Hack A Day T-Shirt Contest Winner

Congratulations to [John Keppel] for his winning t-shirt design. He wins a Dash Express, an in-car navigation device with both cellular and WiFi data support. It’s running Linux on top of the Openmoko FreeRunner’s hardware platform; yes, [John], we do expect you to hack it. We’ll let all of you know when we plan on putting the shirt into production. Thank you to everyone that entered!

Crabfu Challenge Winners Announced

The Trossen Robotics Blog has announced the winners of the “Crabfu challenge”. The challenge, issued by [Crabfu] was to make a robot that was full of character. It didn’t have to have a purpose or be autonomous, it just had to be full of character.

The first place winner, pictured above, won us over when he “blinked” a few moments into his video. Strange how something so simple can add so much life. Continue reading “Crabfu Challenge Winners Announced”

Hack A Day Fail Contest Winner

We had a lot of entries for our Fail contest; there can only be one winner though. We liked [Gordon LaPlante]’s entry pictured above most of all. It’s big, it’s broken, and it’s black and white; that certainly sounds like us. [Gordon] wins $100 worth of No Starch Press merchandise.

There were plenty of other honorable entries. You can view them in the Hack a Day Flickr photo pool. We saw a couple themes emerge during the contest and have highlighted some of them after the break. Continue reading “Hack A Day Fail Contest Winner”

Hack A Day Fail Whale Contest

We’re back! There may be a bit of oddness for the next few days. Our Fail Whale contest is still running and we’ve received over 100 entries so far. Here’s how you can participate:

While we’re adding more hamsters to our server power plant we thought we’d hold a little art contest. Whenever Twitter goes down, they post the iconic Fail Whale. The Fail Whale has become so popular that it has spawned a dedicated blog and many many art projects: embroidery, tattoos, and laser cut models.

We want to see what you think Hack a Day failure looks like. Create an illustration, photo, sculpture, anything that you think embodies Hack a Day failing. Send your entries to hackaday.fail@gmail.com and add them to the Hack a Day photo pool. The prize is $100 for you to spend in the No Starch Press store. Entries are due 00:00PDT Saturday September 6th 2008.

[image: Bjonnh]

Io9’s Build A Lifeform Contest


There’s still time to enter io9’s Build a Lifeform contest. Synthetic biologists, get cracking on the design of that synthetic lifeform or BioBricks lifeform! The rules are pretty straightforward; you need to propose a lifeform design that would be scientifically viable. The BioBricks lifeform part of the contest requires that your design needs to not only be scientifically viable, you have to explain how you would create it in a lab, and you get extra points if you already have an organism. The deadline is August 25, 2008. You could win the opportunity to attend an all-expenses-paid trip to the Synthetic Biology Conference in Hong Kong or $1000 and a chance to get your creature drawn by a cool comic book artist.