Working With High Quality YouTube Videos

November 13, 2008 by Kimberly Lau 22 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZTJbsUcdeU&fmt=18]

[Kottke] posted advice for watching and sharing high quality YouTube videos. While it’s not HD quality, it’s much, much better than the normal, fuzzy quality you get on most videos. This hack has been available for some time, but it hasn’t been documented very well until now. When you’re logged in, you can just set the default to “Always play higher-quality video when it’s available”. When you’re linking to a video, add &fmt=18 to the YouTube URL. This also works when you’re embedding the link in WordPress. If you’re not in WordPress, then tack &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 onto each URL in the embeddable code. It’s pretty simple, and makes wasting your day at work much more enjoyable.

Impressioning At LockCon

November 10, 2008 by Eliot 5 Comments

impressioning

[Steffen Wernéry] has published a video of the impressioning contest at LockCon. We learned about key impressioning at this year’s HOPE conference. You start the process by inserting a key blank into the lock. By turning the lock until it stops and then moving the key up and down you create marks on the blank’s face. Take a file to those marks to remove the extra material and then repeat the process. Once the pins are set properly, they’ll stop leaving marks on the blank. It takes a lot of skill to do this right, but you end up with a perfectly functional key. [Barry Wels] managed to win the competition in 5:30 with second place coming in at 6 minutes.

Asymmetric Gear Heart Sculpture

October 30, 2008 by Eliot 33 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70dKZjP4NOo]

Here’s a video of a mindbending piece of papercraft engineering. We’d love to see a 3D model for this heart to at least have a starting point when designing our own. The creator’s site is in Japanese though, so it’s hard to glean any insight into his process. Embedded below is a similar cube version. Continue reading “Asymmetric Gear Heart Sculpture” →

Smart Phone Hacking Roundup

October 26, 2008 by Eliot 11 Comments

[vimeo 2049219]

T-Mobile’s G1 was released last week and there has been at least one Android vulnerability announced already. The New York Times reported on research done by [Charlie Miller], who also helped find one of the first iPhone bugs, so we think the report is fairly credible. Last year, we saw him deliver a seminar on real world fuzzing at ToorCon 9. It covered exactly how they found the iPhone bug.

If you just want to use a G1 without service, you can activate it with any T-Mobile SIM card.

Above is Boing Boing Gadgets’ concise video review of Griffin AirCurve. It’s garbage. We first talked about it in our loaded horn post because it looked like something fun to redesign.

The iphone-dev team published a video today showing access to the iPhone’s baseband processor. They connect to the device over ssh and then use minicom to issue AT commands. They’re writing custom AT commands for full control.

LED Life And Charlieplexing

October 24, 2008 by Eliot 8 Comments

Yesterday, we featured [Andrew]’s orientation aware camera. We want to highlight another one of his projects: LED Life. It’s a 6×5 LED matrix playing Conway’s Game of Life. He used the low power MSP430 like our e-paper clock. The best part of the writeup is his explanation of how Charlieplexing works. Microcontroller GPIO pins generally have three possible states: output high, output low, and input. This combined with the directional nature LEDs and some creative wiring means you can run a large matrix of individually addressable LEDs with just a few IO pins. Instead of just flipping the IO pins on and off you change their assigned state. Have a look at [Andrew]’s site for some great illustrations of how the system works. A video of his LED Life board is embedded below. Continue reading “LED Life And Charlieplexing” →

Björk Teaches You About Electronics

October 20, 2008 by Eliot 89 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75WFTHpOw8Y]

As we often suspected, [Björk] is quite the technical mastermind. In the video above, she teaches you about the ins and outs of her television. We think she’s making a strong bid as the next person to join Prototype This! Her hacking philosophy is the same as ours: “You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.”

Commercial Self-balancing Unicycle

October 18, 2008 by Eliot 12 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-9mYCXNshQ&fmt=18]

Focus Design sent us a video of their self balancing unicycle (looks like they’re taking on Focus Features too). The electric machine moves at 8MPH and lasts 1.5hrs on a single charge. It only weighs 24.6lbs. They say that new riders only need about 2hrs. practice. They’re building ten units to start for $1500 each.

Electric unicycles are nothing new to our community. We’ve long been fans of [Trevor Blackwell]’s electric unicycle. [Trevor] spent several months learning how to ride a regular unicycle before he could properly debug the electric version. There are several other designs out there: The Einrand-Fahrzeug has a wide wheel to make balancing easier. The eniCycle includes a steering mechanism. The Uniquecycle has a brushless motor in hub for a compact design. We did a roundup back in July that covers these plus many other motorized unicycle concepts.