[Dancerman] sent us a couple pdfs covering the Navy’s research on railguns which might show up on new platforms like the DD(X): first is NRAC’s Electromagnetic Gun Technology Assessment, second is slides from the Annual Gun & Ammo Symposium which covers the problems encountered when scaling a system up for ship use.

I was pretty tired of railguns by the time someone sent in the obligatory Powelabs link. So, I read about Sam’s Subaru 2.5RS engine swap and watched the sandboarding videos instead.

[george] knows that these a pretty common, but his laptop picture frame looks pretty good. He added WiFi and Bluetooth adapters to the empty battery bay so that he could have remote access and control the frame with his phone.

[Douglas J. Hickok] used a solar powered yard light to illuminate his Jack-O-Lantern. It ends up looking like a hat.

[tio.chorizo] doesn’t want to pay for the Nano lanyard headphones so he modified his stock ones. He made a large loop and then used heat shrink tubing to hold it in place. Here is a Coral Cache of his photos.

[seth fogie] pointed us to airscanner’s page of iTunes DOS/Spoofing attacks with flash demos.

If your Folding@Home system is chugging away and your looking for another project you could try setting up some diskless clients. [Grendup]

With a little butchering you can make your own in car DVD player. [the_eye]

A completely useless 2.5cc gas-engined turntable

This Engadget post has links to commercial clothing that has integrated controls and power. Now someone just needs to do it for cheap.

Cool Tools featured a blackbox for your car. It plugs into your OBD-II port and records the signals coming from your ECU. If you are in an accident it will have the information from right before the impact.

Cinematical highlighted the documentary Project Grizzly. It’s the story of Troy Hurtubise who built a bear proof suit and is now claiming he can see through walls/cure cancer.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links” →

The EFF has broken the tracking code for the Xerox DocuColor. The DocuColor prints a faint 15×8 grid of yellow dots on every page. To see these dots you need a magnifying glass. You can also use a blue light to make the dots appear black. The EFF page has a built in application for decoding the dots which hide the time, date, and serial number of the printer. The EFF also maintains a list of printers which do or don’t have this “feature”.

Andrew “bunnie” Huang helped out a lot with this research. To speed up analysis of submitted printer samples he modified a scanner to use blue light. The scanner does a white balance calibration before each page scan so the blue lights need to be turned off during that period otherwise the scanner will compensate. bunnie also opened up his HP 2600N to determine where the watermark was implemented. Studying the boards he decided that most color laser printers are probably using Canon engine boards. By coercing one manufacturer the government was able to get watermarking into a majority of the laser printers sold.

[via BoingBoing]

Continue reading “EFF Reverses Color Laser Printer Fingerprints” →

There was an Engadget post today about Motorola IMFrees that are free after rebate. From the IMFree hacking forum it appears that the project is still in pre-alpha.

Hack-A-Day isn’t hiring. Weblogs, Inc. is. They’re hiring for a new geek blog: “old skool geek as in comic book/sci-fi/D&D genre geeks”.

MAKE:Blog featured the Travel Tinker Trouble Kit that a lot of sites picked up. Julian has added a couple followup posts since then: one, two. I think a good companion to this would be the Altoids survival kit. [The Mark]

[Robogeek] continues to work on his LED bed design improvements.

[combustible] and his buddy Ken built this vodka filtering rig using four filter stages. The system is pressurized to 120psi. It took about 30 minutes to filter a 1.75 of vodka, but that was because the chilled vodka froze the latent water in the filters.

[JaSon] said that security took away their office’s “unapproved appliances” i.e. microwaves, toasters, etc. He’s looking for some rack mount projects that make these items look more official. Probably something a little more discrete than the 3U wine rack [jesse] found.

[Paul Stamatiou] has posted “Part 3: Azureus Anonymity” or “How to abuse the Tor network” DO NOT DO THIS Read the comments for suggestions that don’t involve hoarding bandwidth used to protect peoples lives.

[laughing man] didn’t like the low volume of his PSP headphones so he removed the resistors.

For those who hate traveling outside you could build a Surroundings Defense System. [Jon]

[Ian Nott] made an iPod video foldy to help people cope while waiting for delivery.

This is how I roll Darn this t-shirt addiction [via Waxy] UPDATE: I just saw BoingBoing’s post about someone hooking up their PS2 controller to an oscillating fan to complete the 10^6 rose level on Katamari. Go look at the screen shots so you don’t have to do it yourself.

The tip line

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It has only been a month since [BillyTheImpaler] posted his Folding@Home How-to and the Hack-A-Day team has already completed 1,000,000 points. Great job team!

Continue reading “Hack-A-Day Completes 10^6 Points” →

With the AOL deal I’ve been hearing a lot of “remember Winamp…” Waxy had the Justin Frankel link I needed.

It has been less than a week since the coupon I used to buy my monitor expired; now you can get a 24″ Dell for $780. Hmm

Credit goes to Josh Smith for noticing that something fishy was going on. It’s true. We were not part of the AOL purchase deal of Weblogs, Inc. If you look around, you’ll see that the Weblogs, Inc. directory listings have been removed from the site. Hack-A-Day will continue as an independent entity

I usually don’t link to MAKE:Blog because I assume everyone is already reading it (you should). I just thought the GPS tracking link today deserved special attention.

We’ve been talking about “guerrilla drive-ins”. Dirk put together an FM transmitter kit this weekend that would probably work well. He’s also got a nice picture of why you shouldn’t keep your Replay-TV at a construction site.

[Spazz] put together a Hack-A-Day RSS Konfabulator widget.

[jeffers] pointed me to the Bluetooth car whispering article over on Autoblog. I had shrugged it off earlier in the day because I knew it was possible. I didn’t realize they had released the POC software on their site. This is another gem to come out of What The Hack. Here is the pdf of their slides and the torrent link for the video (370MB).

[TILT-MODE-ARMY] claims to have a working HTTP server on a PSP. They’re doing a stress test, but I’m not going to hot link it for fear of melting the little guy.

[Geoff] wrote to inform me that Weta Digital is expanding their render farm with 250 Dual Xenon blades.

The tip line

Continue reading “Hackaday Links” →