I’m at Defcon in Vegas and I’ve already managed to give away 1 of 5 boxes of shirts in the space of 3 minutes. I guess writing “FREE” on the box worked. If you’re here and want to get a shirt either look for me or drop your contact info on the tip line and I’ll work something out (if you’re at Defcon). If you got a free t-shirt today, hopefully you’ll contribute to the tip line as well. We will have more shirts in the future (seriously don’t worry if you don’t or can’t get one of these), but if you’re here you might as well jump on the opportunity. There is a picture of me after the jump to help you identify me in the wild.

Continue reading “Defcon, Free Shirts” →

Reading [computerguru365]’s infrared security camera build you may wonder “Why did he build it like that?” Well, he was working with what he had. He disassembled a webcam and removed the IR filter (sound familiar?). He mounted it in a stripped power supply case with the zoom assembly pulled from an old camcorder. The zoom control was wired to the back of the box. The final addition was an IR array to the front. You could probably buy a better product off the shelf, but if you’ve already got the parts, why not

It has been a while since I’ve mentioned our unofficial Folding@home team; that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped crushing the competition. We recently completed 25 million points and are ranked 32nd in the world. Pretty good for a team that only really got rolling last October. That much processing power would rank us as #91 in the Top 500 Supercomputers list. To join the team or just to celebrate, head over to the unofficial forums or stop by #hackaday on EFnet.

[thanks Tired2]

Continue reading “Team Hack-A-Day Completes 25,000,000 Points” →

[RafkeP] from Divxstation has created this clever hack to clone the Philips Electronics Ambilight technology used in their flat-panels. Ambilight is an RGB backlight that changes color based on the on-screen image. It’s supposed to make the viewing experience more comfortable. The MoMoLight uses a directshow filter to calculate the average color on the top, left and right border of the screen. It sends this information to a microcontroller that does PWM control of three separate banks of red, green and blue cold-cathodes. LEDs could be used instead. Monitoring the top, left and right would be called Ambilight 3 according to Philips’s naming scheme, which doesn’t actually exist yet.

[thanks mathias vdb]

I admit it. Most the weekend I was making quips about the Segway polo guys like, “Those guys look like walking would do them some good, especially that one.” Well, Will and I finally put two and two together and realized that “that one” was Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. He is feared on the polo ground because he has got at least three backups with him and doesn’t mind breaking one.

Continue reading “The Woz Playing Segway Polo” →

There is a set of bike pedals attached to each seat. The chain on each one drives a sprocket attached to the chair’s pivot point. Spinning the pedals tilts the chair and the entire frame reacts by rotating. They only had one set of pedals attached, but it was more than enough to spin the wheel at a pretty good clip. It did look like some damping on the chair pivots would help, since the chairs would swing pretty wildly. I’m sure adding two more chairs would help as well.

A Cyclecide creation [thanks Sasha]

Continue reading “MF2006: Human Powered Ferris Wheel” →