May 15, 2007
"Ever since the remote control's co-inventor Robert Adler passed away [in March], I've wanted to own one of the first remote controls. After trolling through eBay every now and then, I finally have in my hands a piece of the history of the button. But there's a mystery: which piece?" Entertainingly written piece on the world's first remote controls. I totally enjoy the simplicity of the ultrasonic remote: "All these early remotes are purely mechanical. No batteries at all. When you push the button, a small hammer strikes an aluminum rod, triggering a sound above our hearing range that's picked up by the TV. Each rod is a different length, thus a different frequency, thus distinguishable by the TV." Brilliant.
Apple has updated its line of MacBook computers. "Apple today updated its MacBook consumer notebooks with faster Intel Core 2 Duo processors, 1GB of memory and larger hard drives in every model. The MacBook is just one-inch thin and features built-in 802.11n wireless networking for up to five times the performance and twice the range of 802.11g."
"After a long and controversial discussion with the project admins we've agreed on guidelines for creating a 3rd-party Haiku-based distribution. In brief, other distributions may not use the word 'Haiku' in their name and we will provide a 'Haiku Compatible' logo for distributions that comply to a short list of rules that ensure binary and source compatibility. Please read the detailed guidelines for further information."
SoftwareInReview reviews Windows Vista, and concludes: "I took down my Mandriva workstation and replaced it with my Vista test machine and tried to work normally for a day. I found it difficult to get good desktop software applications for affordable prices, I had trouble getting my Microsoft mouse to work properly, the unintuitive and strangely rearranged interface drove me crazy, and the system's poor performance was intolerable." Elsewhere, El Reg has more on the file deletion problems in Vista.
AMD says its badly needed quad-core desktop processors are on the way, and they'll arrive bearing a new name. Two quad-core chips will be available in the second half of the year, the Phenom FX and the Phenom X4, and a dual-core chip based on a similar design called the Phenom X2 will also appear by the end of the year.
"This week, Microsoft laid out the next chapter in their plans regarding patents and open source Linux software, by going public with the claim that Linux infringes on some 235 of their software patents. The first chapter in this story began back in November of last year, when Microsoft entered into a agreement with Novell. These events, in my opinion, form the most important dynamic today as to the future success of Linux. How will all of this affect open source software and Linux? What should the open source community do? And... What will Linspire do?"
Last friday, the KOffice team started their ODF meeting in Berlin. Many people showed up at the KDAB office, and spend their time discussing, designing, and hacking on KOffice. They came up with some new things.
May 14, 2007
Filed under: laser hacks
The laser community forums have a
nice primer on basic laser effects. [Steve] thought I'd really be interested in this sweet prototype
dual laser saber. It's a
custom piece that uses a
wicked laser pointer (You can use any laser, but those happen to be damn powerful) and a polycarbonate blade(tube/rod) to create the hallowed light saber effect. (Now I know what I want for christmas.) Mcmaster-carr carries polycarbonate rod and tube if you want to make your own,
Read |
Permalink |
Email this |
Linking Blogs |
Comments
IBM's Power6 push began this week with a tweak to AIX support. In a letter to customers, IBM vowed to support future updates to AIX 5.3 for an additional two years. This appears to be IBM's Power6 concession, since the vendor, according to our sources, will announce Power6 systems this month and ship them in the middle of the year but won't have AIX 5.4 available for months. Normally, IBM would like to have a new major release of AIX ready for its new processors and have customers upgrade accordingly. No such luck.
Linus Torvalds has announced the first release candidate for version 2.6.22 of the Linux kernel, noting that the changelog itself for this release is just too big to put on the mailing list. According to the kernel-meister himself: "The diffstat and shortlogs are way too big to fit under the kernel mailing list limits, and the changes are all over the place. Almost seven thousand files changed, and that's not double-counting the files that got moved around. Architecture updates, drivers, filesystems, networking, security, build scripts, reorganizations, cleanups... You name it, it's there."
"It's late, but it's finally here. This morning AMD will be formally announcing their long-awaited Radeon HD 2000 series, or perhaps better known as the ATI R600 GPU. The AMD Radeon HD 2000 series features DirectX 10.0 (well, for those that use Microsoft products), Avivo HD, a programmable tessellation unit, CrossFire support, and much more. This morning we have our technology preview of ATI/AMD's next generation GPUs along with what's in store for Linux and the R600 series support." Update: AnandTech has a 31-page review of the R600.
Here's some follow up pictures of the conference.
Pictured below is a SunRay "pseudo dumb terminal"/workstation I was writing about....
Best part of the conference was all of these bean bags spread out in specific areas of the conference. There were even video games, and movie alcoves if one got overwhelmed with all of the Java technology that was showcased!
Of course the ubiquitous Java/Sun sign-age found throughout the conference.
May 13, 2007
Filed under: misc hacks
Last year a friend of mine was kind enough to watch me jump out of a perfectly good airplane. While pondering that incredible adrinaline rush, I thought it was time for an altimeter hacking extra. (Don't answer your phone for at least 12 hours after the jump or you might accidentally tell your mom.... Even if you're 30 and in another state, you'll probably get yelled at.)
The
2004 KAP rig on this page caught my eye. It features a small dongle that logs altimeter data when the shutter is activated on the camera. Schematics are in
the pdf. The rest of the setups are pretty freakin' impressive too.
Of course, there's the classic model
rocket altimeter project. If you'd prefer to leave off the cost of a basic stamp, try the more recently updated
recording altimeter. It's got a nice low parts count.
If you want something a bit more versatile, check out this
RF transmitting altimeter. It's still in progress, but it's getting a thorough writeup as it progresses.
We've seen them before, but I'd be remiss not to mention a
GPS data logger. (I took my old garmin foretrex on my skydive, but didn't have a decent signal until I was out of the plane.
If someone finds a diy audible altimeter, let me know.
Permalink |
Email this |
Linking Blogs |
Comments
"Free software is great, and corporate America loves it. It's often high-quality stuff that can be downloaded free off the Internet and then copied at will. It's versatile - it can be customized to perform almost any large-scale computing task - and it's blessedly crash-resistant. A broad community of developers, from individuals to large companies like IBM, is constantly working to improve it and introduce new features. No wonder the business world has embraced it so enthusiastically: More than half the companies in the Fortune 500 are thought to be using the free operating system Linux in their data centers. But now there's a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it's being cast by Microsoft. The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft's patents."
AMD will soon deliver open graphics drivers, said Henri Richard just a few minutes ago, and the audience at the opening keynote of the Red Hat Summit broke into applause and cheers. Richard, AMD's executive vice president of sales and marketing, promised: "I'm here to commit to you that it's going to get done." He also promised that AMD is "going to be very proactive in changing way we interface with the Linux community".
Open source guru Alan Cox has voiced his support for the controversial version 3.0 of the GNU General Public Licence in an exclusive podcast interview with Computer Weekly. Cox was once regarded as the Linux number two behind Linus Torvalds because of his work maintaining the Linux kernel, and he is still a major force in the open source community. But whereas Torvalds has openly criticised GPL 3.0, and said he will not be signing up to the new licence, Cox is fully behind it.
"We now know more details about Red Hat's forthcoming Global Desktop, but there's still no download. In fact, the company doesn't plan to push this new Linux desktop online; instead, you're more likely to see it pre-installed on Intel's white box partners' PCs. Red Hat will be certifying Global Desktop for Intel's vPro PC architecture. The vPro is Intel's attempt to re-invent the business desktop."
Filed under: misc hacks
[Ryan] sent in his simple but effective keyless entry hack for his apartment. Many shared apartment buildings have doors that allow residents to buzz visitors inside. He interfaced a keyless entry remote with the entry button on his intercom system. Press the button and voila - open sesame. It's almost a head slapper because it's such a simple hack, but sometimes those are the best.
Read |
Permalink |
Email this |
Linking Blogs |
Comments
I'm attending ToorCon Seattle Beta this weekend. Today was a single track made up of 20 minute talks. ToorCon is really best in breed when it comes to hacker conferences. Highlights follow:
Beetle, from the Shmoo, opened the conference with WiFight Club. Of course, by me mentioning that, you're officially in WiFight Club. This will eventually become a competition that is summarized best with the phrase: "Faraday Cage Match". He mentioned interesting projects like GNU Radio and others. I really want to see where this goes. It looks like a lot of fun.
Rodney Thayer's talk on credit cards boiled down to this: everyone worries about internet security when doing online transactions, but that doesn't really matter since the credit card company security policies are garbage.
Matt Peterson presented on Web 2.0 pr0n. Using 25 encode machines, 3 ripping machines and 1 150 disk SCSI DVD jukebox they can process 200 DVDs in 24 hours... which is all I can safely say on that topic.
Quinn Norton's body hacking talk was surprisingly fascinating. I had known about her experience implanting rare earth magnets, but this talk was more about the societal issues. Like why are athletes allowed to get LASIK, but not use steroids.
RSnake showed off the Master Reconnaissance Tool aka Mr. T. It's a demo of how much info a site can pull using JavaScript. This could be used to automatically pick intelligent attack vectors or targeted marketing. You can download it here.
Toby Kohlenberg presented the KB6 project. It's goal is to create a vulnerability taxonomy so that it's easier to see when a new vuln actually makes an old vuln more vicious. Hopefully it'll be open sourced soon.
Dr. Raid talked about MySpace being used for botnet control. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find anything out of the ordinary with a simple search.
|)ruid patched Asterisk so that he could do VoIP fuzzing with it (and other packet manipulations).
Dan Kaminsky showed a lot of pretty pictures (more than usual). He was able to do live autocorrelation on an MP3 stream. It easily shows patterns in music... and coincidentally breaks audio captchas.
David Maynor and Robert Graham presented on their data seepage idea. It was met with mixed reactions. Mostly a "you're sniffing, so what?"
In the lightning round, Chris Abad ranted that Web 4.0 should have no idiot users; I'm not sure why he didn't just go for the ideal case: no users. Felix Domke's 5 minute talk about the Xbox 360 hack was the shining star in the bunch.
Permalink |
Email this |
Linking Blogs |
Comments
Techgage has taken a hard look at the latest release from Gentoo, particularly its installation process. Although there is a revamped installer, using it proved to be a less than perfect experience: "This installer does not function like the previous ones. Before, the installer would wait until you made changes to the last option before it began installing. Now, everything is installed along the way."
May 11, 2007
Filed under: misc hacks
I knew about this when it came out, but it never made it's way to Hack-A-Day. We've mentioned a computer controlled roaster
before, but
this one is far and away the best I've seen. [Jeffrey Pawlan] has been selling individual units to the coffee industry (and extreme coffee geeks) - with good reason. He modified an already sweet Hottop coffee roaster (~$500 US) to be completely computer controlled. He wrote a complete software interface that accounts for room temperature to create complex, repeatable roast profiles. More than anyone, I've lamented the lack of details on the system. It's a safe bet that he's using more than a few thermocouples with a multi-line A/D converter. Anyone feel like writing some open source coffee roaster software? Modifying
my current setup wouldn't be that difficult.
Read |
Permalink |
Email this |
Linking Blogs |
Comments
May 10, 2007
Filed under: misc hacks, peripherals hacks
Dive computers help divers keep an eye on bottom time and calculate nitrogen saturation during dives. Many of them, like the Suunto above have a built in provision for downloading dive data post dive. [
CIBDiving] figured out a way
to enable this missing feature on one of Suunto's cheaper computers. The Gekko has the same pins as the more expensive units, but Suunto's
download manager won't allow you to download the data. By using a simple software patch, [CIBDiving] tricked the software into pulling down the data.
You can buy a cable to pull down the data, or you can build your own
serial or
USB level shifting interface.
Read |
Permalink |
Email this |
Linking Blogs |
Comments
May 09, 2007
Hello from JavaOne. I'm not a Java zealot, but Sun Microsystems was kind enough to give me a full conference pass to their infamous java conference. Everyone is drinking the koolaid. I registered on a "SunRay"! Yes those over priced pseudo dumb terminals! I know it actually worked too! Anyways I'm in San Francisco again, and if any of you want to hang out I'm sure I can get away for an hour or two to grab some drinks or something.
Filed under: laser hacks, misc hacks
It's that time of year when [Bruce Land] sends in the latest batch of Cornell mcu final projects. There are 32 new projects this year - including a
model retina built from RGB LEDs and photo sensors. My favorite has to be
laser pong. Or maybe the
wearable air guitar. Damn, I can't make up my mind.
Read |
Permalink |
Email this |
Linking Blogs |
Comments
May 08, 2007
Filed under: misc hacks
[KLOZ] submitted his
final project from college. Rather than an expensive CCD camera, he used a set of colored
resistors LEDs and a light dependent resistor (I'm assuming he means a photo resistor) to determine the color of a product (m&ms). He used the carriage from an old HP inkjet, a custom cnc cut wheel to separate and deliver the m&ms and a Parallax propeller micro controller board to tie it all together. Now he can hog all the green ones for himself.
Update: Yes, I'm an idiot. I did mean colored LEDs. People who caught me will get an email - I've got something for ya.
Check out the sorting demo video after the break
Read |
Permalink |
Email this |
Linking Blogs |
Comments
May 07, 2007
Filed under: misc hacks
[
Zach Norman] built this electric bike on a Harley frame. I couldn't dig up much in the way of details, but the
flickr photo set looks good.
[Micheal Raines] built a
great looking electric chopper.
In the lightweight category, this hybrid (pedal/electric) bike uses li-poly batteries and a simple motor-tire drive to keep going. via [
hacknmod]
Early this morning [tnkgrl] sent in her
HSDPA mod for the OQO Model 2. Engadget beat me to it, but it's a great mod for anyone who visits outside of those handy EVDO areas but want the speed for their UMPC. Living in the middle of nowhere means that I'm stuck with RxTT.
[andrew] built a handy
parallel port A/D converter - so far he's got it logging temps. The parts count is pretty low, depending on an ADC, a 555 and some OP amps.
Permalink |
Email this |
Linking Blogs |
Comments
I know, no posts in a while. There's a good reason though: last night, at 10:32pm,
my wife gave birth to our beautiful baby son. He weighed 8lbs 13oz, and measured 20.5
inches. The name isn't "official" yet, but we are leaning strongly towards "Alexander
Lewis Olson". Needless to say, I'm just soaking it all in and enjoying fatherhood.
Once we are out of the hospital (we wanted a home birth, so long story), I'll write
up a longer post with our birth story. It was filled with all sorts of turns and changes,
but it ended well, so we are happy :).
And with that, I leave you with some pictures of our beautiful baby boy. Sorry about
the size of the pictures, but I'm a bit too pre-occupied to resize them right now
:).
