DIY Cardboard IPhone Dock

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While the iPhone 3G included several new features that its predecessor lacked, one thing it did not include was a dock. Instead of shelling out $30 to buy Apple’s iPhone 3G dock, [Roland] and the folks at Geeky-Gadgets.com decided to design their own cardboard iPhone dock. While this doesn’t include any fancy features like dock connectors or audio line-outs, it looks like a quick and budget friendly way to give your iPhone 3G a place to charge and sync.

Boxee On Apple TV 2.3 Firmware

We heard some fear mongering that Apple had released Apple TV firmware 2.3 to break Boxee and XBMC. It certainly was a side effect of the upgrade, but that doesn’t matter now since a new version of ATV USB Creator has been released to work with the new firmware. So, everything is essentially back to normal for the two media center programs.

IPhone Jailbreaks Updated For 2.2 Release

Working as quick as ever, the iphone-dev team have updated the PwnageTool and QuickPwn to work with the new iPhone 2.2 firmware update. The trouble with the new firmware is that it updates the baseband of the phone, which could potentially undo any progress made towards an iPhone 3G unlock in the future. If you don’t care about that, you can use QuickPwn to jailbreak your phone after the upgrade, so you can run any app you want. If a future unlock is important to you, use the PwnageTool to strip the baseband update out of the firmware update.

[photo: edans]

Iphone-dev Team 3G Soft Unlock Coming Soon

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The iphone-dev team has officially stated “all that remains is implementation“. They’ve developed all the pieces they need to perform a software unlock for the iPhone 3G, now it’s just a matter of putting them together in user friendly fashion. They’ve managed to run unsigned code on the baseband, developed custom AT tools, and are now showing injection of a background task. They will combine all of these techniques to override the carrier lock baseband code. As usual, they warn against performing any official firmware updates to the phone.

Mac Pro Ultra Mini

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[Matthew] sent in this slick project where he made a Mac pro Ultra Mini. He received a MacBook that had been killed by water. He took it apart, re-soldered some connections and was able to get enough of it working to be a decent multimedia machine for his tv. To make it look nicer, he found an external drive case that looks like a tiny Mac Pro. After a little bit of grinding, cutting, and zip tying he managed to get all the pieces inside the case.  We’re always happy to see hardware salvaged, and  to see it transformed to a fantastic looking useful machine is a bonus. Good job [Matthew].

Install OSX On The HP TouchSmart

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[Aaron Nelson] of Hijinks Inc. wrote up how he installed OSX on his HP TouchSmart IQ507. It looks and works like you would expect, save for a few things. The touchscreen works, but the calibration is so far off it’s useless. The most important things, like ethernet and the memory card reader, work fine. [Nelson]’s biggest frustration is that he has to disable the on board audio every time he logs in, so that the keyboard and mouse will be recognized. He is working on improvements, and would love to hear any suggestions you have.

INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY


As you can plainly see, we’re embracing International Caps Lock Day with full gusto. Go ahead, try it out in the comments. Caps lock is the cruise control for cool. Surprisingly, there are quite a few full time haters of the key running campaigns: CAPSoff and anticAPSLOCK actually united to form CAPSoff.org to further development of a caps lock free keyboard.

Once you’re tired of yelling at people online (like that’ll happen), you might attempt to do something useful with the key. In OSX, you can remap the caps lock key in System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Modifier Keys. You can make it an extra Command, Control, Option, or select No Action. If you want to map it to another key entirely, try a program like fKeys. You could map it to Esc to make Vim—THE BEST TEXT EDITOR EVER—easy to use. In Windows, try this handy guide from TechRepublic for remapping your keys.

If ease of use is not your goal, you could always make a random caps locker hardware dongle.

[photo: catcubed]