Jason Striegel
Blog Posts
Text-to-speech in PHP
--It's been a while since I've played with the open source Festival TTS software, and I'm pretty impressed with the quality of the speech output. Som...
Cross-browser rounded vector corners
--As a web developer, I've been patiently waiting for the designer community to finally decide that rounded corners and drop shadows are out of sty...
Beagle Board - ultra tiny, 2-Watt Linux system
--Hackszine pal Patti Schiendelman tipped me off to the Beagle Board, a spartan little embedded platform, perfect for all things hackable. It's bas...
Olympic proxy - how to watch location restricted content
--It sounds like I'm not the only one bummed out about the NBC/Microsoft/Silverlight version of the olympics. Hackszine reader No Dust writes: How...
Use iPhone version of Google Reader on your Mac
--I'm fond of iPhone-specific versions of web sites; they usually have just the minimal set of features you need and are very easy to use. Adam Daro...
Free airport WiFi
--Most solutions for getting around the captive portals used in $7 airport wireless services involve sniffing the network and spoofing authenticated ...
iPhone screen capture
--With the new 2.0 firmware, you can take a screen capture using an easy key combo. Just hold down the home button and press the power button briefly...
Wii DVD player
--Team Twiizers is at it again, releasing a Wii port of the MPlayer media player. If you've already added the homebrew channel, you just need to do...
Korg Kaossilator 4-bar loop hack
--I apologize if this is a bit of a niche hack, but I've had my eye on Korg's little pocket synthesizer and then David Battino showed off some impr...
HOWTO - Protect GMail from session snatching
--By default, Google Mail sets a session cookie that doesn't have the secure flag, meaning that if you log in to GMail, leave, and later return...
10 Google Apps Tips
--1. Create special email addresses to better filter your mail This one's an oldie but goodie. If you're using Gmail, you can append "+some...
Super Mario World and quantum physics
--You may recall a post last month about Kaizo Mario, the ridiculously cruel fan-made Super Mario World level. Hackszine reader Guy Russell sent us...
HOWTO fly in the US without a wallet
--One week ago, Sherri Davidoff dropped her wallet into an envelope and shipped it out. Then she boarded a plane: After about a half hour, I got up ...
Run homebrew games on the PSP Slim
--Gizmodo has a detailed walkthrough that guides you through the process of getting homebrew apps running on the PSP Slim (or any PSP, really). The...
Edit binary files in Vi
--If you've ever wanted to examine or edit a binary file in your favorite text editor, there's an easy way to simulate a vi hex mode. To do this, y...
Dell Inspiron 1525 HackBook Pro
--Richard from EspressoReport put together a thorough tutorial that will get you up and running with OS X Leopard on a Dell Inspiron. Arguably, it'...
Ken Schwaber on Scrum
--Scrum is a collection of tools for agile software development and project management. It helps to focus small software development teams into de...
Memcached and high performance MySQL
--Memcached is a distributed object caching system that was originally developed to improve the performance of LiveJournal and has subsequently been ...
Farm Fountain - edible eco-sculpture
--Equal parts hydroponic garden, aquarium, and interactive art, the Farm Fountain is an experiment in self-contained, indoor ecosystem design creat...
NTFS Alternate Data Streams - hide files inside other files
--The NTFS file system has support for additional data, called Alternate Data Streams (ADS), to be attached to any file. Normally this is used by the...
iPhone SDK tutorial - simple RSS reader
--The Apple Blog recently posted a simple SDK tutorial for the iPhone that walks you through the steps for creating a little RSS reader. It's pretty ...
PocketMod and Mapufacture: the anti-iPhone
--Here's a clever way to fold an 8.5x11 sheet of paper into a small book. The way it's folded, all of the book's 8 outward-facing pages are from th...
Shield your files with Reed-Solomon codes
--Thanassis Tsiodras wrote in about a utility for adding additional error correction redundancy to your backup data: The way storage quality has bee...
Photos of the Large Hadron Collider
--View of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment Tracker Outer Barrel (TOB) in the cleaning room. The CMS is one of two general-purpose LHC exp...
Tether your iPhone 3G
--Your iPhone can connect you to the web from just about anywhere, but sometimes browsing on a tiny screen isn't enough. With jailbroken 3G and some ...
LEGO NXT Rubik's Cube solver
--Hand Andersson's Tilted Twister is a LEGO robot that can solve a scrambled Rubik's Cube in about 6 minutes. I've seen LEGO cube solvers before, b...
Magnetic stripe card spoofer
--We posted David Cranor's Arduino card reader the other day, and today he wrote in with an even better magstripe hack: a way to simulate a card sw...
Citizen Engineer 01 - SIM card and payphone hacks
--Ladyada and PT have kicked off the first episode of their Citizen Engineer video series in style. This episode explores GSM SIM card technolo...
Film canister flash diffuser
--When you take pictures with the built-in flash on your digital camera, it's common to get a washed-out, deer-in-headlights result from your subje...
Origami Wall-E
--Click To Play Brian Chan figured out how to make this origami Wall-E from a single uncut s...
Decoding magstrip cards with Arduino
--Instructables user powerpants created a quick and dirty card reader interface with an Arduino. The Arduino decodes the data from the swiped card ...
Binary Arduino clock
--Check out Daniel Andrade's binary LED clock built using the Arduino. It's well thought out, including controls for setting the time and hiber...
Buzz Kill - stopping iPhone GSM speaker noise
--Every GSM cellphone user is familiar with the annoying Bzzzhtzttt noises that tend to emanate from random electronics anywhere you take your devi...
Improve Linux laptop performance with Ramlog
--One of the most power-hungry components in a traditional laptop is its hard disk, and time between charges can be greatly improved by keeping the d...
Asterisk File Transfer Protocol
--Cory Menscher writes: As part of the NYU ITP "5in5" event this week, I created the Asterisk File Transfer Protocol. Using the CSound audio progra...
DJBDNS, DNS exploits, Bernstein, Schneier, and security by design
--If you haven't been living under a rock, you've probably heard of the DNS vulnerability that Dan Kaminsky announced about a half year ago. The plan...
Web application hotkeys with Javascript
--It's unfortunate, but there are only a few sites that have done a good job of enhancing the user experience with hotkey support. In searching for t...
Cyber Security Awareness Week
--Dan Guido from the Information Systems and Internet Security Lab at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU wrote in about the Institute's 5th annual Cy...
MySQL performance tuning
--Jay Pipes, MySQL employee and co-author Pro MySQL, gave a great presentation to Google employees which covers a number of techniques for tuning ...
Peggy LED lightboard
--MAKE's Collin Cunningham really impressed me with this short film "A Date With Peggy," a story of an overworked hacker finding relaxation th...
Find and Grep 101
--Find and Grep are perhaps the most used command line tools for the Linux user or administrator. Terse but powerful, these two commands will allow y...
Cruel Super Mario World hack
--Kaizo Mario is a homebrew level for Super Mario World that's equal parts evil and genius. My tolerance for frustration isn't nearly high enough t...
Reverse autocomplete
--Traditional autocomplete is such a powerful tool that it's managed to work its way into most desktop and a significant number of web applications. ...
Mapstraction - map abstraction API for Javascript
--Mapstraction is an abstracted Javascript mapping API that can make use of Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo Maps and Mapquest. Instead...
Maglite LASER burnination
--Desertfoxx sent us a tip to a classic KipKay howto video. It's pretty easy to swap out the diode in a laser pointer or similar laser housing with...
3D Studio Max motion capture with a Wii Nunchuck
--By passing Nunchuck data to a PC via an Arduino, Melka figured out a way to convert the accelerometer output into a MIDI stream that can be read ...
PlaceSpotting - Google Maps geo quiz
--Martin Fussen tipped us off to PlaceSpotting, a user-contributed geo quiz map mashup. The idea is to create puzzles for your friends to solve by ...
KidWash sprinkler toy
--Just because it's hot doesn't mean the kids have to stay indoors in the A/C. There are a number of worthwhile summer projects, but the KidWash lo...
Crawling AJAX
--Traditionally, a web spider system is tasked with connecting to a server, pulling down the HTML document, scanning the document for anchor links to...
Direct video manipulation interface
--Direct manipulation of video is one of the more uncanny HCI concepts I've ever seen. Instead of manipulating time with a traditional scrubber bar...
Make a record player out of LEGO
--A paper cup, a sewing needle, and a simple LEGO Mindstorms robot make for a nice little record player. This might be a fun project to work on wit...
Algorithm Ink and ContextFree.js - generative art with Javascript
--Currently Firefox, Safari and Opera have reasonable support for the Canvas HTML element. With IE the only major remaining laggard, there are a lo...
Swurl - scrapbook your digital life
--Ryan Sit sent in a link to Swurl, a Web 2.0 application/startup he's been working on that attempts to collect all of the artifacts of your digita...
Add-Art - turn the adverweb into an art gallery
--Add-Art is an ad blocking extension for Firefox, but it's a bit different from other ad blocking hacks. Instead of simply removing ads, leaving a...
Google Apps Hacks Slashdotted today!
--Yay! Philipp Lenssen's Google Apps Hacks just got reviewed on Slashdot by JR Peck, who had some kind words for the book: Well, this book is an ...
Objective-J and Cappuccino: Cocoa for the web
--There's a neat article over at Ars Technica that takes a look at 280 North's 3-person development team, their recent release of a keynote-like we...
JSVI - Javascript Vi for web forms
--There are so many WYSIWYG editors for html forms, it's about time someone put together a decent web version of the Vi editor. JSVI is written in ...
Arduino VGA demo
--Sebastian Tomczak has been playing around with controlling VGA output from an Arduino. Using Max/MSP to process audio and send data to the Arduin...
Flight instruments for an RC plane
--There are products available that will overlay flight data into a flight camera's video stream, but here's a clever and simple hack to do it on t...
Image Fulgurator - subverting other people's photos
--Berlin hacker Julius von Bismarck invented and patented the Image Fulgurator, a device so awesome that it can remotely insert images into other p...
Videos from past Shmoocons
--You may have dug the videos of past DEFCON conferences that we posted back in May, but there's a whole other infosec conference, Shmoocon, which is...
Algorithm Geeks
--If you've ever stumbled into a tricky coding or data representation problem, chances are good that someone has already figured it out. Usually the ...
How we made Google Apps Hacks
--When Philipp Lenssen started writing Google Apps Hacks, we made up our minds that we'd develop the book in Google Docs. A while back, Philipp wro...
Parallax scrolling in jQuery
--Wynn Netherland wrote a plugin for jQuery that makes it easy to add a slick Parallax effect to a web site. For anyone who missed video games of the...
Twilight Hack for Wii v3.3
--It's a good day for Wii homebrewers. The latest version of the Twilight Hack was released, fixing the problem Nintendo created with the Wii 3.3 fir...
Milkscanner - 3D scanning with LEGO and milk
--Friedrich Kirschner's Milkscanner is a clever method for scanning 3D objects using only a webcam, some milk, and a camera rig made out of LEGO. ...
Big Buck Bunny: open source animation
--Earlier this year, I wrote about project Apricot, an open source game that is currently under development using Blender and the Crystal Space gam...
Ugly your bike
--I've never been able to get comfortable with locking my bike to a rack and leaving it unattended. If you have a nice ride, no matter how nice of ...
Twilight trounced - don't update your Wii until further notice
--Nintendo's latest Wii update added a new feature that deletes any doctored Twilight-hack savegames that you have on your Wii. Seriously, Nintendo? ...
Controlling stepper motors
--I've become so familiar with using standard DC and servo motors for my electronics projects that I've been neglecting a resource that I seem to hav...
Home security with Twitter and a webcam
--Shantanu Goel created a cool home security tool using Twitter and a linux application called Motion, a program that will monitor a webcam looking f...
GasPriceWatch - find cheaper pumps
--I really don't drive that much, so when I fill up every month or two, the experience is normally accompanied by equal parts shock and foul langua...
Milk plastic
--Casein, a protein found in milk, can be easily precipitated from standard moo juice with vinegar and turned into a malleable homemade plastic. Co...
HOWTO - scrub private data from your iPhone
--Jonathan Zdziarski, author of iPhone Open Application Development, has been working on a forensics toolkit for law enforcement that allows the reco...
YBox2 - a networked set-top box
--The original YBox was a nifty little electronic gewgaw that made it easy to make a network appliance that displayed itself on a TV, all fit into ...
Free magazines for iPhone users (and fakers)
--If you have an iPhone, or the handy User Agent Switcher for Firefox, there are a couple of sites that offer free digital versions of several popu...
Time lapse movies using a graphing caclulator
--If you want to shoot time lapse movies with your DSLR, you need an intervalometer, a simple device which sends a signal to your camera to trigger...
Star Wars music played by a floppy drive
--I can't find any documentation for this, nor can I help posting it. I assume it's a hardware hack that manually controls the floppy drive's step...
Turn a Brita filter into a reusable activated carbon filter
--We filter our drinking water at home, though it's not because there's a risk of giardia or heavy metals in the tap water where we live. Personall...
Electronic embroidery
--I'm told that one of the most popular projects at the CRAFT table at Maker Faire is our friend Becky Stern's electronic embroidery. If you're int...
DIY Slingbox
--Using a standard DV cam, a Mac Mini, and the Quicktime Broadcaster utility, you can roll your own Slingbox-style TV streamer on the cheap. David ...
Use video RAM as swap in Linux
--If you are into the headless or console experience, there are a couple of ways to put your machine's graphics card to good use. Most new boxes come...
Google Earth has a Javascript API
--Google released a plug-in, currently for Windows browsers only, that allows you to embed the Earth application inside the browser. Existing Googl...
Wii Guitar Hero guitar as a real musical instrument
--I've been trying to get better at Guitar Hero and I'm bothered by the fact that you dump so much time into learning a basically useless combinati...
AVR tri-color LED controller
--A little while ago we posted about a fun LED scroller project made by Hackszine pal Kalanda. He wrote in today with an update about his latest ho...
Create a macro lens from an old 50mm
--Lambert Smith has a great howto for converting a standard 50mm lens from an old SLR camera into a dedicated macro lens for your digital camera. B...
SafeHistory: protect your privacy from visited link analysis
--A couple of days ago I wrote about the visited link javascript hack that lets any website operator query a user's browser history to determine if t...
Wii Balance Board hacks
--A few days ago, this video appeared with Matthieu Deru and Simon Bergweiler showing off a hack that allows them to surf Google Earth using a Wii....
Detect which sites a web user visits
--Aza Raskin's SocialHistory Javascript library allows you to do something incredibly cool: detect which sites your web users have visited on a per...
Conquer jet lag with a 16-hour fast
--There was an interview with Clifford Saper, a professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School, in last week's Science Friday. The...
Code Kata: exercise for the software developer
--It's no news that practice is the only path to being truly great at something. The art of software development is no different. The demand for prog...
Polaroid emulsion lift
--There's a technique called the Polaroid emulsion lift that allows you to transfer a Polaroid print to different materials, such as glass, rock, o...
Colors: Nintendo DS homebrew paint application
--Wired's how-to Wiki ran an article about installing homebrew apps on your Nintendo DS, describing how to install and use Colors, a really pro-loo...
Helmer render cluster: 186 Gflops in an IKEA cabinet
--I usually get all excited about tiny, noiseless, low-power PC hardware, but I have to admit that this 24 core, 186 Gflop render cluster built int...
Keywurl: keyword search for Safari
--Keywurl is a nifty little Safari plugin that adds simple keyword search to the address bar. Say you wanted to pull up the Wikipedia entry for hac...
Aluminum foil is a scissor sharpener
--I got sucked into reading one of those 15 amazing things you never knew about aluminum foil articles. One of the claims was that you could sharpen ...
Duff's Device: loop unrolling for interpreted languages
--In 1983, Tom Duff invented a really strange way to use the C language's switch and case statements for the in code "unrolling" optimization of larg...
Flying bike for Google Earth
--"Some guy who's never met Mike" wrote in to tell us about Mike's Flying Bike, a completely unconventional flight-sim interface created from a bicyc...
Make custom fonts with FontStruct
--Paul from the Compiler blog pointed out a cool flash application called FontStruct. It's basically a WYSIWYG editor for fonts, allowing you to ea...
Protect your luggage with a starter pistol
--I can't say how realistic this is, and I probably won't be using the advice myself, but Jon Udell wrote about a plausible strategy for subverting t...
Python pizza status
--Nothing goes better with some Python hacking than a little pizza. Nick Jensen couldn't wait for his pizza to arrive to begin hacking, so he spent...
Gmail notification cube
--Jamie Matthews created a nifty notification cube that glows when his Gmail inbox has a message. I was given a lovely glowing cube by the generou...
Debian/Ubuntu users: update your SSL keys and certs
--It was announced yesterday that sometime back in September 2006 a line of code was removed from the Debian distributed OpenSSL package. That one li...
drop.io - simple anonymous file sharing
--Sometimes I need to send files to people that are too large to attach to an email. Inevitably, the solution is to upload it to an ftp or web server...
Cross browser session data with Javascript
--By storing data in the window.name property, you can store data between page loads and across domains without ever sending a cookie to a server. Th...
A VAX in your Linux box
--Like many, my first introduction to the Internet came by way of a VAX/VMS server operated by the local University where I lived. A friend of a frie...
Reading EXIF data from images in Javascript
--Jacob Seidelin figured out a way to obtain EXIF data from images in Javascript, allowing AJAX applications to pull information about the make and...
Processing.js - visualization library for Javascript
--John Resig, of jQuery fame, released a port of the Processing visualization language for Javascript. Seriously, John is on fire: The first port...
DIY multi-touch on OS X
--Bridger Maxwell has been blogging his progress on creating a homebrew multi-touch platform in OS X. Prior to this, there's been a lot of activity...
Radio controlled lawn mower
--It's finally starting to warm up where I live on the 45th parallel, which means it's just about lawn mowing season. It's not a chore I typically ...
Using the Canon Hacker's Development Kit
--Lifehacker's Adam Pash put together a nice overview for using CDHK, the firmware enhancement toolkit for consumer-grade Canon point and shoot cam...
Cornell University's student microcontroller projects - Spring08
--Another semester's worth of cool microcontroller projects has come to a close at Cornell University and Bruce Land sent us the results for the Sp...
Videos from past DEFCONs
--I wasn't able to make it to last years DEFCON hacker/security conference, and DEFCON 16 isn't until later this summer. As you can imagine, I've bee...
Update the hacker map
--When I created the "Hackers in Your Neighborhood" map last December, I wasn't sure what the response would be. I was really happy to see it end u...
HOWTO - embed fonts from a SWF into a Flex app
--I haven't done any coding in Flex yet, but I came across this howto today that illustrates how simple it is to pull in a Flash SWF that has an em...
Server-side Google Analytics
--Peter van der Graaf did a little analysis of the URLs that are generated by the Google Analytics Javascript API and put together a very useful tuto...
Remember before you forget, but no sooner.
--There's a fascinating article by Gary Wolf in this month's Wired titled "Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm...
Stop XSS attacks with SafeHTML
--If you allow user-contributed content in your site, you run into the problem of dealing with user supplied HTML in a safe manner. The most secure ...
Improving astronomical video using VirtualDub
--YouTube user kwakhed23 pushed out this video showing before and after imagery of the Moon. In the "before" part of the video, you can see the ef...
DIY 7x5 LED scroller
--Kalanda sent in this 7x5 dot matrix LED scroller based on the Attiny2313 AVR microcontroller. It looks like a fun little project, but the part I...
iPhone LoJack - location tracking for your iPhone
--Erica Sadun put together a great tool for iPhone users who'd like to keep tabs on their iPhone's location. Instead of GPS tracking, a small binary ...
Simple bike computer from scratch
--Here's an excellent tutorial that'll show you how to build and program a bike computer using a PIC and a homemade PCB, all from scratch using fre...
Open GPS Tracker
--Now this looks like fun: The Open GPS Tracker is a small device which plugs into a $20 prepaid mobile phone to make a GPS tracker. The Tracker r...
Scriptographer - Javascript for Illustrator
--My friend Barrett sent along a link today to an Illustrator scripting plugin called Scriptographer. I'm sort of a slouch at Illustrator, so I had...
Encoding JPEGs client-side in AS3
--I've been doing a bunch of Flash Actionscript 3 development lately at work, and one of my favorite features with the new drawing API is the ease an...
Post your Earth Day hacks
--In celebration of my favorite planet, I'd like to open the comments up to any and all Earth Day hacks, links and activities. Think of it as an op...
64HDD - PC hard drive for your Commodore 64
--I've been searching for a way to resurrect my old C64 in all its glory, so I can someday try to introduce my son to programming. The two problems...
Manipulating Mac keyboard LEDs through software
--Amit Singh, the Google Mac Team hacker who taught us all how to use the Mac motion sensor as a human interface device and manipulate the keyboard b...
Tresling - arm wrestling game controller
--Meet Tresling, a newfangled competitive sport which combines the physical challenge of arm wrestling with the mental intensity of Tetris. This vi...
SwashBot - robot from a helicopter
--CrabFu's latest project, the SwashBot, is a 3-legged radio controlled robot built from RC helicopter guts. The three servos that would normally ...
HOWTO - fix a broken NES
--If blowing on the Metroid cart and shimmying it carefully into the system isn't working for you anymore, don't start looking to replace your old ...
Turn an ATX power supply into a lab PSU
--With a couple hours of work, it's pretty simple to pull the power supply from an old PC relic and turn it into a pretty decent bench system for p...
Second Life on an Apple II
--InexorableTash wrote an Apple II program in assembly that receives streaming video from a Windows PC over a 115kbps serial connection. Why? So hi...
Nice overview of the YouTube API
--I caught this self-referential tutorial on YouTube today which walks you through the basics of the YouTube API. It appears to be quite simple to ...
Javascript Super Mario
--CupBoy from the Nihilogic blog wrote a Javascript Super Mario engine which compresses down to just 14K. This includes all of the audio and sprite...
Automatic outbound link analytics with jQuery
--I had the challenge of adding Google Analytics tracking code to all the outbound links on a site I've been working on. There are hundreds of these...
Silence your hard drive
--For a buck's worth of materials, you can quiet your PC by damping your hard disk's vibration: As the pictures show, the drive is essentially sus...
Air on the EeePC
--There's a good post on the O'Reilly Rich Internet Application blog about running Air under Linux on the EeePC: Adobe recently released the first...
Relational database using jQuery and HTML tables
--Here's a novel use for the HTML <TABLE> tag: storing client side database tables. Nick Kallen came up with a slick hack that uses the jQuery ...
Javascript marker clustering for Google Maps
--Everyone who works with large data sets in Google Maps has come across the problem of displaying a bunch of markers in a small area. Not just an ...
Windows Mobile del.icio.us plugin
--If you're a del.icio.us power user and you use Windows Mobile, you've probably missed the del.icio.us plugin that's available in desktop browsers...
HOWTO - Encode any string into a trigonometric function
--Following Poromenos' nifty "Hello World!" function, Jan Krueger posted a great explanation for why it works along with a general method for produci...
Add keystroke user verification to Gnome
--Nathan Harrington amended the GNOME Desktop Manager to include keystroke dynamics in the user verification process. When the user enters their us...
Practical fluid mechanics
--Mick West from Cowboy Programming posted a two part series to his blog titled Practical Fluid Dynamics. Originally written for Game Developer Mag...
Poromenos' hello world curve
--Take a peek at this curve. If you take the rounded y value for every integer x from 0 through 11, you'll have yourself the ascii values for the s...
USB CapsLocker and Sun keyboard simulation
--Of all the April Fools pranks that I came across today, the Stealth USB CapsLocker was my favorite. The tiny AVR-driven USB device sends random c...
Robosapien has a coil gun
--This custom coil gun for V2 robosapiens is outstanding. The video was posted to youtube over a year ago, but I just noticed it now, so let's all ...
Faster Windows shutdown
--It pretty typical for Windows to take a minute or two to shutdown. Most of this wait is due to the OS being extra patient, waiting for all of you...
Assign USB drives to a folder
--When a drive is mounted in Windows, it's normally assigned the next available drive letter, and using the disk management tool, you can force a dis...
Little drummer bot
--Yellow Drum Machine is a tiny musical robot who's sole purpose in simulife is to motor around looking for suitable surfaces to drum a beat on. ...
CSS ad blocking for Firefox and Safari
--Using Firefox's CSS-based chrome feature or Safari's advanced stylesheet preferences and a little clever CSS coding, you can disable most banner ad...
Design Coding: web standards rap
--Next time you're trying to explain the importance of web standards in modern web design and development, just let this video do the talking for y...
Shredz64: Guitar Hero for C64
--Toni Westbrook authored a new C64 game called Shredz64, bringing the best game of all time to the best computing platform of all time: You can...
BATMAN: adhoc mesh routing
--BATMAN (Better Approach To Mobile Ad-hoc Networking) is a routing protocol designed for multi-hop ad-hoc mesh networks. When you run BATMAN on ro...
iNoteBook: repurpose an old laptop
--It seems like I end up updating my laptop every couple of years, but as cool as new hardware is, sometimes the challenge of finding a new use for...
Safari single window mode
--Dennis Stevense posted a great little Terminal hack which enables single window browsing for the latest version of Safari. If you're running 3.1 yo...
Run Safari in Ubuntu
--The Ubuntu Unleashed blog has a simple guide for getting Safari to run in Ubuntu. You basically install the Windows version of Safari under WINE,...
Easter egg anemometer
--Here's something fun to do with the kids tomorrow after they've finished emptying those big plastic eggs of jelly beans and malted milk balls. T...
Easiest cross-browser CSS min-height
--Enforcing a minimum height for block elements in HTML is one of those few CSS tricks that you can't live without. There are still enough folks usi...
Visualization API for Google Docs
--This looks really useful. Google recently released an API for using Gadgets and visualizations inside of (or pulling from) the Google Docs spread...
From Nand to Tetris in 12 Steps
--Shimon Schocken gave a really interesting Google Tech Talk titled From Nand to Tetris in 12 Steps. In the video, he describes a course where stud...
Paper cameras - old and new
--In 1970's Communist Czechoslovakia, the state-run magazine ABCs for Young Technicians and Natural Scientists published a cut-out paper camera cal...
CryoPID: hibernation for Linux processes
--We're all familiar with the hibernate/deep-sleep features that are typical on your standard laptop. In this mode, the entire contents of RAM are wr...
Art Bots 2008
--The fifth international ArtBots exhibit is being held on September 19-21 in Dublin Ireland. Whether you're interested in creating a robotic work ...
HOWTO: Fast SMT soldering
--I've only had to solder a couple of SMT chips, and though my attempts have worked out for me, it's always been a combination of frustration and f...
Wii homebrew now works from internal SD Card
--It looks like the 0.1alpha3 release of the Wii Twilight Hack now works with the internal SD slot. No USBGecko or other additional hardware needed...
Arduino Etch-A-Scetch clock
--Check out Angela Yuan's Etch-A-Scetch Clock. An Arduino powers a few stepper motors that clear the screen once a minute and then draw the curren...
CNC hologram
--I posted earlier this week about abrasion holography, a hologram technique that uses a network of simple arc shaped scratches to encode a visible...
N64 emulation: better than the real thing
--Racketboy has a great article showing off some of the capabilities of the modern N64 emulator. If your machine is fast enough, most of the availa...
SketchUp has a Ruby API
--I guess it's been available for a few months, but I just noticed that there's a Ruby API for Google SketchUp. Looks like a cool tool for extendin...
Command line Twitter
--You can easily update your Twitter status from the command line using cURL. The Tech-Recipes blog posted this handy command line hack: With cURL i...
DIY hand-drawn holograms
--Typically the creation of a hologram involves lasers and various other expensive equipment and materials. William J. Beaty figured out a low-tech...
Run Linux apps in Windows with andLinux
--andLinux is a Ubuntu distribution that used the coLinux kernel, a Windows port of the Linux kernel which allows andLinux to run natively inside W...
Microsoft Excel 3D engine
--Peter Rakos wrote an article for Gamasutra today which demonstrates how to hack yourself a simple 3D engine by subverting an Excel worksheet. It'...
Neighborhood crime fighting robot
--Someone in Atlanta created what appears to be a homemade Dalek to help deal with streetcorner criminal activity: Rufus Terrill has had it with t...
Ram dump over Firewire
--Unlike USB2, the Firewire spec allows devices to have full DMA access. By impersonating the appropriate device, a PC can essentially obtain full ...
View YouTube in high-res
--YouTube has been testing higher bitrate encodings of it videos, which you can see if you add a &fmt=8 or &fmt=16 to the video url. Histor...
Point polygon intersection in SQL
--update: As readers noted, it's not the 0 degrees longitude that's the problem, it's at 180 degrees where you could encounter issues. I've also e...
Recover data from RAM after a crash
--After Princeton's cold-boot encryption key recovery hack, I got to thinking about what other useful things might be lying around in memory. It's ol...
Single character commenting
--It's a pretty common practice to comment and uncomment big chunks of code during the development and testing of software. Here's an odd little hac...
Detecting forged photos algorithmically
--John Graham-Cumming posted an automated tool for detecting "Clone Tool" Photoshop forgeries. Photojournalism ethics issues (LInk, Link) aside, Jo...
Excel Hacks: Display a "please wait" message
--Here's Hack #111, Display a "Please Wait" Message, from David and Raina Hawley's Excel Hacks, 2nd Edition. Millions of users create and share Exc...
Wiindow curtain control
--Hackszine reader clickthegoogleads wrote to us about a set of Wiimote controlled curtains: The curtain control system is an existing system from...
Excel Hacks: Display negative time values
--Here's Hack #87, Display Negative Time Values, from David and Raina Hawley's Excel Hacks, 2nd Edition. Millions of users create and share Excel s...
Wii Linux
--This is awesome news from the GameCube Linux Wiki: 24 Feb 2008: Long time, no see Although we haven't posted any news in the last 2 years, we h...
Excel Hacks: Highlight alternating rows and columns
--Here's Hack #21, Highlight Every Other Row or Column, from David and Raina Hawley's Excel Hacks, 2nd Edition. Millions of users create and share ...
Botanicalls Twitter: flora tweets
--With Monday finally wrapping up, it's time to start thinking about next weekend. Why not spend it Twitter-enabling your house plants? Botanicall...
Make a remote connections to Windows Home Server
--Windows Home Server may seem like an unusual piece of software, but it's worth playing around with if you are considering a home server for your ...
Excel Hacks: Reduce workbook bloat
--Here's Hack #15, Reduce Workbook Bloat, from David and Raina Hawley's Excel Hacks, 2nd Edition. Millions of users create and share Excel spreadsh...
LED security camera disruptor
--The German translation isn't perfect, but this site describes a privacy product that defeats security cameras. A simple IR LED array in a headban...
Remote file access through email
--Shantanu Goel put a proof-of-concept Outlook macro together that will send you files in response to a specially formatted email. The idea is that y...
Extracting encryption keys after a cold boot
--In this video, researchers at Princeton demonstrate the ability to lift encryption keys from RAM that has been powered off for a brief period of ...
Knoppix Hacks: Install Windows patches securely
--Here's Hack #94, Download Windows Patches Securely, from Kyle Rankin's Knoppix Hacks, 2nd Edition. Knoppix Hacks offers a collection of tips and ...
SIXAXIS hacks
--Hackszine reader IraqiGeek writes: I made an application that uses libusb-Win32 and PPJoy to map the Sony Sixaxis into a windows joystick with t...
Knoppix Hacks: Wipe a hard drive
--Here's Hack #59, Wipe a Hard Drive, from Kyle Rankin's Knoppix Hacks, 2nd Edition. Knoppix Hacks offers a collection of tips and techniques for u...
iPhone WebClip speed dial
--Nate True figured out a quick way to add speed dial icons to your iPhone 1.1.3 home screen: So the new iPhone 1.1.3 firmware allows you to put i...
Knoppix Hacks: Install multimedia codecs
--Here's Hack #39, Install Multimedia Codecs, from Kyle Rankin's Knoppix Hacks, 2nd Edition. Knoppix Hacks offers a collection of tips and techniqu...
One-handed Wii controller
--Ryan Culy designed a single-handed, combination Wiimote and Nunchuck (motechuck?), making Nunchuck-enabled Wii games accessible to a friend who i...
Knoppix Hacks: Rock out with Knoppix multimedia
--Here's Hack #18, Rock Out with Knoppix Multimedia, from Kyle Rankin's Knoppix Hacks, 2nd Edition. Knoppix Hacks offers a collection of tips and t...
Actionscript mapping APIs
--Yahoo recently released an official AS3 API for Yahoo! Maps, which provides another option for Flash-based GIS applications. This adds to Mapques...
360 degree video in Flash
--Quentin Lengelé put together a cool demo for a Flash application that uses the Papervision 3D library to pan around a 360 degree video while it's...
Vector MAME
--There's a special place reserved in my digital heart for the classic arcades like Tempest and Asteroids, and ironically it's because of the flawl...
Hack request: electronic cat door
--An anonymous reader requested a hack today to solve a particular kind of kitty problem. Specifically, the reader wants to know if there's a way t...
Nifty Corners: roundtangles made simple
--Since the border-radius CSS parameter has been too slow in coming and rounded corners don't seem to be going out of style any time soon, everyone...
Apartment-friendly bike rack
--It's hard to find a good place to store your bikes when you're an apartment dweller. Here's a nice looking bike rack made from a few cheap Ikea s...
What's your poison?
--Robert Bruce Thompson, author of books on everything from PC Hardware to Astronomy, is working on a new book for Make: the Illustrated Guide to ...
Haiku running in QEMU
--The death of BeOS was an incredible shame. I sometimes wonder what modern operating systems, developer interfaces, and hardware hacking tools (re...
Wii Twilight Hack
--A demo of the first Wii ELF loader is now available for download, thanks to bushing, Segher, and tmbinc. It takes advantage of the Twilight Princ...
Bookmarks:
Darth Vader tags Wikipedia
Lord Vader has obviously been spending some time polishing his graffiti skills.
You can check the final artwork here: http://www.paintthatshitgold.com...
YouTube's April Fools User Count
Since YouTube redirected all of it's promoted homepage videos and RickRoll'D its entire homepage-viewing user base, we can get a bit of a glimpse at the number of passive and active users who visit the homepage in a 24-hour period.
Based on previously released video view stats, it would also appear that over 95% of video views are from external referrers and embedded videos (as opposed to homepage browsing).
Robot snowblower that poops ice bricks
It's autonomous, GPS guided, has a complete snow-munching digestive tract, and poops ice bricks with a smile.
Radio Controlled Hamster Ball
Here's a novel robot locomotion concept:
"This was created as a proto-type for the Swarm Burning Man Project. It consists of an 11" hamster ball from the pet store, a Tamiya worm gear ?power unit, and standard R/C radio, servo and speed controller."
Art Is A Gift - make a digital Qee
I wanted to share a site with you folks that I've been working on with the dev team at Colle+McVoy this last month.
As part of a project for Free Arts Minnesota, we put together a little web toy that allows you to make your own digital Qee and share it with the world.
What's a Qee? They are cute little vinyl toys. They come blank-white, and you get to be the designer and paint them any way you like. The digital version lets you experiment a little more with your design skills and you can fire the little dudes off to your friends.
It's pretty fun. Give it a shot and let me know what you think.
Top 10 Ugly Fish
This stuff is straight out of a sci-fi nightmare.
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Rich Gibson friend |
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Andrew Lockhart (mutual) friend |
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Mark Frauenfelder friend |
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Natalie Zee Drieu (mutual) friend |
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bre (mutual) friend |
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Shawn Connally (mutual) friend |
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Brian Jepson (mutual) friend |
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James Powderly friend |
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Dale Dougherty friend |
