November 1st means that registration for ShmooCon 2009 has opened. The DC hacker convention is entering the fifth year. They’re releasing the tickets in blocks; after today’s are gone the next won’t be available till December 1st. Today is also the closing of first round consideration for their call for papers, but you still have another month before the final deadline.
We’ve always enjoyed our time at ShmooCon. In 2008 we saw talks on cracking GSM encryption and recovering data from SSDs.
It can sometimes be difficult to decide what items we want to fill space in our homes. Our health is valued highly, as is our ability to consume cold beer. Someone out there must have been thinking of us when they designed this exersize bike that chills your beer. Admittedly, it won’t chill it as fast as some other methods we’ve tried. We also may end up forcing our friends and loved ones to do the actual chilling, but beer tastes better when cooled by slave labor anyway.
Promises, promises, promises. The $200 Eee PC is supposedly coming in 2009, according to chairman Johnny Shih. No word on whether it will be a 10 inch screen, but it seems possible as they have stated they are phasing out the smaller models. Other interesting facts were divulged, such as 70% of them are now loaded with Windows XP and hard drives.
[via Engadget]
We were expecting eye gouging and body slams, but this review of several thumb drive Linux distributions will do. They compared Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, Xubuntu, and Fedora. They don’t mention why they chose these four specifically, as UNetbootin has many many distributions available. They put each through its paces, listing common issues and boot up speed.
Their conclusion was that puppy Linux was preferable as it has a graphically nice interface and the ability to have persistent data storage on the disk. They have a poll going though, so head over and voice your opinion.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q9NSVUu8nk]
With the election coming up in less than a week, voting machine security (or the lack thereof) is critical, especially with the popularity of early voting this year. While we’ve previously discussed voting machine insecurities, it looks like the problems haven’t been fixed, and in some cases, it’s escalated. Voters in states like West Virginia and Tennessee have complained about voting machines “flipping” their votes, even after they were recalibrated as in the video above. Voters have been advised to avoid voting straight Republican or Democratic tickets, to avoid the likelihood of their votes being flipped. What if you actually do want to vote a straight ticket? Video the Vote is an organization that advises documenting as much of your voting process as possible. Other ways you can protect your vote include voting absentee so that a paper trail is available, and refusing to accept provisional ballots, which are often thrown out. After seeing videos of ROM swapping and finding out that the locks can be opened with hotel minibar keys, we’re waiting to see what’s going to fail this year… and voting absentee.
European researchers in the I-SWARM project are hard at work developing small, autonomous robots that can work together and communicate to perform different functions. They successfully built two types of robots: the I-SWARM, and the Jasmine robots. The I-SWARM robots are three millimeters in size, are powered by a solar cell, and move by vibration. The Jasmine robots are the size of two-Euro coins, have small wheels, and are powered by battery. These tiny robots have several advantages over their bulky predecessors, such as high redundancy, greater flexibility, and the ability to manage tough terrain. They could even be used to repair larger robots. They also come with distinct challenges. Because of their minuscule size, programming memory is necessarily limited, and the team had to come up with special algorithms to manage and control the machines. Though they haven’t been able to meet their goal of making a thousand of them, the researchers are hopeful and confident about their abilities to mass produce the robots cheaply.
[via io9]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgKSLxRPtu8]
For roughly $250, you too can have this sweet bit of gadgetry based off of the Arduino platform. It is open source, and has some pretty impressive specs. Sporting a rumble pack, lithium ion battery, OLED display, and space for expanson. You can buy the pieces pre assembled, or as a kit. If you get the kit, you’ll see that the controller board has been laid out so that you can solder your buttons and joystick in as either left handed or right handed. The only problem? No games yet.
