flickr

14 Articles

New Year Habits – What Do You Do For Data Storage?

January 20, 2020 by 109 Comments

2020 is a year of reflection and avoiding regret, and one of the biggest practices we all know we should do better is back up our data. Inevitably there will be a corruption or accident, and we mourn the loss of some valuable data and vow to never let it happen again, and then promptly forget about good data retention practices.

I believe life is about acquiring memories, so it makes sense to me to try to archive and store those memories so that I can reflect on them later, but data storage and management is a huge pain. There’s got to be a better way (cue black and white video of clumsy person throwing up arms in disgust).

Nice Cloud You Have There; Shame if Something Happened to It

The teens of the century saw a huge shift towards cloud storage. The advantages of instantly backing up files and using the cloud as the primary storage for all your devices is appealing. It’s now easier to transfer files via the cloud than with a cable. With Google Docs and WordPress we have our most important documents and writing stored as database blobs on someone else’s servers. Facebook and Google and Flickr record all of our memories as photo albums. Unlimited storage is common, and indexing is so good that we can find photos with a vague description of their contents.

These things are instantly accessible, but lack permanence. Gone are newspaper clippings and printed photos discovered in a shoebox. When we aren’t in control of those services, they can disappear without any warning. Even some big offerings have packed up shop, leaving people scrambling to back up data before the servers were shut down. Google Plus is closed, Yahoo  Groups is closed, MySpace lost all content created prior to 2016, GeoCities closed in 2009, and Ubuntu One closed in 2014. It’s safe to say that no online content is safe from deletion. It’s also safe to say that cloud storage is a difficult location from which to extract your data.

With the risk of data leaks and privacy violations occurring daily, it’s also safe to say that some of your files should probably not be stored in the cloud in the first place. So, how do we do it well, and how do we get in the habit of doing it regularly?

Continue reading “New Year Habits – What Do You Do For Data Storage?” →

Hackaday Links: December 20, 2015

December 20, 2015 by 16 Comments

If you don’t have a Raspberry Pi Zero right now, you’re not getting one for Christmas. Who would have thought a $5 Linux computer would have been popular, huh? If you’re looking for a new microcontroller platform you can actually buy, the Arduino / Genuino 101 is available in stores. This was released a few months ago, but it still looks pretty cool: DSP, BTLE, and a six-axis sensor.

If you don’t know [David], the Swede, you should. He’s the guy that launched a glider from a high altitude balloon and is one of the biggest advocates of tricopters. Now he bought an airplane wing for his front yard. It was an old Swedish air force transport aircraft being broken up for scrap. Simply awesome.

Chocolate chips. Now that the most obvious pun is out of the way, here’s how you make DIP8 cookie cutters.

[Barb] is over at the Crash Space hackerspace in LA, and she has a YouTube channel that goes over all her creations. This week, it’s a layered wood pendant constructed out of many layers of veneer. Take note of the 3M 77 spray glue used for the lamination and the super glue used as a clear, hard finish.

Star Wars was released and we have a few people digging through the repertoire to see what [John Williams] lifted for the new movie. Here’s musical Tesla coils playing the theme for the Force.

Flickr gives you a full gigabyte of storage, but only if you upload JPEGs, GIFs, and PNGs. That doesn’t prevent you from using Flickr as your own cloud storage.

We know two things about [Hans Fouche]: he lives in South Africa and he has a gigantic 3D printer. His latest creation is an acoustic guitar. It may not sound great, but that’s the quality of the recording. It may not play great, but he can fix that with some acetone vapor. It would be very interesting to see 3D printing used in a more traditional lutherie context; this printer could easily print molds and possibly even something to bend plywood tops.

Starting in 1990, [deater] would make a yearly Christmas-themed demo on his DOS box. You can really see the progression of technology starting with ANSI art trees written in BASIC, to an EGA graphical demo written with QBASIC to the last demo in 96 made with VGA, and SoundBlaster effects written in Turbo Pascal and asm.

Firesheep: Promoting Privacy In A Scary Way

October 25, 2010 by 50 Comments

Often, software hackers are the activists that push software giants towards updating vulnerable applications. In todays example, [Eric Butler] is pushing Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and more all at the same time. By creating a user script-kiddie friendly extension for Firefox, he has allowed just about anyone to sniff unsecured connections on public Wi-Fi access points and log into these unprotected accounts.

Right now the extension is available for Windows and Mac, with a Linux port coming soon. Temporarily, the best way for a user to avoid getting taken advantage of would be to not use these social networking sites on a public connection, or to implement a secure proxy for these connections that would keep your data safe. Hopefully these websites will have a quick rebuttal that allows for security without workarounds. With all of the bad press they are recieving, they certainly have incentive to.

Are there any software or security buffs out there? We would love to see someone port this to an iPhone or Android app that could check and log open Wi-Fi points. We’ll leave the foot work to the experts out there, but do be sure to give us a heads up if anyone manages to make it happen, okay?

Irregular Incurve Robotic Instrument

May 12, 2009 by 13 Comments

irregular_incurve

The Irregular Incurve is a robotic instrument built by [Xiaoyang Feng] as part of his ITP thesis work. It’s a MIDI instrument with an array of 12 strung bows mounted to a curved shower rod. The end of each bow has a tuning key. The strings are each picked using independently mounted arms. One servo controls the downward motion of the pick while the other controls the rotation of the shaft. A damper is also attached to each arm. The string vibrations are transferred to a spruce soundbox under the bridge. Below you can see a video of Gizmodo playing with it at the ITP show. Check out [Xiaoyang]’s Flickr set for images of the build process plus some early videos of the mechanism.

Continue reading “Irregular Incurve Robotic Instrument” →

Eye-Fi Teardown

February 1, 2009 by 44 Comments

eye-fi

[les robots] had a defective Eye-Fi card on his hands and when a replacement was sent, he was told to destroy the original. What better way to ‘destroy’ something than opening the case? The Eye-Fi is an SD card with a builtin WiFi radio so it can upload images while remaining in camera. One version uses Skyhook’s location service to geotag photos. You can see a few photos of the dismantled card on Flickr. The board is manufactured by Wintec. The wireless side is handled by Atheros’ ROCm, the same low power Radio-on-Chip module you would find in a mobile phone. The flash memory comes from Samsung and the antenna is along the back edge, where it has the best chance of getting signal.

DC Gearmotor Teardown

January 10, 2009 by 15 Comments

dcmotor

The RepRap project has made heavy use of the Solarbotics GM3 Gearmotor as part of their extruders. Unfortunately they’ve proven to be underpowered for the task and the plastic gears could cause future problems. [Zach] decided to investigate some other options. He bought a pile of motors from Kysan to try out. He posted a teardown of one of the motors on Flickr. He found it not only easy to disassemble, but the metal gears were also easy to put back together. Next up is testing it on the machine.