bugs.

[thanks Woeka]

How To Properly Dispose Of Fruitcake

December 25, 2008 by 7 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Tsgz3G0E1c]

While doing serious fruitcake research, (no, really) we stumbled across the Great Fruitcake Toss held every January in Colorado. The particular entry above caught our eye. Omega 380 was built by a group of Boeing engineers and currently holds the distance record of 1,420feet. It’s a large compressed air cannon. All pressure is human generated using an exercise bike turning a pump. Apparently the team’s first contest entry was a classic surgical tubing slingshot. It eventually broke down during a very cold year, so they switched to this newer design. You can see more videos on the Operation Fruitcake blog.