Cut from metal sheets, this computer case modded into a WALL-E robot (above) is one of the most bad ass gadget mods we've ever seen. A Russian hobbyist spent 18 days cutting and detailing each part of the lovable Pixar hero; he photographs the entire process step-by-step.

Perhaps one day we'll see a Mac modded into an Eve?

See Also:

• Mac Mod Adds LCD Screen Behind Apple Logo
• Electric Hub is Simplest Powerbike Mod Yet
• Vintage Radio Case Mod Painstakingly Assembled by Hand
• Home Made iMac-Mini Case Mod
• Stunningly Clever Rubik's Cube Mod
• Mac Modder Transforms Old PowerBook Into Sleek Desktop
• LEGO Mac Will Make Apple Geeks Salivate With Envy

Photo: Casemods.ru

Take a look at the video and consider that this might, depending upon where you live, be the way that your iPod gets charged. Sure, you might not be hooking the USB port directly to a steam-powered turbine, but down at your local power station, the folks may be using a somewhat larger turbine to provide your electricity.

The engine is a Jensen #75, from the family business Jensen Steam Engines, and the maker TWDunbar hooked this up to technic Lego via a rubber-band to generate electricity. The power then goes through a small circuit to turn it into a smooth, USB-friendly 5v DC.

It’s incredibly impractical, especially as this model of engine runs on purpose-made dry-fuel tablets. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t amazing, though, and you could make your own — if you want to spend $206 plus the cost of Lego and circuitry on an iPod charger, that is.

Steam 1 [YouTube]

Product page [Jensen]

After endless procrastination, Ben finally got started and completed the project in an astonishingly short week and a half. Inside the rather slick and beautifully retro box is an original C64 motherboard, a Gamecube power supply and a piece of hardware called a 1541-III, which tricks the C64 into seeing an SD card as a floppy drive.

You really need to check the video (below) to see the machine in action (despite the SD cards, the game load times are still tortuously long). The clip reminds us of something else, too — how the hell did we ever manage to use those awful Atari joysticks? I hated them the first time round, before my teenage years brought on incurable RSI.

Commodore 64 Original Hardware Laptop [Ben Heck]

See Also:

• Ben Heck's PS3 Laptop
• Apple ][ GS Laptop From Ben Heckendorn
• Ben Heckendorn Shows Off XBox 360 Laptop Mk II

Continue reading "Ben Heck Goes Back to the 1980s with Commodore 64 Laptop" »

This is what happens when Nintendo meets the street. Wiispray is a simple mixture of a Wii and Flash — simply shake until the virtual ball has done its mixing and start spraying some electronic graffiti.

Details are thin, but we know that the WiiSpray 2nd edition is a remix of the original 2007 project by Martin Lihs and Frank Matuse of the Bauhaus Universität in Weimar. It looks like the Wiimote itself has a modified control so you can exhaust your finger by pressing down the top of a virtual spray-can, but the coolest part, at least from this chair, is the virtual stencil for making your own instant Banksies. This looks like fantastic fun.

WiiSpray Teaser of Final Presentation [Wiispray via  ★]

Design blog Core77 put out a call for Business Card Hacks in its monthly "1 Hour Design Challenge". Only a few days later and back came this amazing piece of origami geekery, a simple earbud winder, complete with pocket in which to tuck the bud parts themselves. The whole thing is held together by the wound headphone cord.

Finally, another use for business cards! Up until now, the only thing they could be used for was to temporarily fix a wobbly restaurant table — the business card is almost the perfect tool for this. Of course, winding any kind of electrical cord is a bad idea, causing broken internal wires and fraying. That won’t stop the neat-freaks obsessively wrapping cables, though. With this hack, at least they can save the cash on pre-made winders and use it to buy some replacement ‘buds.

‘Inside Job’ Free iPhone Earbud Winder [Core77]

Business Card Submission Forum [Core77]

So, why not make your own? That’s what Manzin of the Digital Photography School forums did, and the result is above. Essentially free (if you raid the kitchen), the adapter is made of two plastic bowls, one big and one small. The gap between them is filled with aluminum foil and the flash is fired in from the side. You won’t get the efficiency of a dedicated adapter — that foil will eat some of the light — but for a quick and dirty projects it’s perfect. Just make sure you don’t use mom’s favorite Tupperware.

How to Make a DIY Ring Flash [Digital Photography School]

See Also:

• Ray Flash Ring Flash Adapter
• How To: DIY Ring Flash Made From a Styrofoam Cup
• Lomo Ring Flash: Cheap and Fun
• Twelve Strobe Rig Blots Out the Sun

It turns out that it’s possible to develop film in a mixture of instant coffee, washing soda and vitamin C. This is, to me, amazing. Here’s the recipe.

12 oz. water

5 teaspoons instant coffee crystals

3 1/2 teaspoons washing soda

1/2 teaspoon vitamin C powder

Dubbed cafenol (its a geeky photochem joke), the developer is used just like a regular developing solution, only you can make it by raiding the kitchen cupboard (apart from the instant coffee, of course. We know you all have French presses and espresso machines). You will still need a real fixer solution to deactivate the light sensitive materials, and you’ll need to take the same care in loading the film into a developing tank as you would if using regular ol’ Perceptol, but the results are surprisingly good.

Cafenol will turn any film into a black and white negative, similar in effect to cross processing (developing a slide film in color print film chemicals, for example), and you’ll still want to keep the extractor fan running. Despite the ingredients, this mixture is foul smelling. Photojojo:

Holy frijoles! How can things that smell like coffee, nothing, and nothing combine to smell like grim death?

Also, don’t drink it. One thing about this hack that isn’t surprising is that there is a Flickr group dedicated to cafenol photos. And it goes without saying that if you do try this at home, post your results to the Gadget Lab Flickr pool.

How to Develop Film Using Coffee and Vitamin C! Srsly! [Photojojo via Lifehacker]

Photo: Photojojo

Have you ever taken a look at a Super Nintendo console and pondered the toaster-like slot in the top? Or contemplated an actual toaster, wondering what would happen if you slotted in a game cartridge? Well, so did hacker richdaluz but, unlike all you lazy-bones readers, he did something about it. Behold! The Super Nintoaster.

The mod is a fully functioning Super Nintendo (although it has some glitches playing Super Mario World 2). Sadly it is no longer a fully functioning toaster, but tweaking the doneness control will dim and brighten the six glowing orange LEDs inside so you can pretend you are cooking.

The game carts slide into the toaster slots and, well, the whole thing is just amazing. I’m actually tempted to do this in reverse, turning an old SNES or NES into a real, working toaster. That might just be because I missed this morning’s breakfast, though, and my belly is currently rumbling like Bowser’s.

Project page [Stupidfingers via the Giz]

See Also:

• Catapult Toaster Makes Toast Of Old Fashioned Rivals
• CES 2008: Retro Console Clones Take Actual Cartridges
• Engine Block Customized To Resemble NES Joypad

Psystar's legal battle with Apple hasn't prevented it from releasing a high-end Mac clone this week.

Psystar has launched the Open(3), a desktop machine equipped with a 2.53GHz Core2Quad processor, 4GB of RAM, 1TB of storage and a Blu-ray burner. Of course, it ships loaded with Mac OS X Leopard.

That's some pretty bad ass hardware. The desktop starts at $600, and with maxed-out configurations it runs up to about $2,000. However, that's still less than a Mac Pro, which starts at $2,500.

Psystar, a Florida-based company, began selling Mac clones April 2008. Three months later, Apple filed a lawsuit alleging Psystar was committing copyright, trademark and shrink-wrap infringement.

Product page [Psystar via TUAW]

See Also:

• Mac Copycat Psystar Gets Ammo to Countersue Apple
• Apple Finally Sues Mac Copycat Psystar
• Psystar Tags Back Apple With Antitrust Suit
• Apple Demands That Psystar Recalls All Hackintoshes
• Psystar Offers Cloned OS X Servers
• Apple Cries Corporate Conspiracy Behind Psystar
• Psystar: Blu-Ray Hackintosh for Sale; MacBook Clones on the Way ...
• Hack of the Clones: Why Apple Can't Stop the Copies

Photo: Psystar

You crash your motorbike and lose a chunk of your finger. What do you do? If you’re Finnish nerd Jerry Jalava, you fashion a prosthetic finger from silicone and install a USB “thumb" drive inside.

That’s not all. Jerry has various operating systems installed on the 2GB drive. He just pops off his finger, jams his digit into a USB port and he can boot into Billix, CouchDBX or Ajatus. And version 2.0 is already in the works: “I’m planning to use the other prosthetic as a shell for the next version, which will have removable fingertip and RFID tag." says Jerry.

USB finger, more details [Protoblogger. Thanks, Annaliza!]

Photos: Jerry Jalava/Flickr

When I fed Steinar Birgisson’s iSight fisheye hack into Google Translate. there was bad news: “We are not yet able to translate from Icelandic into English."

Luckily, a picture really is worth a thousand words, and as Steinar chose to do lavishly illustrate his forum posting with step-by-step photos, we don’t need no steenkin one of them.

The ingredients: Apple’s iSight camera. This FireWire webcam seems to have disappeared for the Apple Store, but can still be had from Amazon for anywhere up to $500 (yes, $500). Any webcam should do, though, as long as it is similar in size to the Holga Auxiliary Fish Eye Lens ($80), an add-on for the Holga medium format camera from Lomo.

Take the iSight, slide a roll of insulating tape around the barrel and then slide the lens on top. The whole thing slots together as if designed that way. This is a guess (I don’t speak Icelandic, remember) but it seems likely that Steinar had these thing lying around and one day noticed how well they matched up.

The result is a super wide-angle webcam with the trademark curved distortion of a fisheye. Head to the page to see the results, carefully calibrated using a tape measure. And any Icelanders reading this should feel free to add translations in the comments. And one more thing -- putting any camera lens in front of your built-in webcam will give some interesting results. I tried it with a telephoto and my MacBook's iSight and it beat out the speceial FX in Photo Booth, to be sure.

iSight með FishEye linsu - myndir [Maclantic. Thanks, Steinar!]

Photo: Steinar Birgisson

See Also:

• How To Shoot Close-Up With Any Lens
• Make a Cheap Lens Case

Don’t worry, we’re not about to bring you yet another hackintosh with a glowing Apple logo. This mod is altogether smarter and more elegant. It’s a real MacBook with another display within the Apple.

Eddie Zarick was actually responsible for the MSI Wind with a glowing logo we showed you last month. Since then, he’s been busy opening up his black MacBook and wiring a second LCD behind the Apple. This is recognized as a proper secondary display by the Mac and can therefore show anything.

The video starts out with screen saver but quickly gets more spooky when Ed switches on the iSight camera. It looks like there is a hole in the case when he starts waving — albeit a reversing, reducing hole, but still. Then the iTunes visualizer fires up and we realize the whole point of this hack. It might be pointless, but it looks amazing. Way better, in fact, than a stupid Splashtop weather widget.

Apple Glowing Logo as a Secondary Display with LCD! [MacMod Forum. Thanks. Eddie!]

See Also:

• Hackintosh With Genuine Glowing Apple Logo
• Russians Mod iPhone to Make Apple Glow

Over at Make, Jason Striegel explains how to turn your DSLR into a pinhole camera using "only need a few things: black paper, aluminum foil, a rubber band, and tape. Really, that's it."

Apart from the camera itself, of course. The hack is about as simple as these things get -- remove the lens, block the hole in the body with a piece of black card (with a hole pre-bored in the center) and cover with foil. Use a pin to punch a tiny hole in this piece of foil. Hey, it's called a pinhole camera for a reason, OK?

That's almost it. If your camera can't take long exposures, set it to bulb (or "b") mode. This lets you hold the shutter release down to keep the shutter open. Striegel uses a ball of scrunched up foil and a rubber band to keep this in place.

Now, put the camera on a tripod or other steady base and take some pictures. You'll get dreamy images with almost infinite depth of field due to the small aperture. The aperture also means exposures in the minutes, not seconds, of fractions thereof.

Try it out, and be sure to post the results to the Gadget Lab Flickr Pool. I'll be making one this afternoon.

$0 digital pinhole camera [Make]

See Also:

• How To Make a Scanner Camera
• Turn a Flatbed Scanner Into a Giant Camera

You don't have to be a smoker to know the pain of yellowing hardware. Any beige box of a certain age starts to darken and stain like an Englishman's teeth, turning beautiful retro hardware into the equivalent of a filthy, leering uncle, something to hide, not flaunt.

The reason? Retards. The ABS used for these old machines was rendered flame-retardant with chemical treatments. These chemicals are the ones which cause this unsightly yellowing and until now the only fix was an equally ugly coat of paint.

Retr0bright to the rescue! In a twisting story that started with German boffins and English Amiga nerds, it was eventually discovered that bromine was the yellowing agent, and UV light didn't help either. The McGyver-esque answer is a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and a dash of commercial laundry booster "Oxy". Paint this on, stick the old computer out in the sun (or under a UV lamp) and several hours later you have a shiny white machine.

The folks at the Retr0bright project will sell you a gel, but if you actually own old hardware then its likely you're a tinkerer already, in which case you can make your own. Full instructions are on the Retr0bright wiki, but the short recipe is this: Take a weak (10%) solution of hydrogen peroxide, add a dash of Oxy, apply and leave in the sun for an afternoon. That's it.

Caution: Does not work on English teeth.

The “Retr0bright” Project [Retrobright via Lifehacker]

Chinese hackers have managed to reverse-engineer the iTunes Gift Certificate algorithm and are knocking out knock-off cards and selling them cheap. In China, a $200 equivalent card can be had for just $3.

In a tribute to China's healthy disregard for intellectual property (much like the policy in the US for the first 100 years of its life), these numbers are being traded on Taobao, the "Chinese Ebay". Buyers receive their codes via instant message, ready to be redeemed. Searching on the US Ebay site turns some codes up, too. According to Yahoo news, the going rate is around $40 for a $200 card.

Because the hackers appear to have discovered how to make genuine gift codes, the numbers are legitimate and cannot be distinguished from those blessed with Apple's magic wand. Good news for the dodgy buyers, but bad news for real, honest customers: it's entirely possible that the Chinese hackers could sell off a code that is already on a card in a store in the US, meaning the honest buyer will be left with an invalid certificate.

Not surprisingly, Apple is quiet on the matter. Expect to hear something when the company finds a fix. This could be tricky -- the code generating algorithms could be changed, but that would leave a bunch of honest buyers with dead cards.

Hacked: $200 iTunes Gift Card for Only $2.60 [Yahoo News]

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The creator of the TV-B-Gone, Mitch Altman, has turned his love of open-source electronic mayhem into a one-man business.

His website offers the basic TV-B-Gone, a $20 keychain device with a protruding LED that emits 140 different TV power-off codes, enabling it to shut down 98 percent of all televisions with the press of a single button, Altman says.

"The way I see it, it's only fair," Altman says of his infrared light-emitting device. "If a TV shines light at me, I'll shine a light at it. And if it stops shining light at me, I'll stop shining light at it."

He also sells a $20 TV-B-Gone kit for do-it-yourselfers who want to assemble the parts themselves, and a $50 TV-B-Gone Pro that looks a bit like a chunky iPhone and has a range of 100 meters.

"I used it in the hotel lobby last night," Altman says. "I was trying to get some work done and there were four TVs on, with no one watching them. I aimed it at the two in front of me and all four turned off, that's how powerful it is."

Altman's invention, covered by Wired.com in 2004, achieved notoriety last year, when writers from Gizmodo used it to turn off dozens of displays at a time in the TV-saturated booths of CES 2008.

Afterwards, Altman says, he made $24,000 in new sales. "I called those guys to thank them personally," he says.

But business is, it seems, just a means for Altman to keep doing what he loves most: Hacking electronics. In a workshop Monday on how to build things with microcontrollers here at the Emerging Technology conference, Altman explained the basics of electronics while standing in front of a table littered with blinking, pulsing, glowing, beeping and whirring devices.

Many of his hacks, including the first versions of the TV-B-Gone, were built using the MiniPOV3 kit by hardware hacker Ladyada. That kit lets you create ghostly messages with a bank of 8 blinking LEDs, by waving the LEDs back and forth in the air.

By making changes to the kit's circuitry, replacing the red LEDs with different colors and reprogramming the included microcontroller, Altman has made not only the TV-B-Gone, but also glowing lights that respond to hand gestures, an electronic "dog" that spins its tail in reaction to sunlight, a 3x3x3 cube of LEDs that displays abstract 3-dimensional patterns, and even a pair of glasses with embedded, flashing LEDs and a pair of headphones for getting your brain waves into a meditative state.

Altman is a fan of open-source hardware. The MiniPOV3 kit he uses is open source, and he recently released the schematics and code for his own projects as open source. Altman describes the decision to go open-source as a way of giving back to the hardware hacking community, which was already modifying and improving the TV-B-Gone.

"There are thousands of people who are incredibly intelligent and creative helping me, for free, and they love it," he says, describing the benefits of open source hardware.

He's also helped found a hacker space in San Francisco, Noisebridge, where hardware hackers (or those who would like to learn more about hardware and software) can gather to work on their projects.

"I make enough money to live the life I want to live," Altman says. "And I love this life."

Photo: Mitch Altman wears the $35 Brain Machine he designed. Photo by Dylan Tweney / Wired.com

The best, nerdiest and probably funniest cartoon from the stickman comic XKCD was the sandwich strip seen above. If you don't get it, then it doesn't matter. If you do get it, it is quite amazingly hilarious. Sadly, trying it out in real life won't work -- it's about as likely a transition from comic space into meat space as putting on a pair of glasses, re-parting your hair and expecting to be unrecognizable (we're looking at you, Kal-El).

Happily, maker extraordinaire Bre Pettis and his trusty sidekick Adam Cecchetti decided to fix this, and built the Sudo Make Me A Sandwich Robot. The robot consists of a toaster oven, and bread and cheese delivery devices, just like the mechanized screws you see in vending machines. The robot is, of course, hooked up to a computer running a Unix variant. Type "Make me a sandwich" into the command line and it throws an error message: "What? Make it yourself."

Type in "Sudo make me a sandwich", however, and the robot goes into action. Check it:

There seems to be something about the XKCD comics that inspires people to bring them to life. In fact, we fully expect somebody to hack Kindle 2 to display the legend "Don't Panic" upon startup.

Sudo Make Me A Sandwich Robot [Bre Pettis]

Sandwich [XKCD]

See Also:

• The Kindle's Dirty Secret
• The Love Mattress: Not What You Think
• New Devices Replace Passwords with Pictures

This is a fantastic idea: When your batteries go flat, pull them out and toss them into a sunny corner. A little while later, they’re charged. This is the promise of the SunCat solar powered batteries: “The batteries should just bask in the sun like a cat and left for a while, in a sunny window, they would slowly recharge.”

These batteries are actually hand made by Knut Karlsen. He scored some flexible solar panels from some “scientists” and simply wrapped them around some old NiMH cells, connecting them to the terminals. They actually work, but as Knut says a future version should have more electronics and some capacitors to keep the flow more even and efficient.

Still, we can’t help but think that all batteries should be made this way. We even have some ideas for a perpetual motion machine: Connect these batteries up to some flashlights and arrange them in a circle, pointed at each other. Hey presto! Infinitely renewable energy.

The SunCat Batteries - DIY prototypes [Bareknut via Oh Gizmo!]

This weekend, I decided to do something about it. There are plenty of tutorials on the web detailing intricate schemes for cable management, most of which involve drilling holes, installing wooden screens or other long-winded solutions. I’m lazy, and I’m also fussy about how things look, so I thought about the easiest (and cheapest) fix I could make. Read on to find out how, with some street scavenging and five minutes of easy work you can have a neat and tidy workspace.

Continue reading "How To: Five Minute DIY Desk Cable Tidy" »

Desks can get messy, and if you are hooking up a laptop to a host of desktop peripherals, it can get messier still. One answer is a clutter-reducing basket slung beneath the desk. Another much more dangerous solution was created by Matt Lumpkin, a man so cavalier that he drove screws into the back of his monitor.

This rather elegant hack takes a standard, wire-mesh office file holder and fixes it to the back of the monitor. You then drop in the notebook, hook up the cables and – if you don’t look too closely around the back – you have converted your MacBook into an iMac. Matt actually avoided any real danger of piercing his screen with a screw by picking a monitor which already had mounting holes for a VESA stand.

As you can see, the rats nest of cables is still there, but at least it is out of sight. Better still, Matt reports that the MacBook actually runs cooler than it did when on the desktop — the wire mesh means that air can run freely over every surface, comfortably convecting away the heat.

MacBook/iMac Rack Hack [Instructables via Life Hacker]

Apple and Mac cloner Psystar have filed a protective order to ensure trade secrets are not leaked before their November trial.

Filed Wednesday, the 18-page order requests restrictions on expert testimony as well as access to software. If honored by Judge William Alsup, the order will allow both companies to label sensitive materials as "CONFIDENTIAL" or "CONFIDENTIAL — ATTORNEY'S EYES ONLY." 

Apple in July filed a lawsuit against Psystar alleging copyright, trademark and shrink-wrap infringement. Psystar has been selling Mac clones — non-Apple PCs hacked to run the Mac operating system — since April. Earlier this month, Psystar filed a counterclaim alleging that Apple is misusing copyright laws by attempting to prevent other companies from installing Mac OS X on their systems.

The outcome of the lawsuit could dramatically impact Apple's business. If Alsup rules in Psystar's favor, the case would effectively legitimatize Mac clones, opening doors for other Hackintosh businesses as well. Apple frequently stresses that "software is the key ingredient" to the success of its hardware, and thus surrendering OS X to other companies would be detrimental to its Mac sales.

Apple and Psystar are scheduled to go to trial Nov. 9.

Stipulated Protective Order and [Proposed] Order [pdf]

See Also:

• Psystar: Apple Is Paranoid for Alleging Conspiracy
• Psystar Tags Back Apple With Antitrust Suit
• Apple Finally Sues Mac Copycat Psystar
• Apple Demands That Psystar Recalls All Hackintoshes
• Apple Cries Corporate Conspiracy Behind Psystar
• Psystar: Blu-Ray Hackintosh for Sale; MacBook Clones on the Way ...
• Hack of the Clones: Why Apple Can't Stop the Copies

Photo: Psystar

Bikes, unlike bigger means of transport, are pretty easy to modify to fit the will and needs of the owner, for carrying strange cargoes or perhaps to just look more awesomer. Sometimes, though, there are some chop-jobs which are quite inexplicable. Here we'll look at a few, and try to decode the more unusual.

First, this bike above, photographed this weekend in Berlin's slushy streets. We have dubbed it the "Pizza Bike" for its round cargo section, but it is clearly not used for delivering pizza. Not unless it's by a restaurateur with a strange grasp of gravitational laws.

To be honest, I have no idea what this is. There's a small, rectangular hatch in the side, and it appears that the top tube pierces the disc -- if not the bike would be pretty unstable. Is it for small parcels, a kind of slow, old-fashioned courier bike? We're flummoxed, so help out with suggestions in the comments.

Continue reading "The Craziest Home Made Bike Mods" »

For some, hacking the MSI Wind netbook to run Mac OS X isn't just about having a tiny, portable Mac. As with much hacking, it is instead about the process itself, and the challenges of making the most accurate MacBook Nano possible.

MSI Wind Forums member EdsJunk has taken possibly the final step. Many others have attempted glowing Apple logos, but EdsJunk is the firat that we know of to have done it the Apple way, hacking a hole in the lid of his netbook and letting the LED backlight shine through. He even ordered an old iBook lid from Ebay to mount in his hole.

Full instructions are on the forum thread, but job is rather involved. Aside from the obligatory Dremel work, there is some rummaging around inside the display and much re-routing of wires. Finally, you'll need to take to the case with some fine-grit sandpaper. The result, though, is worth it, although it would have been nice if, after all that effort, EdsJunk had bothered to hold the camera still while taking the pictures.

Guide to Glowing Apple Logo using LCD Backlight (no wiring!) [MSI Wind Forums]

See Also:

• Russians Mod iPhone to Make Apple Glow
• MacBook Nano Mod Is Smooth, Convincing
• OS X Leopard On Eee PC

Propose to your girlfriend with technology and you're bound to get blogged.

There's no shame in that, though. If the idea of Cupid were conceived in modern times, he'd probably be sending messages through an RSS reader rather than shooting arrows with a bow, right?

OK, probably not. But even so, geeks have come a long way since they were mocked and despised a couple decades ago. Now that we know nerdiness can lead to fame, power and riches, it's possible to be a geek and get the girl. To prove the point, we've rounded up a list of the geekiest, tech-inspired marriage proposals that were sweet enough to work. They might even get a cold, dead heart like mine thumping a little.

Proposal 2.0

Michael Weiss-Malik, a Google employee, deserves a lot of credit for this one. What better way to show the world your love than displaying it on Google Maps? Weiss-Malik got his buddies on the Street View team to give him a heads-up on the next time the Street View car was coming out to take pictures. And when that day came, he was well-prepared, holding a banner that read "Proposal 2.0: Marry me Leslie!!" (see above) After that, all he had to was lure Leslie into loading Google Maps and zooming in on the precise coordinates of his romantic stunt.

Now, that's clever.

Continue reading "5 Geeky Marriage Proposals That Worked" »

Most of you are aware of how much we love Hackintoshes here at Wired.com. (Charlie Sorrel and I each hacked our netbooks to run Mac OS X.) So we found amusing that Jay Pan, a fellow HackBook owner, participated in a contest to see how many Mac apps he could launch before everything went haywire. Final number? 80 apps.

Not too bad, considering that the leader of this "Busy Mac" contest is a Mac Pro with 240 apps. Of course, we doubt Pan's hacked Advent 4211 (MSI Wind clone) could do anything with the 80 apps after launching them. Then again, that's kind of the goal of the contest, right?

What a bunch of dorks. We love it.

The bragging race continues! [AppleDifferent via CultofMac]

See Also:

• It Lives! Gadget Lab's Netbook Running OS X Leopard
• OS X Running on Lenovo Netbook
• Gadget Lab Video: Running OS X on a Netbook
• OS X on a Netbook: The Good, the Bad, and the Pretty
• Mac OS X on Netbooks: What Works, What Doesn't
• Hacked Netbooks Run OS X As Well As an iBook
• Cheap, Easy-to-Mod NetBooks Are a Hacker's Paradise

Here's the way to get your ad shown free -- make it awesome. Here we see Tech Restore hawking its Modbook upgrade program, a $1150 service which adds a touch screen to your MacBook while simultaneously rendering it useless by removing the keyboard.

The twist is that the video shows the whole process in stop motion video. Initially, I was entranced. And then I started to see how similar this is to the rather easy keyboard replacement on a MacBook, or the hard drive swap-out in an iBook.

We're not sure just how much the 256-level, pressure sensitive touch screen costs, but we doubt its more than a couple hundred dollars. And given that the mod is available as a swift overnight service, that $1150 is starting to look pretty steep. In fact, you could buy a second MacBook for that, complete with a keyboard.

Product page [Tech Restore]

See Also:

• Review: Modbook Tablet Is a Designer's BFF
• Axiotron's ModBook, Here At Last
• Macworld 2009: Wozniak Demos MacBook Mod

Converting a notebook into a tablet is one of the toughest — and most impressive — mods out there. Over in Mobile01forums are some pictures (above) of a 7-inch Asus Eee PC 701 netbook turned into a tablet, and it looks pretty sweet.

Keep in mind that this type of mod requires installing a touchscreen, cramming all the guts into a different case and then figuring out how to tweak the software to work like a true tablet. This one even has buttons on the side for launching applications and controlling the cursor.

See Also:

• Cheap, Easy-to-Mod NetBooks Are a Hacker's Paradise
• Tablet Hackintosh on Dell Netbook

Mobile01 Forums [via Liliputing]

Photo: Mobile01 Forums

Meet Mrs. Muyonjo, the Ugandan MacGyver. Mrs. Muyonjo used to ride her bike 20 miles to the next town over in order to charge her cellphone, but after the dodgy wheeler-dealers in the charging shop swapped out her fresh battery for an old one that could barely hold a charge, she did what any self respecting maker would do -- she built her own charging station.

It's simple -- five D-Cell batteries are connected in series, and the business end of the charger has been cut off, the wires bared and then joined to the + and - terminals. Mrs. Muyonjo says "it works perfectly".

The only problem we see is that you have to keep buying D-Cells, which is a rather expensive way of doing things. We suppose that, compared to riding 20 miles and then paying some cowboy to charge your phone, this may actually be a cheaper option. Still, a great hack.

Housewife Designs Mobile Phone Charger [Wougnet via Afrigadget]

Chris Harrison and Scott Hudson, from the Carnegie Mellon University, have come up with a way to fake some pretty convincing 3D using nothing but a standard, single webcam, so videoconferencers can actually look behind the people they are talking to.

This head-slappingly simple idea uses something that will be familiar to old-school video gamers -- parallax. The video explains this very well, but for those of you who like to read, here's how it works.

First, the software separates the subject (let's say me, on a Skype call to my mother) from the background. It does this by either remembering the bits of the picture that don't move and building the background up over time, or by simply taking a snap when I'm not there. Then the subject is reimposed on the background.

At the other end, the program tracks my mother's head using face recognition software. When she moves her head, the layers in the image slide over each other to give the illusion of parallax and therefore 3D.

It's ingenious, and we wouldn't be at all surprised if Apple bought this up, patented it and stuck it in iChat. After all, the software already runs on a Mac -- look at the video.

Pseudo-3D Video Conferencing with a Generic Webcam [Chris Harrison. Thanks, Hesham!]

If camera hacks had heels, then this story would come hot on those of yesterday's Canon DSLR video recording hack. Actually inspired by that story, ace programmer Olivier Giroux decided to try it out with his Nikon D700.

Olivier grabbed the software development kit from Nikon's site and set to coding. A few scant hours later he had an application which would capture video using Nikon's low-light wonder. Like the Canon hack, Olivier's method just captures the live view stream from the camera's sensor -- you have to hook the cam up to a computer via USB and from there the software records the information sent over the wire. Olivier:

Good news: it is a viable video source. It’s fast enough, and the quality is sufficient.

Bad news: it’s a bit too low-quality to be really exciting. It’s roughly 30% below 480p resolution.  The most unfortunate thing is they create the Live-View image by decimating the sensor data rather than downsampling it – as a result it aliases, moirés and looks terrible in low light.

That’s it for the bad news though.  The feed travels over the wire at 100fps (I measured), within which maybe 30fps’ worth are unique frames.  Each frame is basically a NEF embedded thumbnail, each one is a fully-formed high quality JPEG file.  The result has the potential to look as good (or bad) as a DVD, roughly.

This isn't going to be a replacement for a real video camera, but if Olivier gets around to releasing the software, it should certainly be fun to play around with.

D700 Shoots Video [Mutable Conclusions via Nikon Rumors]

See Also:

• Hack Adds Hi-Def Video to All Canon DSLRs
• Hands-On With the Nikon D700
• HD Video Shot With Canon 5D MKII Looks Stellar
• Nikon D90: First SLR With Hi-Def Movie Mode

It appears that an enterprising Russian hacker has figured out a way to get video from Canon DSLRs. And not just the fancy new 5D MkII, either. This Windows program is claimed to pull video from any Canon DSLR with live view, which means just about anything in the current lineup. The clip above is apparently from an EOS 450D.

If real, this could be huge -- free hi-def video for anyone willing to tweak their camera a little. There are a few caveats, though. First, this is not a tweak to the camera's firmware like the Canon CHDK hack (which adds features to cheap point'n'shoots) -- instead you need to run an application on a Windows machine. This means that the video is not saved to the memory card of the camera.

Second, beware. Google translate doesn't want to decipher the original forum thread for me, and downloading and running an unknown executable is a bad idea. Aside from that, though, this could be awesome, even if it may just be making a screen capture of the Live View display on the computer's monitor. Another video, linked below, shows that the resolution (from a 40D this time) is a hi-def-tastic 720x480. Nice.

Forum thread [IXBT via Canon Rumors]

Application download [Valexvir]

40D video [YouTube]

AVI file with cow [Odevaem]

See Also:

• Four Camera Hacks You Can Do Today
• Add Features to Low End Canon Cameras: Free

Hacker Luke Hutchison has successfully brought multi-touch to the T-Mobile G1 Googlephone. The video shows that it's a rather clunky implementation right now, but as Luke points out, this is v.1.0:

 

This is a proof of concept, people — of course it will be optimized over time — the fact it’s not done yet doesn’t mean it can’t be or won’t be. Apple’s engineers were paid mega moola to implement their bling, I was not.

How does it work? Luke has patched the Linux kernel of the Android OS to tweak the (Synaptics) touchpad driver. As this is a software only modification, we assume that the abilities to sense multiple fingers are built in to the hardware already.

You'll also need modified applications to take advantage of the new multitouch capabilities. Luke has provided a browser, a maps application, a photo viewer plus the vector-style demo app you see in the video.

Best of all, you don't need to do any hacking yourself. There's a downloadable, pre-patched version of the firmware available, ready to be installed. Proceed with caution -- you could kill your G-1, although you'll probably be fine. Right up until you get sick of the clunky zooming and throw the phone out the window at least.

Get Multi-Touch Zooming Support on your T-Mobile G1 TODAY [Luke Hutchison via Boy Genius]

What can't the iPhone do? This latest hack, by the always excellent Strobist, presses the iPhone into service as a fill light for low-light shooting. You just fire up your flashlight app of choice and dangle the phone just out of frame: Instant, accented fill.

It turns out that the iPhone's screen gives out light very close to daylight balance, and for lighting noobs it has the advantage over flash in that you can see just what effect you're going to get before you trip the shutter. The Strobist also points us to a purpose made solution from Rosco called the LightPad, essentially a bright, flat LED panel designed for soft video lighting but also ideal for still shooting.

It's not just for the amateur, either. Apparently Micheal Mann used a bunch of old laptop screen backlights to light the car interiors in the movie Collateral. These were velcroed to the walls and ceiling, taking up virtually no space, and the exterior street lighting was left to take care of itself. This is Hollywood using low-budget, indie techniques.

If any of you have tried any similar hacks, post the photos in the Gadget Lab Flickr pool and link in the comments.

Is That a Soft Box in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy to See Me? [Strobist]
Photo: Strobist/Flickr

Take the internals of old USB thumb drive, ask IT to dig out an obsolete floppy disk, throw in a pair of scissors and combine. What do you get? If you do it properly, you'll have an easy to make novelty USB stick. If you follow the instructions in our how-to video, things might not go so well.

Ask anyone with kids what is the best part of the MacBook range and they'll tell you the Magsafe connector. Not only is it easy to pop in – the magnet snaps the plug right into place – but marauding rugrats can shoot by, trip on the wire and the computer stays safely, and smugly, sat on the desk.

It's not a new idea – deep fat fryers have been using the same tech for a while – but it hasn't yet appeared on other notebooks. Now, with some help from Instructables, you can roll your own for around $30:

It's effective, cool-looking, and breaks away cleanly when kicked.

We'd certainly disagree with the second point: it's anything but cool -looking, but a Magsafe is so practical we don't care. This would be an especially good mod for a netbook, a computer that is often used in unpredictable situations. The hack here, by Breath, was forced upon a Thinkpad.

The gist is that you add washers to the collar of the power plug and then glue on magnets, which then become the ground connection. Then, a washer is stuck to the outside of the socket on the computer and connected to the internal ground.

Next, you extend the pin inside the plug with a spring loaded aluminum tube so that it will contact the internal pin. That's it. Fugly but quick, easy and cheap. I'd try this on my MSI Wind if I wasn't planning on selling that piece of junk.

ThinkSafe: A Magnetic Power Connector for Thinkpads [Instructables via MSI Wind Forums]

Mac cloner Psystar claims it's nothing but an independent Florida-based startup, despite Apple's suspicions of a conspiracy.

Apple has been in legal battle with Psystar for several months, and recently the corporation said it believes the Mac cloner is receiving help from other parties -- possibly corporations.

"Psystar denies that said activities are unlawful and improper," Psystar said in its response. "Psystar likewise denies the suggestion that there exists a concerted effort to commit infringement of Apple's intellectual property rights, to breach or induce the breach of Apple's otherwise unenforceable license agreements, and to violate state and common law unfair competition laws."

Psystar in April began selling a PC hacked to run Mac OS X Leopard -- a Mac clone -- and the company has since added several Hackintoshes to its product line. Apple in July filed a lawsuit claiming Psystar was committing copyright, trademark and shrink-wrap infringement.

Apple's lawsuit against Psystar wasn't enough to scare off other companies that later arose to offer similar Mac clones. The army of Mac cloners was largely driven by Apple's switch to Intel chips, which made its operating system easier to hack to run on other non-Mac, Intel machines.   

See Also:

• Apple Cries Corporate Conspiracy Behind Psystar
• Psystar: Blu-Ray Hackintosh for Sale; MacBook Clones on the Way
• Psystar Tags Back Apple With Antitrust Suit
• Psystar Offers Cloned OS X Servers
• Apple Finally Sues Mac Copycat Psystar
• Apple Demands That Psystar Recalls All Hackintoshes

Psystar: No conspiracy against Apple [ComputerWorld]

Photo: Psystar

The joy of Nerf-play never fades. But the older you get, the sillier you look shooting toy guns. Modify a Nerf gun to shoot as fast as a machine gun, and you've got a different story.

That's what a pair of hackers -- Eli and Aaron at ManaPotions -- sought out to do. They modified a Nerf chaingun to spit out 500 rounds per minute by increasing its voltage. And on top of that, they added a round counter and gave the gun a paint job.

That's some serious horsing around. The hack cost them about $80; they provide an entire how-to on their site. Check out the video below the jump.

Continue reading "Hackers Mod Nerf Gun Into Crazy Weapon of Cushiony Destruction" »

Netbook hacking is becoming increasingly trendy -- especially installing Mac OS X on the dinky things since Apple refuses to offer its own Mac netbook. Our friend Rob Beschizza at Boing Boing Gadgets slapped together a pretty useful chart (above) rounding up all the netbooks that can be hacked to run OS X -- and which features work fine and which don't.

He even cites a few how-to guides written by Wired.com: our tutorials on installing OS X on an Asus Eee PC and the Samsung NC 10.

Interested in hacking your netbook? We've got even more reading material below.

See Also:

• Gadget Lab Video: Running OS X on a Netbook
• It Lives! Gadget Lab's Netbook Running OS X Leopard
• Wind OS X: New Graphics, Wi-Fi and Sound Fixes
• Gadget Lab Catches a Second MSI Wind
• OS X Running on Lenovo Netbook
• OS X on a Netbook: The Good, the Bad, and the Pretty
• Cheap, Easy-to-Mod NetBooks Are a Hacker's Paradise
• Apple Has 'Interesting Ideas' for a Netbook, But Isn't Ready ...
• Gadget Lab Hackintosh Contest: Installing OS X 10.5.5
• Gadget Lab Hackintosh: Now With Added Sound Output
• Hackintosh Update: Installing a New Wireless Card
• Sound Output Enabled on Hackintosh Eee PCs
• Run Mac OS X on an Eee PC

Image: BBG

Twitter is clearly all the rage now. And with plants and cats tweeting, there's no reason machines such as a toaster shouldn't get into the game.

Over at Instructables, Hans Scharler  has a photo guide to his twittering toaster creation.

The toaster uses an off-the-shelf IO-204 monitor and control module that allows it to be plugged to the internet without having to run a home web server.

Scharler glued a switch to the toaster's exterior that is triggered by the slider's movement. The switch hooks up to the control module's digital input.

"Using a terminal board, a pull up resistor (1k), and some alligator clips, I hooked up the resistor from the digital input to the +5v source from the module, and clipped my clips on the resistor and the ground,"  Scharler explains on his blog.

The real gem in this hack is the control module from ioBridge available for $88. It can bring most devices online and interested newbies don't need to be a programming or electronics whiz to do that, says the company.

Right now the toaster's tweets seem rather binary, switching between 'toasting' and 'toast is done.'

But isn't Twitter with its 140-characters limit just the perfect place for such Zen pearls?

Also see:
DIY Kit Helps Your Plant Twitter
The Age of Tweety Cats

Photo: Twitter Toaster/Hans Scharler

[via Hack a Day]

A team of hackers announced Tuesday that it has unlocked the iPhone 3G.

Codenamed "yellowsn0w," the hack will enable the iPhone 3G to work with 3G networks other than those sanctioned by Apple. (For example, the unlock hack would make the iPhone 3G work on the T-Mobile network in the United States.) The iPhone Dev-Team, famous for unlocking the original iPhone, said the hack will be ready for release by Dec. 31.

This, of course, will undoubtedly lead to another game of cat and mouse. When the Dev-Team unlocked the first iPhone in 2007, Apple released software updates that effectively bricked (i.e., rendered useless) any unlocked handset. 

"It's a cat-and-mouse game," said Jobs, when asked about unlocked iPhones in November 2007. "We try to stay ahead. People will try to break in, and it's our job to stop them breaking in."

It should be clarified that "Jailbreaking" the iPhone is not the same as unlocking it -- though there is some confusion over this term. The term Jailbreak refers to a process that hacks the iPhone to run unauthorized software -- apps that likely would never be approved in Apple's iPhone App Store. The iPhone Dev-Team released the Jailbreak tool for iPhone 3G -- called Pwnage 2.0 -- just days after the iPhone 3G's launch in July.

'Tis the Season to be Jolly! - yellowsn0w [iPhone Dev-Team via Engadget ]

Photo: dfarber/Flickr

While my Hackintosh netbook was on display at Gizmodo Gallery last week, I had a chance to tinker around with the 10.2-inch Samsung NC10 on loan from Samsung. Much to our surprise, Samsung sent Wired.com an e-mail giving us permission to hack the NC10 however we wished. Two words: Hell yeah!

Of course, the first thing I wanted to do was beautify the NC10 with an install of Mac OS X. After reading some forums, I discovered the OS X installation process for the NC10 was almost exactly the same as the steps Charlie Sorrel and I followed to hack our MSI Wind netbooks. So I gave it a whirl, and presto -- the NC10 is now running OS X.

How did I do it? You can follow the same video guide we provided a few weeks ago to hack the MSI Wind; you'd just change one step: Don't uncheck "Kernel" in the OS X install options. If you're going to turn your NC10 into a Hackintosh, make sure to scroll down to the bottom of this post to read about the known issues: Not many in the blogosphere have done this, and this hack is far from perfect.

Here are the steps again with that "Kernel" part left out:

(Disclaimer: The following process potentially violates Apple's End User License Agreement for Mac OS X. Please ensure you own a copy of Mac OS X Leopard if you wish to follow the procedure.)

Continue reading "Samsung NC10 Hacked to Run OS X" »

Just hours after announcing plans to sell a high-end Mac clone, niche electronics reseller EFIX USA changed course in order to avoid a nasty legal confrontation with Apple.

"We certainly don't want to get into a legal battle that's over a couple thousand dollars," an EFIX USA spokesman said. "Potentially Apple could have a legal issue there. They may not have a legal issue, but with all the money they have they might try to make one."

Despite the sudden turnabout, it's getting harder and harder for Apple to guard the most precious jewel at the core of its success: The Mac operating system.

Apple forbids Mac OS X from running on anything but a Mac. But in the past year, an army of Mac cloners has emerged, their rise facilitated in large part by Apple's 2006 decision to switch to Intel chips. The most prominent example is Florida-based Psystar, a startup selling Mac clones, which has been in legal battle with Apple since July. Shortly following Psystar's lead were companies with similar offerings: OpenTech, OpeniMac and Art Studios Entertainment Media.

Friday morning, AppleInsider reported that EFIX USA was going to start selling custom-made PCs with a Mac-OS-loaded USB dongle included inside. But in a phone interview with Wired.com, EFIX USA said it was going to cancel this deal, in fear that Apple would construe this offer -- a computer shipped with a Mac OS X booter -- as a Mac clone.

HR&O attorney Eric Overholt said the dongle will likely face legality issues with Apple. He explained Apple could potentially allege piracy and copyright infringement in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, because the Taiwanese company is essentially copying the Mac BIOS and putting it in a chip (the dongle).

"My thought is that this company will face the same type of lawsuit and claims that Psystar is facing," said Eric Overholt, an attorney with HR&O. "This dongle tricks the clone into thinking that the clone is actually a Mac. There will also most likely be claims against [the company] for 'reverse engineering' the Mac BIOS in order to create their 'dongle.'"

Art Studios Entertainment Media's dongle shows how the definition of a "Mac clone" has become blurry. And that gives away just how easy it's become for manufacturers to steal Apple's operating system -- and market it in different ways in order to dodge legal bullets.

"I would say that one of the things that's happening to Apple is that it's less able to keep secrets than it used to be because it has broader supply chain and broader distribution," said Roger Kay, an Endpoint Technologies analyst.

Apple wasn't always opposed to Mac clones. For a brief period in the 1990s -- when Steve Jobs was still exiled from Apple -- Apple CEO Michael Spindler licensed the Mac operating system to several manufacturers: Power Computing, Motorola, Umax, APS, Radius and DayStar. When Jobs retook the helm in 1997, one of the first items on his agenda was to destroy the clone program and eliminate these cheaper alternatives to Apple's goods.

But in 2006, Apple opened itself up to attack again (knowingly or not) when it ditched its own Power PC processors in favor of Intel's more power-efficient CPUs. Because Apple then had to code OS X to run on Intel processors, it opened a door for hackers: They could modify the operating system code to run on any Intel-powered, non-Mac machine.

The Intel switch gave birth to an underground community of hackers dubbed OSX86, who anonymously contribute to a wiki that details the techniques required to get the Mac OS to work on other Intel machines. The OSX86 community is what made Psystar and all the aforementioned companies possible, and it's also what enables people to install Mac OS X on a netbook, a popular hack.

"People were talking about Apple coming out with a laptop under $800 for the first time, and someone already made one and it's a [hacked] netbook," said Brad Linder, blogger of Liliputing.   

Continue reading "Hack of the Clones: Why Apple Can't Stop the Copies" »

Things just got a little easier for squeamish Hackintosh makers. One of the biggest problems with installing Mac OS X on an MSI Wind has been the lack of proper Wi-Fi support. The easiest way to fix it is to pick up a cheap Dell card and replace the one that comes with the machine. It costs around $15 and acts just like a real Aiport card in a real Mac.

But those not so comfortable with – literally – screwing around inside their netbooks now have a better option: Ralink, the supplier of wireless cards to some Wind variants, has released an updated driver for OS X (10.3, 10.4 and 10.5).

The official Wind still ships with a Realtek Wi-Fi card, so the replacement option is still the best way to go. But owners of the Wind clone Medion Akoya Mini will have the Ralink card inside (check the sticker on the bottom of the computer). There were already drivers for this card, but the interface was quite hideous and the connection had to be manually re-established after sleep or a restart.

We haven't yet tested the new setup, as both of the Gadget Lab Hackintoshes have replacement Dell cards inside, but the reports from the MSI wind forum say that it works, although the interface is still pretty fugly. MSI Wind Forum member Svinto:

The wireless utility starts automatically at login and seems to connect automatically as long as you make a profile for your preferred network. It also works fine after sleep.

What is most interesting about this development is that Ralink is effectively supporting Hackintoshes. As every new Mac comes with Wi-Fi, there is no need for anyone to buy a third party card, especially not a Mini-PCI card. These drivers are probably only going to be used in Frankenmacs. We think this is great, although the rather paranoid Apple might think otherwise.

Driver downloads [Ralink]
New RALINK drivers for wireless-n card! [MSI Wind Forums]

See Also:

We've seen some pretty weird gadget modifications, but this computer mouse made with actual mouse bones takes the cake for "most stomach-turning" steampunk mod ever.

Blogger Daniel Pon felt like modding his five-button computer mouse, and luckily he "had a whole rodent skeleton sitting in a box."

He details the lengthy process step-by-step in his blog. In summary, he used a combination of wood, brass and mouse skeleton to construct the body; a lot of cutting, bending and welding was involved. The project took about 22 hours spread over a week and a half. All the parts including the mouse cost about $50.

Now I really regret eating that Subway sandwich last night.

The Paradox Mouse! Custom Computer Mouse [Daniel Pon via Laptop Mag]

Photo: Daniel Pon

Yet another company has decided to get in on the cheap Mac-making game, seemingly oblivious to Apple's increasingly paranoid litigation against the original Hackintosh maker, Psystar.

The OpeniMac, from the company of the same name, is an ugly commodity PC box, stuffed full of fast hardware and loaded with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. The specs are fairly normal: Intel Core 2 Duo running at 2.53GHz, a 320GB hard drive, a "SuperDrive", eight (8!) USB ports and four FireWire, a card reader (you won't find one of those on a real Mac) and a 19" LCD monitor from LG.

There is also a Pro version, which is a little bit faster, a little bit uglier and is distinguished by a ridiculous 1GB of memory in its Nvidia GeForce GS graphics card.

The prices are less than what you'd pay for a real Mac, although not by much. The OpeniMac is going for US$1330 with monitor ($990 without) and the OpeniMacPro is US$1710.

These will, we presume, ship from Argentina, handily avoiding Apple's US lawyers. We would, of course, advise caution: if you buy one of these and it goes wrong, you won't be able to drop it off at the Genius Bar.

Be careful of those prices, too. For comparison purposes, the web site shows a Mac Mini and a couple if iMacs alongside the OpeniMacs. The Mini is listed at US$1337 whereas on Apple's site it is clearly shown at either $600 or $800. although it's possible that those are the list prices in Argentina, converted to US$.

Product page [OpeniMac via TUAW]

See Also:

• Apple Cries Corporate Conspiracy Behind Psystar
• Apple Demands That Psystar Recalls All Hackintoshes
• Psystar Tags Back Apple With Antitrust Suit
• Apple Finally Sues Mac Copycat Psystar

This is truly one of the neatest hacks we have seen in a while, and it should work with any portable video player. Simply rip a screen-sized hole in the side of an airplane sick-bag, tuck the end into the lap-tray of the seat in front and sit back to enjoy the movie. We thought that Andy Ihnatko's Gorillapod in-flight entertainment system was good, but this one is even better. And cheaper.

Testicular mumps Trick17: Free iPhonehalter [Hodenmumpds via Engadget]

See Also:

• Gorillapod Go-Go: Miniature, Flexible Tripod

Apple believes Psystar, a manufacturer of Mac clones, is more than just a small Florida-based company.

In its most recent legal filing, Apple alleges there may be other parties helping drive Psystar's success -- possibly other corporations.

On information and belief, persons other than Psystar are involved in Psystar’s unlawful and improper activities described in this Amended Complaint. The true names or capacities, whether individual, corporate, or otherwise, of these persons are unknown to Apple. Consequently they are referred to herein as John Does 1 through 10 (collectively the “John Doe Defendants”). On information and belief, the John Doe Defendants are various individuals and/or corporations who have infringed Apple’s intellectual property rights, breached or induced the breach of Apple’s license agreements and violated state and common law unfair competition laws. Apple will seek leave to amend this complaint to show the unknown John Doe Defendants’ true names and capacities when they are ascertained."

Legal news site Groklaw notes that if Apple's assumption is correct, this may explain why such a small company as Psystar is being backed by a major law firm. This could also indicate why Psystar is so bold with continuing to roll out Mac clones.

Apple in mid-July filed a lawsuit against Psystar alleging copyright, trademark and shrink-wrap license infringement. Psystar's first release in April was the "OpenMac" -- essentially a PC hacked to run OS X Leopard -- which the company later renamed OpenComputer. The sort-of Mac clone cost $400, or about $2,400 cheaper than a Mac Pro.

Psystar's audacity certainly raises a brow. Another startup called OpenTech wasn't so brave. Open Tech in July said it would offer a similar product -- PCs bundled with how-to kits on installing Mac OS X -- but the company shut down a month after its launch.

See Also:

• Psystar: Blu-Ray Hackintosh for Sale; MacBook Clones on the Way ...
• Psystar Tags Back Apple With Antitrust Suit
• Psystar Offers Cloned OS X Servers
• Apple Finally Sues Mac Copycat Psystar
• Apple Demands That Psystar Recalls All Hackintoshes

Photo: Psystar

The MSI Wind has proved to be the most hackable of the netbooks. It might be the ease with which one can get inside the plastic case (a few screws, large enough to be unscrewed with a regular household screwdriver), it might be down to the fact that there are at least four ways to install Mac OS X on the tiny machine. Or it might just be that the low price and incredibly helpful MSI Wind forums encourage experimentation.

Whatever the reason, the result is that the insides of the Wind are known intimately, and one of the biggest problems for buyers is knowing just what their new netbook will contain. The greatest fear of a Wind buyer? The Sentilic touchpad, widely considered inferior to the original Synaptics pad. It's harder to hack, and even in the stock Windows XP environment, it offers less customization.

What to do? If you're a good little hacker, you rip out the old and put in the new. The latest craze to sweep the Wind forums is the replacement of the stock pad with an $8 spare from, of all people, Asus.

The trackpad is a straight swap out replacement. According to forum member dxmiller it takes a little wiggling and perhaps some solvents to free the old pad, but the dimensions and connections of the new one are exactly the same.

Now Wind Hackintosh owners can attempt the two-finger scrolling hack (hint- don't bother). Sadly, this mod only replaces the pad itself, not the crappy single button rocker that cripples the Wind. Although there's a solution to that problem, too.

The $12 Touchpad Experiment [MSI Wind Forums]

See Also:

• Gadget Lab Hackintosh: Now With Added Sound Output
• Hackintosh Update: Installing a New Wireless Card
• Sound Output Enabled on Hackintosh Eee PCs
• It Lives! Gadget Lab's Netbook Running OS X Leopard

Tech publication Gizmodo this week is kicking off its first gadget showcase ever, dubbed Gizmodo Gallery.

Held in New York City, the event begins Thursday and ends Sunday. Gizmodo staff will show off about 40 gadgets, including the RED ONE camera, ancient Apple prototypes, and the first Walkman.   

Guess what else will be on display? My very own MSI Wind netbook hacked to run Mac OS X. Lam stopped by yesterday and took away my netbook after knocking me out with chloroform, so keep an eye out for a white mini Hackintosh.

Gizmodo Gallery takes place at Reed Annex at 151 Orchard Street, New York NY. Admission is free.

Gizmodo Gallery: Our Wonderful World of Gadgets On Display in NYC [Gizmodo]

Photo: Gizmodo

This is possibly the purpose for which the Wiimote, and also the Wii Fit balance board, were made. Drumming:

There's also a more detailed video below of just how this hack, by Zhao He, works  but the basics are simple: The Wiimote, Nunchuk and Balance Board are all connected to your PC via Bluetooth. You then download the free, open-source software and install (XP useres will need to install the .NET framework first). The Wii accessories do what they are supposed to do - sense motion – and the software translates it into drum sounds.

This is quite excellent, although I will kill you if you ever bring it near my house. My lazy flatmate, along with owning a real drum kit, is one of those annoying people who can't stop rat-a-tat-tapping on every surface that will make a noise. He also sings in the bathroom, which is right next to where I live and work, explaining the sometimes terse tone of my posts.

We love Zhao's hack, but if he would, say, work out a way to get my housemate a job, we'd worship him all the more.

Wii Drum High [He Zhao. Thanks, Zhao!]

Continue reading "Wii Drum High: Virtual Drumming Hack" »

UPDATE: The video described in this article has been pulled in response to a complaint by Apple. In addition, the article has been edited to remove instructions about how to find a modded, pirate copy of OS X. Wired.com does not condone or endorse software piracy.

Apple isn't ready to offer an inexpensive, low-powered netbook yet -- so why not make one yourself? In this week's video podcast, I go over the process of installing Mac OS X Leopard on an MSI Wind netbook.

Here are the steps to install a legal, purchased retail copy of Mac OS X on a Wind.

(Disclaimer: The following process potentially violates Apple's End User License Agreement for Mac OS X. Please ensure you own a copy of Mac OS X Leopard if you wish to follow the procedure.)

Continue reading "Gadget Lab Video: Running OS X on a Netbook" »

When Matthew Osburn received a dead MacBook, he had greater ambitions than simply repairing it. After bringing the MacBook back to life by replacing its hard drive and RAM, he sought out parts to modify the notebook into a miniature desktop sporting the same look as the Mac Pro, Apple's high-end desktop system.

Really neat stuff: He bought a Macally aluminum enclosure and cut it down to size. Then he removed the guts of the MacBook and crammed them into the enclosure (much more difficult than it sounds). He provides a full how-to on his blog.   

Now, this gets me thinking: If Apple decides to roll out an upgrade to its Mac mini desktop system (which it hasn't in well over a year), wouldn't it be cool if it received the aluminum treatment just like the latest MacBooks?

My New Mac Pro Ultra Mini [wolphBite] (Thanks, Matthew!)

Photo: Matthew Osburn

Here at the G-Lab we love Make, the magazine for hackers, modders and DIY freaks. And, by extension, we dig Makezine, the online home of the mag. Sometimes the projects are a little too ambitious (DIY DNA sequencing, anyone?) but once in a while there is a true gem, a project so cool that you can't not do it.

The Scanner Camera is one of those projects. It's a perfect destination for your useless scanner and better still, it's reversible, meaning you can always go back to scanning boring old pieces of paper.

The video shows you just what to do: essentially you tape a 7"x7" black box the the top of an old flatbed, fit a magnifying-glass lens into a smaller box and slide that inside, and then punch a few different sized holes into black cards to use as apertures.

That's it. The image is focused by moving the inner box in and out, and the light levels can be controlled with the black cards. The images are amazing, and best of all, if you have a Canon LiDE scanner like the one in the video, it's powered from the USB bus so you could even hook this up to a laptop and go shooting outside.

I will be trying this out over the next few days. I'll let you know how I get on.

Weekend Project: Scanner Camera [Make via Lifehacker]

The new four-finger trackpad gestures found on the new MacBook and MacBook Pro could be coming to older Mac notebooks, too. A curious (and jealous) member of Mac Rumors – michaelb – was so envious of the four-finger gestures his girlfriend was enjoying on her new MacBook that he stole the installation disk and popped it into his first-gen MacBook Air.

Because the installer discs that Apple ships with its computers are ror restoration purposes only, you can't use it for a fresh install on other machines. However, there are ways and means, and michealb ended up with the new system on his old machine.

But it didn't work. Michael had to do some rummaging deep in the system to make it recognise his trackpad, and then up popped the new options right there in the System Preferences. Michael now enjoys the same four-fingered fun as his girlfriend.

Now, reinstalling the entire system to grab a new feature is a little extreme, but this proves that the older trackpads are capable of the new multi touch goodness -- this should also work for MacBook Pros. We have our hopes that Apple will bake this into the next OS X software update (10.5.6). I took a new unibody MacBook for a test run in the store last wek and the four finger gestures, which invoke Show Desktop and Exposé behaviour, are great.

Old MBP. Do we get the 4 finger swipe as well??? [MacRumors Forum]

The OSx86 hacking scene, which involves installing the Mac OS onto generic PCs instead of those shiny Apple boxes, is characterized by the troubles of marrying hardware to software. In short, OS X just doesn't have drivers for many of the internal parts such as Wi-Fi cards and, almost as important, sound hardware.

In fact, getting sound in and out of a netbook Hackintosh has proved to be a big challenge. At least with Wi-Fi you can always just swap out the card for an Airport-compatible one. Enterprising hackers also helped us to get the headphone jack working on our Gadget Lab Wind, and now the folks at ipis OS X have done the same for the Eee PC.

Like the Wind solution, you need to install Apple's developer tools and a new audio driver to get things working. Unlike the rather clunky Wind solution – which requires typing a command into the terminal every time you want to switch from headphones to the internal speakers – the Eee hack is packaged as a menu extra.

The picture above shows Audieee, a small application (227KB) which sits up in the menubar and lets you toggle the output. That's about as simple as things can get until someone figures out how to have the output switch automatically when you plug in some headphones. Now, please, someone make this work on the Wind!

Audieee: The less ugly stop-gap [ipis OS X. Thanks, Scott!]

Looks like someone has one-upped both me and Charlie Sorrel in our Hackintosh netbook modding contest. A Flickr set suggests that a hardcore modder fitted some MSI Wind netbooks with a shiny case sporting an Apple logo (presumably a vinyl sticker) and the fictional name "MacBook Nano" — attractive enough to convince the average customer that the netbook was designed by the Cupertino-based company itself. And of course, it's running a hacked version of Mac OS X Leopard.

Continue reading "MacBook Nano Mod Is Smooth, Convincing" »

Anybody who plays Rock Band is aware the bass-drum pedal is a plastic piece of crap, destined to one day snap in half and ruin a party. My Rock Band pedal met its ill fate over the weekend, and instead of ordering a new one for $40, I put on my "What Would MacGyver Do?" thinking cap and fashioned a fix that cost a mere $5. It only took a few simple steps, and now my pedal is stronger than it ever was before, which isn't saying much, but I thought I'd share the process here:

You'll need: 1.) an electric drill (Don't have one? Borrow one from a neighbor!); 2.) two metal mending brackets (3 1/2-inch by 1 3/8-inch, includes screws and comes in packs of four for $5 at your local hardware store); 3.) super glue.

Step one
Apply super glue in between the two broken pieces to rejoin them (not entirely necessary, but provides additional support).

Step two
Position the two metal brackets side by side with the crack directly in their center.

Step three
Drill eight shallow holes in the pedal aligning with the corner holes in the metal brackets (be careful not to go too deep, or else you'll crack the pedal or completely penetrate it, as I did with the left bracket, hence one missing screw).

Step four

Screw in the screws included with the mending brackets.

Et voila. Good as new. I can't guarantee it's indestructible, but I gave it a good stomping and it's still alive. Hell, it looks kind of cool, too, doesn't it? Frankenstein monster, anyone?

Photos: raphaelmull/Flickr, Brian X. Chen/Wired.com

In the West, we make a big deal about recycling, but what we really mean by "recycling" is melting down old crap to build yet more new crap. This is not the same everywhere. In some places, to recycle means to reuse, foregoing the energy-wasting reprocessing for a simple re-purposing of an old object. And if you thought I used the prefix "re-" too many times in that last sentence, then you're just being extravagant. I was recycling it.

Above you see an old, keyless computer keyboard, the kind of bland beige box to be found mouldering on any sidewalk. In Africa, though, it becomes a lap-desk for a shoeshiner, the rough surface of the stripped keyboard offering a platform which grips both shoes and polish while protecting the shoeshiner's clothes.

It's a question of cultural attitude, and it's not confined to Africa. In Barcelona, Spain, where I live, each barrio has a set day for the collection of big trash -- furniture, clothing and the like. The collection happens late at night, so there is plenty of time for trawling the trash for treasure. It's not unusual to see a well dressed businessman, complete with laptop bag, rifling the refuse alongside the students, the homeless, the poor or the tech blogger. And that's great. Dumpster divers should be proud: We're saving the planet and saving cash.

Your Old Keyboard and a Shoeshine Stand [AfriGadget]

Photo: whiteafrican/Flickr

This mystery picture is quite stunning real-world imagining of the Photoshop interface, but we have absolutely no idea where it is from. It has popped up on a few image sharing sites, as well as Digg and Reddit. In lieu of actual knowledge, here's one of the few Digg comments that have ever been worth reading, from Doublefelix:

They missed out on some great job opportunities for marching ants.

Real-world Photoshop [John Nack]

We're not particularly sold on non-phone touch screens yet here at Gadget Lab, mostly because of the Gorilla-Arm problem, but that doesn't mean there's not a market for them.

The folks at Hoda Technology know this, and they also see the willingness amongst netbook buyers to open up their cheap machines for warranty-voiding hacking projects. The TouchKit is a fairly cheap ($95) kit that adds resistive touch (not the fancy iPhone and G1 capacative touch) to your Acer Aspire One or your Eee PC 900/901.

And a hack this certainly is. Although no soldering is required, you're going to have to get pretty deep into the innards of your machine to fit these things. Happily, netbooks are pretty simple and, in our experience of the MSI Wind, at least, pretty easy to take apart.

The screen hooks into the computer's USB interface, and there are drivers for Windows and Linux and Mac. That last shows that the Hoda folks are aiming clearly at the hacker market, as currently the only Mac netbooks are Hackintoshes.

The kits are currently available through Ebay, and Hoda promises that "TouchKit will be available in other netbook models such as Dell Inspiron, MSI Wind, etc.. in the coming year". We can't wait. The original Gadget Lab Hackintosh is going touchscreen, gorilla arms be damned!

Product page [Ebay. Thanks, Joe!]

What with its open source operating system and developer-friendly nature, cracking open phones running Google's Android was always going to be easier than the full-on assault that was required to hack the iPhone, but we're still impressed by the speed with which hackers have broken the T-Mobile G1.

First is full access to the file system on the phone. This part is easy, but you could potentially break everything with an errant rm -r. You need to grab PTerminal, a command line tool, from the Android marketplace. From there, you navigate to your system/bin folder (where the binaries are kept) and type telnetd to launch the telnet program which lets you login to the phone remotely.

Assuming your Wi-Fi is switched on, you can now type netstat to get your IP address. From there, you just grab a computer on the same network and telnet in. You now have root access to the entire file system. This is the dangerous part, and it's odd that telnet runs this way. The root user, or superuser, is the God of the computer and can do anything, so proceed with care.

This means that one of the big G1 problems has been bypassed. Off the shelf, you can't install applications on the SD card, only in the G1's internal memory. Using this method, you can put applications on the SD card and point the phone at them. According to a post on the Android Community forums, this works just fine.

Aside from putting applications where you want them, root access to the OS means that a carrier unlock should be possible, meaning that you can use the phone on any supported network. On the same forum thread, user Shebanx, claims to have done just this, and although he used a third party unlock service, he claims that all the Google Apps still work (Gmail, Calendar and so on).

It's a great first step, and we can be sure that, as Android is a Linux-based operating system, there's going to be plenty more where that came from. Bring it on!

Android Jailbreak, first steps forward !!- get root access to your G1 [Android Community]

How to get Root on the G1 [XDA Developers Forum]

G1 is Jailbroken [ModMyGphone]

Charlie Sorrel should add his Hackintosh netbook (*cough* Crapintosh) to his list of useless gadgets to toss in the trash! I'm slightly behind in our netbook modding contest in terms of software hacking, but I managed to get my MSI Wind running the latest version of Mac OS X (10.5.5) -- something Sorrel didn't even know was possible!

Many thought when they hacked their netbooks to run OS X that they'd be stuck on an older version of the operating system (10.5.4) for eternity, but a quick workaround on the MSI Wind forums helped me evade obsolescence. Here are the steps I followed:

Continue reading "Gadget Lab Hackintosh Contest: Installing OS X 10.5.5" »

The kids won't understand why Evil Mad Scientist's jack 'o lantern is terrifying until they grow older. The mini pumpkin contains a scrolling LED stock ticker to remind adults that while they sip booze and hit bongs this joyous holiday, Wall Street is continuing in its downward spiral toward financial ruin.

Happy Halloween!

Want something more uplifting? Check out Wired.com's gallery of creative pumpkin mods.

Scariest Jack-o'-Lantern of 2008 [Evil Mad Scientist]

Photo: Evil Mad Scientist

Editor's note: This is the latest installment in Gadget Lab's continuing netbook hacking contest, which pits Mac-loving, cafe-dwelling, penny-pinching nerds Charlie Sorrel and Brian Chen against each other to see who can come up with the geekiest netbook mods.

Brian Chen can bite me! Thanks to the tireless work of greater hackers than either of us, I now have the headphone jack working on the original, and still best, Gadget Lab Hackintosh. The workaround is a little clunky, but it means that I can now hook up my Medion Akoya Mini to a stereo, or use headphones. This is a pretty big deal. Almost everything else works on these wonderful little machines when running Mac OS X, but sound inputs and outputs have been notoriously hard to fix.

Over at the MSI Wind forums, Pizzaboy75 posted a shell script (a small program which runs in the command line, or terminal) which will toggle the sound output of the Wind between the built in speakers (which already work) and the headphone jack (which has, until now, remained dead).

Continue reading "Gadget Lab Hackintosh: Now With Added Sound Output" »

Wired.com's Charlie Sorrel and I are happily hacking and modding away our new netbooks, but we'd be selfish to keep all the fun to ourselves. That's why we're holding a contest to see who can pull off the coolest netbook mod by Dec. 5, 2008.

Who will determine the winner? You -- by a majority vote with a Reddit widget. Who will determine the mods? Us and you: You can submit and vote on suggestions in the widget below, and each of us will decide which mods we'd like to pursue.

We'll post tutorials and pictures on our modding adventures. We'll also include the costs of whatever parts we purchase -- but that's just to give you an idea of how much you'd have to spend if you choose to mod your netbooks, too, so don't factor that into your vote on whose Wind is coolest.

As for what the loser has to do, we'll let you submit ideas and vote on that, too -- after the contest ends.

With that said, start humming the Street Fighter II theme in your head. Ready?

Round One, Fight!

Software:

• Running a hacked version of Mac OS X Leopard
• Fixed the dead headphone port problem in OS X
• Two-finger scrolling enabled
• Installed Function Flip to use the volume and display-brightness keys without having to hold down Fn

Hardware:

• Installed a Dell Wireless-N DW 1500 mini PCI for Airport connection ($50 from UK seller)
• 3-cell battery (about two hours of battery life)
• 1GB RAM (standard)
• 160GB hard-disk drive (standard)

Net Cost: Computer ($500) + Parts ($50) = $550

Software:

• Running a hacked version of Mac OS X Leopard

Hardware:

• 6-cell battery (about four hours of battery life)
• Installed a Dell DW 1390 Wireless mini PCI card for Airport connection ($12 on eBay)
• Upgraded to 2GB RAM (1GB RAM = $16 on eBay)
• 160 GB hard disk drive (standard)

Net Cost: Computer ($480) + Parts ($28) = $508

Submit your suggestions for netbook mods/hacks you'd like to see in the widget below.

Continue reading "Battle of the Winds: Gadget Lab's Netbook Hacking Contest, Round One" »

Call me a hypocrite: I bought a netbook. In the recent past I said I'd wait a bit longer for the young, diminutive chaps to "mature" (i.e. get lighter and more powerful), but I tend to change my mind as easily as I make snap decisions. (This is probably why my relationships fail.) So I couldn't help but give in to the same mini notebook that won over the likes of Wired.com's Charlie Sorrel: The MSI Wind.

What's silly is that I have absolutely no need for one: My first-generation, 15-inch MacBook Pro and I are running two years strong. So why did I cave? First and foremost, I kept writing articles about the puny scoundrels -- from how they're revolutionizing computers to how easy they are to hack. The more I interviewed netbook owners, the more excited I got about the idea of purchasing one of these inexpensive, pared-down devices that I could modify into the computer of my dreams.

Second, I don't buy stuff very often; I'd like to think I live a pretty minimalistic life. So on the rare occasion that marketing and the media (in this case, myself) succeed in mesmerizing me into believing there's a void in my life that can be filled with a material, the desire to make a purchase is beyond my control. 

Third, I'm a cafe rat, and lugging around my MacBook Pro avec its bulky power brick began to tire me. And I thought, why not leave my MacBook Pro in the office and reserve a small, lightweight netbook at home for casual use and cafe squatting? Deviates from my philosophy of minimalism, I know -- but the idea was appealing to me. And for $300 to $600 (about as much as people shovel up for smartphones nowadays), if this turned out to be a mistake, it wouldn't be a very expensive one.

And then there was a sale on Amazon for the six-cell MSI Wind -- $20 off the original price, bringing it down to $480 with free shipping and no tax. Next thing you know I was eating up my words about "waiting to buy one" as frantically as a mouse gnawing off his own foot to free himself from a glue trap. Downed a cocktail, uttered a Hail Mary to Tupac's ghost, and punched in my credit card number. End of story.

My Wind arrived last week, and of course I started upgrading and hacking it over the weekend. The little champ is running a hacked version of Mac OS X Leopard with 2 gigs of RAM, as well as a third-party Wi-Fi card for Apple's Airport connection.

But wait -- two netbooks in Gadget Lab? You guessed it: Why not spice this up with some competitive fun? Sorrel and I are starting a netbook modding contest, where we're allowing you, Gadget Lab readers, to vote on mods you'd like to see either one of us pull off. Details of the contest to come in my next post. May the best man win!

See also:

• Cheap, Easy-to-Mod NetBooks Are a Hacker's Paradise
• Run Mac OS X on an Eee PC
• OS X Running on Lenovo Netbook
• Tiny Notes Net Big Gains: The Netbook Revolution
• It Lives! Gadget Lab's Netbook Running OS X Leopard

Photo: Brian X. Chen/Wired.com

Here's a completely ghetto DIY project which you can complete using the things you have in your house right now. From Instructables, we bring you the "Ergonomic Laptop Stand Made From a Coat Hanger".

In the picture, right, you can just see the ends of the wire hanger restraining the bottom corners of a rather panicked-looking laptop. Below, you can see how it works.

Continue reading "Instant Project: DIY Coathanger Notebook Stand" »

An enterprising Russian hacker has ripped apart both his car's dashboard and his Eee PC (701G) and recombined them into a rather excellent in-car computer. It's no simple mod, either: The perpetrator, named Dali, added a USB touchscreen, USB Bluetooth, a USB GPS unit (plus, of course, a USB hub), and a wireless keyboard and joystick mouse.

The result is a location-aware entertainment system running what looks like a skinned version of Windows XP -- enough to distract even the most focussed driver. While the result is undoubtedly very professional looking (the fit and finish makes this look like a factory-added option), it wasn't easy. Take a look at the step by step photo gallery to see the work that went into this mod. And while you're there, please note the absolutely huge heat-sink on the Eee's motherboard.

The original case for eeePS701 [Eee PC.ru via Laptop Mag via Lilliputing]

How-to gallery [Photofile]

Therer are many reasons to love this MSI Wind mod (although it is actually a Medion Akoya Mini, just like the Gadget Lab Hackintosh), not least the name: WoodWind. The wood-effect vinyl has been applied beautifully, free of unsightly seams and bubbles. The effect is to make the netbook look like a 1970s Music Center -- it even has a pointless flourish inside -- the wood covered trackpad (below).

Modder and MSI Wind forum member tankboyben has been asked if the trackpad works (that was our first question), but he hasn't yet answered. We asume it can't be made much worse than the unadorned trackpad (and tankboyben is using a Logitech Nano mouse there, anyway). He has further plans to retro-fy his Wind with stickers (in addition to the awful arrow-and-heart sticker on the wrist-rest)

im thinkin either a logo from and old casio calculator, a rainbow apple sticker or a HAL9000 eye

I'm with him on the rainbow Apple sticker -- I'm looking for one for my own Wind (or Akoya). For this mod, though, I recommend something orange and silver, for the real 70s feel.

I actually did something similar to this, years ago, with a Commodore Amiga, although the design of that meant I had to cut out a hole for the keyboard, with predictably messy results. It did, however, have a small cutout photograph of a man on a sit-on lawnmower, riding across the top of the function keys.

Check out my msi WoodWind! [MSI Wind Forums]

Continue reading "WoodWind: Netbook Covered in Fine-Grained Vinyl" »

Yesterday, I replaced the Ralink Wi-Fi card in my Medion Akoya Mini, the Gadget Lab netbook Hackintosh. When we first installed Mac OS X Leopard onto the Wind clone, there were a few things that didn't work so well, and one of those was the wireless networking, something pretty imp ortant for a tiny, take-anywhere netbook. So I ordered a new card from Ebay and swapped it in.

Continue reading "Hackintosh Update: Installing a New Wireless Card" »

Thanks to their utilitarian design and low prices, netbooks are inspiring a booming subculture of hackers souping up their liliputers with touchscreens, Bluetooth and unauthorized operating systems like Apple's Mac OS X.

As netbook sales continue to soar, more and more tech-savvy grease monkeys are dismantling netbooks to add fancy features including back-lit keyboards, GPS and longer-lasting batteries.

"I'd say it was a work of passion and love for computing," said San Diego resident David Winter, who has crammed three solid state drives into a netbook, upping the capacity to 128 GB. (Normally, netbooks only ship with solid state drives in double-digit capacities.) His next project? A laser espionage microphone that he plans to implant into a netbook, which will enable him to record sound from behind someone's window.

Netbooks may seem like unlikely devices to attract the interest of hardware hackers, who traditionally have been drawn to bigger iron. Compared to full-size laptops, netbooks are low-powered and have limited feature sets. But in the face of a broad economic meltdown, hacking a $400 netbook makes more sense than risking a pricier, full-featured laptop.

Netbook modding is becoming so popular, Winter has launched a netbook-modding business: Winter Computer Solutions, which mods customers' netbooks with GPS, Bluetooth, DVD readers or HDTV tuners.

Winter, who runs his burgeoning business on his netbook, is known for his remarkable netbook-mod stunts. He once sold an Asus Eee PC netbook sporting every mod you can imagine: A 7-inch touchscreen, Air Play for transmitting FM radio, an overclocked processor, a Bluetooth adapter — and the list keeps on going.

Continue reading "Cheap, Easy-to-Mod NetBooks Are a Hacker's Paradise" »

Very cool: Tech-savvy musician Rob Morris hooked up his Nintendo Wiimote to his guitar and used the controller's accelerometer data to manipulate the instrument's sounds. Check out the video above: He tilts his guitar upward (Star Power, anyone?) to change the pitch, and then he moves on to crazier sounds by pressing the Wiimote buttons. 

[Hack a Day via Gizmodo]

Yesterday, Apple didn't announce a netbook. When asked why, Jobs replied "That's a nascent market that's just getting started, and we'll see how it goes."

Nascent it may be, but it isn't stopping people rolling their own OS X netbooks. We did it here at Gadget Lab (in fact, I just put in a new, Apple-supported wireless card this morning — more on that soon), and now Flung, over at NetBook Tech, has managed it with Lenovo's new IdeaPad S10, which we previously declared "The Best Netbook We've Seen All Year."

Flung has posted an exhaustive how-to, suitable for n00bs and veterans alike. He used the same WindOSx86 distribution that we did (although we actually rolled our own with the help of one of its creators, Stellarolla), and the initial part looks to be as easy as it was for us. Because WindOSx86 is optimized for the MSI Wind and its variants (hence the name), Flung had to iron out a few problems using the command line, and even then not everything worked out of the box:

 

Once logged in, you’ll notice right off the bat that some things don’t work. In particular, WiFi, Sound, LAN and Power Management fail to work after the initial install.

Thankfully, Flung provides links to the needed extras (kernel extensions, mostly) needed to fix things up. Like the Wind, the S10 still doesn't run OS X 100 percent: The mike and headphone jacks are dead, as is Ethernet and, alarmingly, the sleep mode. But unlike the Wind, WiFi is fine (the S10 uses the a Broadcom card, the same brand used by Apple).

We're certainly not getting tired of these hacks. It's getting easier and easier, thanks to the fine work of real hackers who run the OSx86 project. So easy, in fact, that — if you are prepared to wipe a working install and break a few license agreements — we'd say it would make a great first hacking project.

Guide to installing OS X on Lenovo IdeaPad S10 [NetBook Tech. Thanks, Michael and Felix!]

The beauty of the Intel incarnation of the Macintosh is that, if Apple doesn't make the Mac you want, you can hack your own. It takes some work, but in theory it is possible to run OS X on any modern Intel x86 machine. Here we see a Mac tablet, put together by YouTuber stulowe2006.

Although it doesn't come across in the video, this Smart Car -- despite being perched atop four giant monster-truck wheels -- can still drive easily under a standard North American automobile*.

These things are great fun. I took one out for a test drive a few years back and sent the saleman into a panic as I took my turn at the wheel. Shimmying across from the passenger side, I caught my leg on the handbrake . The salesman stood on the sidewalk, aghast as the car rolled down the hill with me trapped between the seats. If only I'd been in this monster version, the little kid I ran into wouldn't have caused quite so much damage to the car.

Smart Car Monster Truck [YouTube via New Launches]

*It can't

Researchers at the Linux Plumbers Conference managed to trim the boot time for an SSD Eee PC from around 45 seconds down to a mere five seconds. By cutting out some superflous processes called during the system startup, Arjan van de Ven and Auke Kok got the netbook from cold start to fully ready in record time. And this was no faux-boot, with a nice desktop picture presented on screen while the computer grinds away in the background -- after those five seconds the Eee was sitting with both the disk and the CPU idle.

De Ven and Kok used modified versions of Fedora and Moblin for the demonstration. The Eee's solid state drive helped, but the same setup run on an HDD Thinkpad went from cold to hot in just ten seconds -- not much longer than a recovery from hibernation in Windows.

The problem with a stock OS boot is that many different processes are starting up and checking things out. Many of these are not needed by 99% of users. For example, Fedora starts "sendmail", a process which adds two seconds to the boot time and is only needed if you are running your own mail server. On a laptop, even for nerdy power users, this is unlikely. And while two seconds doesn't sound much, if you add a few of these together you end up with a lot of wasted time.

We don't know which is more surprising -- that a full startup can be trimmed to just five seconds, or that today's computers take so long in the first place.

LPC: Booting Linux in five seconds [LPC via Liliputing]

Back in the 1990s, portable consoles were expensive, underpowered and came with terrible battery life. That Nintendo’s first generation Game Boy (born 1989) lasted for so long, with its chiptune sounds and monochrome display, is an indictment of the technology of the period -- the Game Boy Color didn’t arrive until 1998. But what of those old games today? Can we take the cream of the old school on the road? Why yes, and if you have a tiny netbook, you (almost) have everything you need.

As it turns out, the MSI Wind (or any Atom-powered netbook) is easily up to the task of emulation. For this quick project, I downloaded SNES9x, which appears to play most things and gives quick and easy controller configuration (more on that in a moment). The emulator is free and works on the Mac (or Hackintosh). There are other emulators for Linux and Windows which are easy enough to find online.

Continue reading "Turn An MSI Wind into a Super Nintendo " »

If all of today's MSI Wind news wasn't enough for you, here's a MacBook Mini, fashioned by German hacker Florian. All it took was a Dremel, six white LEDs and a very steady hand. Inside is a little less tidy, with tape and aluminum foil holding things in place and bouncing back a little extra light.

Florian even took the time to make a spoof ad in the style of the MacBook Air spot (below), featuring his diminutive machine emerging from a tiny envelope. The irony hits double for me, as I keep my HackBook in a Jiffy Bag. Note the Aldi logo at the end -- that's the low-rent supermarket where Florian bought his Akoya Wind clone.

Shining apple - MacBookMini [MSI Wind – Das Forum]

UPDATE: This story has been edited from the original.

One thing that isn't often mentioned in the world of OSx86 hacking (or, as it is also known, turning a PC into a Mac) is the rather PC-like need to update drivers. With a real Mac, your software updates take care of all that stuff for you. With a FrankenMac, those same software updates offer a similar service, but due to all the unsupported hardware inside a Hackintosh, hackers need to do a bit of extra work.

The best part is that these new drivers can up the functionality. Hacker Slinger2g has released on the MSI Wind forum a Mac driver for the Intel GMA950 video chipset. Drop this into your Wind and you'll get full suport for mirroring mode with an external monitor, something that has been somewhat hit or miss with previous versions. You can visit the MSI Wind forum to grab a copy. You'll need to be running OS X 10.5.5 to use it, but the driver is all packed up in an installer, just like a real Apple update.

Next, and potentially bigger news for Wi-Fi-less Wind owners, is a new native Mac driver for the Realtek Wi-Fi cards, which should be going live sometime soon. Of the hardware problems with these Wind Hackintosh, the lack of proper Wi-Fi is probably the worst aspect -- after all, what use is a tethered netbook? The "luckier" buyers end up with a Ralink WLAN card in their machines, but the official driver is hideous (you can't even paste in network password).

Wind forum member Marckie emailed the folks at Realtek and it turns out that they are actually working on it. Here's the reply:

 

On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 9:50 AM, [removed]@realtek.com.tw> wrote:

 

Dear Sir,

 

Thanks for your e-mail.

 

We are development 8187SE Mac driver now and expect release to Realtek web site later.

 

Regards,

 

[removed]

Of course, "now" and "later" in this context could mean anything, but the big surprise is that Realtek are working on an official driver at all. As far as we know, Apple uses only Broadcom wireless chipsets in the Mac, which means that either Realtek is supporting external wireless dongles or specifically developing for OSx86 hackers.

The third piece of good news is that Stellarola, one of the two hackers who put together the MSIWindOSX installer disk , will soon be releasing a fix for the sound inputs and outputs on the Wind, which up to now have remained completely dead. Promises in hacking forums should, of course, be read with some skepticism, but Stella is a crazed hacker who never seems to sleep, and his promises have a habit of turning out to be true.

If this is all too much for you, just stick around. Just like the real Apple updates, the OSx86 community packages everything together now and again and releases it in a bundle. When that happens, we'll let you know.

A developer on Tuesday released a patch enabling Apple TV to play practically any DRM-free multimedia file with the insertion of a thumb drive into the box.

Normally, Apple TV can only play video and music files that are compatible with iTunes or bought through the iTunes Store, but coder Scott Davilla's patch essentially "Jailbreaks" the TV set-top box from such restrictions by installing an open-source media center called Boxee.

Currently in limited, invite-only alpha testing, the patch automatically installs itself onto a thumb drive and adds a Boxee button to the main menu of Apple TV. Clicking on Boxee brings you to an interface allowing you to view about 30 types of DRM-free multimedia (e.g., DIVX, AVI, MKZ and BIN) from any computer connected to your network; you can even play multimedia through internet streams (e.g. Hulu and ABC.com videos).

Though similar hacks, called "patchsticks," have been released in the past for Apple TV, Davilla's is the first to install Boxee -- an open source media browser that was first released for Mac OS X and Linux -- onto the Apple TV. And since Davilla's patchstick includes an automatic installer, it's easier to apply than past hacks.

In addition to playing media on your network, Boxee enables other friends running Boxee to view information on what you just watched or listened to as well. For example, your Boxee buddies will be able to see that you just streamed the latest episode of Lost through ABC.com, and they can then click through to the site to watch it, too.

"We think Boxee will be a great complement for Apple TV," said Andrew Kippen, a Boxee spokesperson. "It'll spare users the need to spend $600 on a Mac mini just to view their DRM-free media."

According to Kippen, Apple has been unaware of Boxee being developed for Apple TV. He said Davilla wasn't worried about Apple "quashing" Boxee, since Apple has not fought Apple TV hacks in the past, and the corporation thus far appears fixated on hackers tampering with iPhone.

However, Boxee emerges at sour times for Apple in its developer community. The corporation recently rejected a few developers' applications from distribution through its iPhone App Store on the grounds that they "duplicated" iTunes functionality. Podcaster has been the prime example: The application allowed iPhones to remotely download Podcasts without having to sync through iTunes --  but Apple rejected the app, saying it was too similar to iTunes. Some have construed Apples actions as anticompetitive practices.

Though Davilla is not concerned with Apple, Boxee would be directly competing with iTunes by allowing Apple TV users to freely stream any content they wish, rather than pushing them to purchase multimedia through the iTunes Store. Kippen acknowledged this as a possibility, but he noted Boxee, and the tools to install it, are open source and that Davilla has been careful to respect Apple's intellectual property.

Currently Boxee is invitation only, so those interested in installing it will have to request an invite. (Invited users can also share invites.) The current patch can only be downloaded and run by Mac users, but Davilla is releasing Windows and Linux versions next week. The patch also only works with bootable thumb drives. (If your drive isn't bootable by default, you can modify it with an HP utility.)

After receiving an invite, you can install Boxee using the following instructions:

Continue reading "Hack Apple TV With a Thumb Drive, Set It Free" »

Getting the cellphone water damaged is everyone's worst nightmare and it is likely to happen to some of us at least once.

A Verizon EnV phone user, Bisquick, had his phone run through a washing machine and found it completely waterlogged. Instead of throwing away the device, he took it apart, cleaned it with some Q-tips, paper towel and a blow dryer and had it working again.

Instructables has a neat how-to by him with pictures and step-by-step instructions on taking care of a water damaged phone. It explains how to carefully take out the screws in the back, remove the back case, clean the circuit board and reassemble the piece.

No guarantees though on whether it will work in the end. And be warned, messing around with your phone will void its warranty.

But, hey, isn't the phone already broken?

Photo: Bisquick/Instructables.com

Apple mods don't get much cooler than this.

Gizmodo stumbled upon photos of this model of a Mac Pro composed of 2,588 LEGO bricks. But wait -- it's not just a Mac. The plastic-brick tower actually contains both a Mac mini and a hacked PC running Mac OS X. The PC is a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Quad; the Mac mini is a 1.66GHz Core Duo. There's even a turtleneck-wearing Steve Jobs LEGO man perched on top of the Apple logo.

I'm not entirely sure why you'd need a Mac mini in addition to a more powerful hacked PC, but I'm guessing they threw that in because Hackintoshes still act a little funky running OS X.

I'd like one. How about we arrange a trade? My office PowerBook G4 for your LEGO Mac Pro? Eh? Ehh?

Perfect Lego Mac Pro Is Two Computers in One [Gizmodo]

UPDATE: This story has been edited from the original.

This week we took an in depth look at the MSI Wind, or rather a slightly different model from the same factory rebranded as the Medion Akoya Mini. Then we took the poor vigin XP machine and installed Mac OS X Leopard on it, with the surprising result that the little machine actually runs OS X noticeably faster than the pre-installed XP Home Premium.

Today we’ll take a look at the experience of running OS X on a netbook, and give you a rundown of the various flavors of the Wind family and how they differ.

Continue reading "OS X on a Netbook: The Good, the Bad, and the Pretty" »

UPDATE: This story has been edited from the original.

This week we took an in depth look at the MSI Wind, or rather a slightly different model from the same factory rebranded as the Medion Akoya Mini. Then we took the poor vigin XP machine and installed Mac OS X Leopard on it, with the surprising result that the little machine actually runs OS X noticeably faster than the pre-installed XP Home Premium.

Today we’ll take a look at the experience of running OS X on a netbook, and give you a rundown of the various flavors of the Wind family and how they differ.

Continue reading "OS X on a Netbook: The Good, the Bad, and the Pretty" »

A professional photographer with Panocamera.com was tired of toting his laptop around on his shoots, so he thought, "What would MacGyver do?" And he modified a Nintendo DS into a remote control for his Canon DSLR.

The process, documented at Panocamera, involved using a devkitPro toolset to write a program for the Nintendo DS to control the DSLR. And then connecting the camera to the game device required some tampering of ports and pin connectors.

Pretty neat stuff -- though it's much easier said than done, to the average techy at least. Panocamera is pondering selling this "mod" eventually for various DSLRs.

Panocamera [via Reddit]

Photo courtesy of Panocamera

UPDATE: This story has been edited from the original.

Yesterday, we covered the MSI Wind clone from Medion, the Akoya. The little netbook turned out to be a wonder, albeit with a few flaws. The one thing that would make it better? OS X. When I mentioned the plan in yesterday's post, the comments covered all the usual flamewar bases. My favorite:

I bet you sit in your loft apartment with your turtleneck and your macs and your ieverything and you listen to some band you don't really like cos they're 'cool' and you probably also wear sandals (with socks) and drink coffee from pretentious places out of a pretentious mug. Oh, and you probably wear stripey sweaters and have a tweed scarf. Ok, I feel better now ;)

Not all of the responses were so silly. Gadget Lab reader and – it turns out – hacker extraordinaire Onetrack emailed. He and fellow hacker Stellarolla have put together a single-disk install. We'll be posting a full how-to soon.

Continue reading "It Lives! Gadget Lab's Netbook Running OS X Leopard" »

I think I'm in love. Gina Trapani's new bike is one of a small fleet of GPS- and cameraphone-equipped bicycles that Flickr has deployed in several cities around the world. Flickr + GPS + solar power + bicycles = how can I not be utterly charmed?

The bikes have handlebar-mounted cameraphones (Nokia N95s, based on the metadata in the Flickr photos) that are set to snap every 60 seconds while the bike is in motion. The photos then get uploaded, along with their geodata, to a special Flickr account.

I'm not sure there's much purpose to this, other than to tout Flickr's corporate parent, Yahoo. (The bikes are part of a "Start Wearing Purple" marketing campaign.) Still, the hack is nifty, and I'd welcome an open source version of it.

Wish you had a Flickr bike? Me too. Trapani says you can do the same thing with your own Symbian Series 60 phone by downloading Yahoo's ZoneTag software and strapping the phone to your handlebars. Sadly, iPhone users like me will have to wait.

"Flickr Bikes" Photo-Map Locales Across the Globe [Lifehacker]

Continue reading "Flickr Bikes Shoot Pics With Solar and Pedal Power" »

I'm this close to buying a netbook -- my MacBook Pro is far too big to carry around with me, but these tiny little boxes can slide into a bag unnoticed and be instantly ready when inspiration strikes (usually after the third glass of wine). The trouble is, I really don't want to use Windows, and while Linux is OK, I just want a mini version of my Mac in my pocket.

Today's news brings us another Eee PC mod, this time by tinkerer Gregory Cohen. Above you see the eeeMac, an Asus machine running OS X 10.5 Leopard, my OS of choice. It looks like the big-screen 901, which means this is running on a Atom processor. Gregory even had the good manners to put an Apple sticker on the back for that familiar, pretentious glowing advertisement us Mac users love.

UPDATE: Gregory tells us in the comments that the glowing Apple was ripped from an old PowerBook: "It's not a sticker, that's an cast piece of plastic salvaged from a dead Lombard. It lights up when the machine is on." Even better!

Gregory hasn't given any details of the hack, but a friend of the family noted on his Picasa album page that Wi-Fi is up and running, but ethernet isn't (just like the MacBook Air!)

This is the kind of thing that makes me want to go out and buy an Eee right now. If it wasn't for the truly awful keyboard and mouse buttons, I would. As it is, I'm holding out for the Dell Minispiron, although I might blow in the direction of MSI's Wind. And when I do, I'll be hacking it into a Mac and posting a full how-to here on Wired.

EeeMac [Picasa Gregory Cohen via TUAW]

Esquire took a bold (and expensive) step in releasing the world's first magazine with an e-ink cover (or -- more correctly -- a small e-ink patch on a cover). The internet said "Boo".

But it might not be so bad -- Esquire may have just put a cheap and hackable pair of e-ink panels into the hands of 100,000 hackers. Over at Make, the inimitable Phil Torrone has torn the assembly apart and found a wealth of user-modifiable gubbins inside:

 

I think someone out there will likely reflash the PIC and make the segments go on/off at different time and perhaps put other displays on it, there's a little bit of hacking to be had but not that much really. [emphasis added]

That's right. For the price of a magazine, any capable hacker can play with a couple of e-ink panels. I will be fitting mine into a pair of spectacles and programming them to show a pair of clear, bright and blinking eyes. That way I can sleep my hangovers off at my desk and none of the Wired.com editors will even notice (I usually snore while I am awake anyway).

Esquire E-Ink cover hacking? - take apart photos and more ... [Make]

After iPhone users discovered a major security flaw exposing their private data, Wired.com published a how-to on securing the iPhone. But yikes -- apparently that's not enough, as a hacker has stepped up to the plate to demonstrate how to break through iPhone's security measures.

In a Webcast to be held Sept. 11, hacker and data-forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski will show how to bypass the iPhone's passcode lock using a custom firmware bundle. The webcast is aimed at educating those in law enforcement to perform forensics on iPhones and iPod touches dropped by criminals. The method would allow them to recover, process and remove sensitive data from said devices. 

"This live presentation is aimed towards law enforcement and anyone else who has a need to access the not-so-readily available data on an iPhone," says the webcast description.

Uh, that last part -- "anyone else who has a need to access" -- is troubling. Couldn't that include malicious hackers or paranoid significant others? Hmm.

Wired.com will tune in on the event next week and write a summary of the webcast. You can register to view it, too, at O'Reilly Webcasts.  

(Photo credit: .schill/Flickr)

Here's a hack gadgetheads will love. What happens when Roomba meets the Wii Balance Board? Say hello to the "Surfin ba"

Japanese Roomba enthusiast Ron Tajima attached a serial Bluetooth adapter to the Roomba. He then used the Wii Balance Board's Bluetooth capability to steer the Roomba around. The extent to which he leans on the Balance Board controls the radius of the Roomba's turn and its direction.

Check out the YouTube video with its kitschy music and sped up assembly footage making it all seem so easy! Even easier than just letting the Roomba do its own thing.

Via Kotaku

The claimed purpose of the Speed Vest is safety: It gives a glowing, live readout of your speed to increase "motorists' awareness of both cyclists and speed limits."

What it's really for, though, is showing off. The six inch high digits are made from electroluminescent wire which will glow for six hours on a single AA battery. The brain of the operation is the Arduino, a programmable circuit which in this case takes the speed readings from an on-wheel sensor and uses the information to control the lights.

Here's a video of a test run done last week in Minneapolis:

More a visual joke than a real working hack, Faraiq's Apple Walkpod is just an iPod cracked open with a cassette tape stuffed inside, but as a comment on the history of portable music, it is priceless.

It encompasses everything: Size, both physical and metaphorical (inches vs. gigabytes); business (Sony vs. Apple) and society (buying music vs. copying it). Even the choice of tape is part of the gag: "Forever Changes", Love's 1967 album , which was re-released this year.

Apple Walkpod [Faraiq via BBG]

Who knew tiny houses could be so big?

After I featured the portable, cheap Tumbleweed houses two weeks ago, many readers expressed their enthusiasm for the idea and pointed me towards several online forums of tiny house fanatics. They also requested that I look out for similar designs that could be realistically implemented.

Here are some that I've found:

The Voglreiter Auto Residence

The Voglreiter Auto house in Germany (lead photo above) is a luxurious tiny house that is supposed to ride out as a car. But it has a problem: The whole internal combustion design is non-existent and its tires are just a design façade. Disappointing, but its two-story environmentally focused design is a result of a dome-like structure that circulates energy efficiently. And the construction price fits in with other tiny house models, between $60-80K.

Basically, all this house needs is a hard-core motor, fat tires, and desire to take it out on the road. 

Continue reading "In Search of Tiny, Affordable Houses " »

Is there anything that lasers can't do? The answer, if you need it, is "No". They're even useful in the kitchen. Here we see two cooking hacks which are so perfect in their synergy between nerds and their favorite foods that we wonder why we haven't seen them before.

The ingredients

Pizza

Coffee

Geeks

Lasers

Method

Take one pizza, place on an industrial laser line cutter and stand back. You pizza will be divided into slices so perfectly accurate, you will never have to argue about who gets the biggest.

Next, place three cups of foul instant coffee powder and cold water into a the chamber of a 2KW laser. Spin into position and briefly zap, until you have a steaming but tasteless brew. If you are feeling fancy, also boil some water for tea.

Serving suggestion: Pour the coffee away, and buy beer. Enjoy.

Continue reading "Laser Pizza Cutter" »

Cellphone cameras are junk, right? All those megapixels squeezed onto tiny sensors mean noise, and lots of it. But you know, the plastic-lensed Lomo film cameras have crappy images too, and people love them. There's something to be said for the serendipity involved in using substandard hardware: The happy accidents that result can be a lot more satisfying than a perfect, Photoshop-groomed image.

UK artist Kerrin Mansfield knows this, and hacked together a neat little version of the Brando iPhone Telescope we covered on Monday. The photos you see below were taken using a Nokia 6101 taped to a Chinon monocular. The results are dreamy and blurred; they have odd colour shifts and a rather mysterious aspect. And we love them.

Continue reading "Cellphone Plus Monocular Equals Telephoto Camera Hack" »

Original photo [edjar/Flickr]

In a story straight out of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, three MIT undergraduates concocted a scheme to hack Boston's transit payment system, the Charlie Card (no relation). The students managed to reprogram the cards to increase their credit balance, thus allowing them to ride the subway for free.

Of course, being MIT students, they decided to write up their prank as an academic paper. But the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), already stinging from such a thorough pwning, took it to the courts, citing computer fraud, and asking for time to fix the system before the paper was presented. It is also thought that an MBTA official was overheard saying "It's not fair. I'm telling my mom."

MBTA lost. Judge George O'Toole ruled that "presenting an academic paper would not violate computer fraud laws." Go hackers.

The students, Zack Anderson, R.J. Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa, went on to receive "top marks" for their paper, from which we can conclude the following: RFID is very insecure, and MIT is awesome.

For more coverage, check out Wired.com's Threat Level blog: Federal Judge Throws Out Gag Order Against Boston Students in Subway Case

A headset is now the law in most states if you want to use your cellphone while driving. But what about your laptop?

Here’s a low-tech hack from a New York Times reader who uses a laptop while driving to chat with his wife, who has hearing loss.

Use brackets to hold a laptop in the car. Combine it with a lapel mike and a voice recognition software such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

Add in a wireless card, and this could also be an easy way to get online and use a laptop from your car. Just be sure to keep your eyes -- and your mind -- on the road.

David Pogue’s Mailbag [The New York Times]

(Photo credit: Asurroca/Flickr)

We think that the normally excellent Fail Blog is being a little mean to this primitive but clever Polish hot water solution. Both Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson would be proud of the higgledy piggledy home hack.

Of course, just because this invention doesn't outright fail, it doesn't mean that a careless user of electricity and water isn't eligible for a Darwin Award (entry number 13).

Photo page [Hot Water Fail Fail Blog via Street Use]

The folks at Hackmii have released an installer which will will let you play DVDs on your Wii, something which Nintendo's console should really do already.

You won't need to have a mod chip inside the Wii for this to work. According to the instructions, "The DVDX installer instead will install a small, hidden, channel on your Wii that allows you to read DVDs on an unmodified system". You will also be able to play movie files from an SD card inserted into the Wii, and future versions will let you play games from DVDs you have burned yourself. So you can, you know, keep your original discs safe.

But the best part of this whole story is the method for cracking your Wii open in the first place, which reads like some cross between William Gibson and Disney. You download a file, put it on an SD card and slip it into the Wii. Then, you play The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Then the magic happens. You load the cracked game-save file and "either walk backwards or talk to the man standing in front of you".

Apparently, by giving your horse an extra long name, the Wii is compromised. But only when you talk to the man, and only if you do it before he "reminds you to go the other way to get the horse". This is brilliant, and the way all hacks should work. Want Blu-ray in your Wii? No problem. Just convince an audience member to stab your grunting opponent in Wii Tennis.

Project page [Hackmii via BBGadgets]

Setting up your Wii for Homebrew [Wiibrew]

why would someone want a longer segway? isnt the whole point to move quicker whithought using too much space

A big part of the American dream is owning your own home. Too bad the mortgage crisis, inflation, and joblessness have put that out of reach.

Or have they? Maybe you just need to buy a smaller house. A really small one. Like, 65 square feet of house.

The miniscule Tumbleweed houses might be an affordable option if they're placed in a safe area and you are willing to give up your enormous Star Wars/He-Man toy collection and stick with only a gadget or two. (Frankly, I couldn't do that.)

The houses vary in size, from teeny (65 sq. feet) to tiny (117 sq. feet), but most include the most basic things a person needs: a heater, closets, electricity, a bathroom, kitchen, and a sleeping loft. Some even have vaulted ceilings and others have stainless steel counters, for those durable-surface fetishists. The cheapest house, the XS-House, runs for about $37,000, and they can go up to nearly $50,000.

Continue reading "Tiny Houses Fit Microscopic Land, Budgets" »

Open Tech started selling  its Mac clones Tuesday morning -- even knowing that it could potentially face a lawsuit from Apple.

By selling Mac clones, Open Tech is following the footsteps of Mac cloner Psystar, which is currently in a legal war with Apple. The major difference between the two companies is that Open Tech is selling computers with a how-to kit for users to install the operating system of their choice, including Mac OS X Leopard. Psystar's Mac clones came with Leopard preinstalled.

Two Open Tech computers are up for sale: The $620 Open Tech Home includes a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor, a 500GB hard drive and 2GB of RAM; the $1,200 Open Tech XT includes a 2.4GHz Intel Core Quad processor, a 640GB hard drive and 4GB of RAM.

Also read:

• Open Tech: Apple Can't Stop Us From Making Mac Clones
• Attorney: Open Tech Mac Cloner Subject to Legal Troubles
• Another Mac Clone to Come
• Apple Finally Sues Psystar

The Openmoko Neo Freerunner phone was released only a few weeks ago, and already, a customized version called the W.E. Phone is now available for purchase. So what's the difference between the naked-as-a-baby Neo and the Canadian-based W.E.? The latter comes with a full bundle of custom Google applications, on top of the core GNU/Linux OS base with dialing, SMS and contacts.

Oh yeah, it also comes in an ugly batch of colors, including a tartan-weave plaid case that spells out 'Debian' in Morse Code.

For those of you not aware of the profoundly geeky implications of this design, all you need to know is that the Debian Project is another free and open source OS project and that attendees of the Debian Linux conference in Scotland last year actually wore kilts made out of this pattern. Now that’s truly g33ky.

Continue reading "First Openmoko Custom Phone Now Available and Wears a Debian Plaid Kilt" »

If you can't fight the man, then join him.

That is, if you're an iPhone hacker, at least. Our friends at Ars Technica point out that an Apple job opening has popped up for an "iPhone Security Engineer." The engineer's duties include overseeing iPhone's security architecture and developing "proof of concept" attacks on iPhone's security.

Pretty cool: It's like the dork equivalent of the FBI hiring an inmate to infiltrate a gang of criminals. Of course, if Apple finds someone truly "exceptional," he could kill a lot of fun for those who have happily hacked their handsets.

Apple says, "Want to hack iPhones for a living?" [Ars Technica]

(Photo credit: stuckincustoms/Flickr)

Talk tough but keep your ass covered.

That might be the motto of companies who want to take on famously litigious Apple by making Mac clones.

An official from Open Tech has said the company is confident it can sell its Mac clones and avoid a lawsuit from Apple. He wasn't so confident that he was willing to let us publish his full name, though.

Tom, an Open Tech employee who asked that his last name not be revealed to protect him from legal retribution, said his company's legal team has carefully looked over the complaint Apple filed against Mac cloner Psystar to ensure Open Tech doesn't meet a similar fate. He added that Open Tech's method of selling computers with how-to kits for users to install the operating system of their choice -- OS X Leopard, Windows XP, Ubuntu or Vista -- would not violate Apple's copyrights.

"If Apple didn't want to have this problem with us or anybody, all they have to do is remove their software from their shelves, because if they don't want that software used then they shouldn't even sell it," Tom said in a phone interview.

Saying Apple has a "ruthless reputation" for stomping Mac cloners, Tom noted it was possible Apple might allege contributory infringement. Contributory infringement requires two conditions: 1.) The company is aware of which violation(s) it is assisting others in committing; 2.) The company provides materials to assist users in infringement.

Apple's end-user agreement reads, “You agree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-labeled computer, or to enable others to do so.”    

Open Tech emerged a week after Apple sued Mac copycat Psystar, which sold hacked PCs with OS X Leopard preinstalled. Shortly after filing a lawsuit alleging copyright, trademark and shrink-wrap infringement, Apple demanded Psystar recall all the Mac clones it sold. Days later, Psystar's office building appeared for sale in an ad.

Open Tech has not announced a price for its computer lineup. One of the systems will feature a 3.45GHz Intel Pentium D Dual-Core processor, a 500GB hard drive and 3GB of RAM.

Tom said Open Tech is making necessary preparations, as Apple is already beginning to take action.

"We're on guard for the sharks," he said. "They're already coming at us."

If Open Tech follows through with selling Mac clones, it will face legal issues just like the company that sold a similar product before it, according to an intellectual property lawyer.

By selling computers with a how-to kit for users to install OS X Leopard themselves, Open Tech would be subjecting itself to contributory infringement of Apple's end-user agreement, said Carole Handler, an intellectual property lawyer with Wildman Harrold.

"Making the user instead of the company the perpetrator of any violation will not avoid the issue of a new company's contributory infringement and/or vicarious liability for what it facilitates and enables the user to undertake," Handler said in an e-mail interview. "This kind of workaround is not a bar to Apple bringing contributory infringement or vicarious liability claims."

By definition, contributory infringement requires two conditions: 1.) The company is aware of which violation(s) it is assisting others in committing; 2.) The company provides materials to assist users in infringement.

Apple's end-user agreement reads, “You agree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-labeled computer, or to enable others to do so.”

Open Tech emerged just a week after Apple sued Mac copycat Psystar, which sold hacked PCs running OS X Leopard. Shortly after filing suit alleging copyright, trademark and shrink-wrap infringement, Apple demanded Psystar to recall all the Mac clones it sold. Days later, Psystar's office building appeared for sale in an ad.

Open Tech has not announced pricing for its systems. The company was not available for comment before publishing.

Old MacDonald had a dildo, OIOO. So should go the theme song for the OIOO "Tactile-Communication-Device for the Wiimote", a monicker which proves that inventors should never be allow to name their own devices.

We prefer the term Wiibrator, which instantly informs you of this device's teledildonic function. The Wiibrator slides gently onto the end of a standard Wiimote and contains motors, electronics and Bluetooth. Movements in one controller are then translated into ones and zeros, sent over the Internet to your lonely partner, and turned back into good vibrations.

No Wii is required, but you will need a computer with a Bluetooth radio. Valentin Heun, the German inventor, says that the device is sensitive enough to produce vibrations ranging from a gentle caress right up to a jackhammer punch which will rattle your better half's fillings (or as Huen more prudently puts it, "really sexual contact.")

You know what comes (ahem) next. I asked the Lady's opinion. She was rather confused by the design of the second implement, which resembles a donut on a stick. "The hole is tiny," she told me, as I nodded proudly at her highly accurate and objective understanding of size. She also suggested an upgrade. "It should move", she said. "What, you mean wriggle?" I asked. "Yes. The vibrating part is boring. It should move around more when you wave the other one." Finally, I asked "If I was in another country, would you use this?" She smiled and nodded.

The device is not for sale yet, although you can suggest a price on the project's site. I did. $69. Video and more pictures below.

Continue reading "Wiibrator: Motion Sensing Teledildonics" »

Ever since Apple shifted the Mac line to Intel processors, its computers have been getting more and more PC-like in their capabilities. First up was Boot Camp, which lets you run Windows (or Linux) on Mac hardware. Now it's the turn of the overclockers: ZDNet has release a software overclocker for the Mac, called simply ZDNet Clock.

In typical Mac style, the application is simple. You slide the slider to the right to increase the CPU frequency (and also increases the memory clock speed). ZDNet says that an overclocked 2.8GHz Mac Pro will out perform a stock 3.2GHz model, thus saving you $1600 (ZDNet Clock is freeware). However, it's not quite so simple. If you don't do some fine tuning, there could be some serious problems:

If you push the slider all the way to the right, to the maximum frequency, and click on the "Apply" button, the computer will certainly crash.

The tool only works with Intel 5000 or Intel 5400 chipsets, so it's Pro or Xserve only right now. Which is probably a good thing: I don't think my poor MacBooks fans could take all the extra work, and future generations of Sorrels depend on keeping the family jewels cool.

Exclusive: ZDNet overclocking tool enhances performance of Mac Pro [ZDNet. Thanks, Kai!]

These homemade specs could be straight out of Cory Doctow's latest (and possibly greatest) new novel, Little Brother . The simple hack consists of mounting two infrared LEDs into the frames of a pair of sunglasses and running the cables to the earpieces, where they hook up with a couple of button batteries.

Putting on the glasses presses the wires against the batteries and the lights glow protectively, unseen by the human eye, but bright enough to obliterate your image from security cameras. It's a variation on the CCTV-busting infrared headset we featured a while back, only a little more slick. Aside from helping San Francisco's teenagers bring down the DHS, we'd guess that – if these were built into Armani sunglasses – the paparazzi plague would go away overnight.

The original Metacafe video has been taken down. For now, you can see it at Abrutis, link below.

Lunettes anti paparazzi [Abrutis. Thanks daa dee!]

Julius von Bismarck's 'Image Fulgurator' projects stealth images into the photographs of strangers, while keeping those images invisible to human eyes. Depending on whom you ask, it's either a clever hack or an obnoxious intrusion. Naturally, we had to find out more.

Yesterday, von Bismarck's device made its premature debut on the internet. Today we met him in his hometown, Berlin, to talk about the device, the thinking behind it and the inevitable deluge of e-mails from viral marketers wanting use it to smash their way further into our brains.

But first, about that name: According to von Bismarck, 'Image Fulgurator' comes from the Latin for 'lightning' (fulgur) and means 'Flash Thrower'.

Continue reading "The Brains Behind the Image Fulgurator" »

This is the Image Fulgurator, half guerrilla-art stunt and half homemade-gadget awesomeness. Berlin based artist Julius von Bismarck uses his oddly named camera-mod to project images onto street furniture where they appear in the photos of strangers, but remain invisible to their eyes.

How? It's simple. The device has a slave unit on top which is triggered when it sees a flash fire. This triggers his own flash, which fires through the back of the camera, through a film slide containing his slogan and then on and out through the lens at the front. This works because a camera is pretty much a projector in reverse. And because the light-graffiti is fired at the exact same moment the unsuspecting victim takes a picture, it ends up in their photograph and paranoid mind ramblings result. Neat.

Here's a video of von Bismarck in action at fake Berlin tourist hot spot, Checkpoint Charlie (no relation):

Continue reading "Gun Camera Adds Graffiti to Other People's Photos" »

Did you ever wonder what caused the MacBook Air's external SuperDrive to only play nice with the Air itself? Hacker tnkgrl did, and she embarked on some hardware research to find out just what was going on.

It turns out that it is neither special kernel extensions, nor that the drive requires more power than the standard USB 500 mA. It is in fact a custom IDE to USB bridge that locks other machines out, and that is a part which can be replaced.

Tnkgrl (who, judging by her driver's license, actually does look a bit like the real Tank Girl) ordered the $9 replacement and grafted it inot place. It's not a pretty hack -- the daughter board needs to be tossed to make space, but the SuperDrive now runs on any USB equipped machine.

Which leaves the answer, "why?" Why did Apple bother to lock out PCs and even other Macs? It makes little sense, as this small and stylish bus powered drive could be a big seller. Maybe it's just because other PC makers can manage to get an optical drive into their ultra-slim notebooks when Apple cannot. Sour grapes, perhaps?

MacBook Air SuperDrive for all [tnkgrl Mobile via TUAW]

Hackintosh hawker Psystar is at it again. The company, which first came to our attention for its commodity-box PCs with Mac OS X pre-installed, has announced a couple of Xserve clones, named OpenServ.

Seen above are the OpenServ 1100 and 2400, which start at $2125 for the smaller model with a 2.5 GHx Xeon processor, 4GB RAM and a 750GB hard drive and a 10 seat license for OS X server. This compares to Apple's basic model, which costs $3000 and has a smaller, 80GB drive and a 2.8 GHz Xeon inside.

Whether this means that Psystar is getting away with its Mac clones, or that Apple simply doesn't care, we don't know. But if the servers offer anything like the troubles of the desktop Open Computers (no software updates, no user reinstalls of the OS), then we don't see many people buying them for server use, which is, after all, a pretty critical application. The boxes can, however, be specced with Windows Server, Ubuntu Server and CentOS, which makes a little more sense.

Product page [Psystar via Apple Insider]

Tired of waiting for a promotion that will move you into a swank corner office? Sick of wasting your daylight hours in a sad, soulless cubicle? Bring the swank to you, like Jared Nielsen, who lords it over his officemates with his mahogany-paneled walls and hardwood floors.

Nielsen completes the effect with an ornate end table to hold his LCD monitor and phone. Missing from this setup? Any place to put his computer, as the space in front of the LCD is too small to fit anythng but a few Post-It notes. Storage is also mysteriously absent, as the cube shows no signs of shelving or filing space. But so what? As ostentatious cube makeovers go, this takes the cake.

via Boing Boing Gadgets

Remember aTV Flash, the USB dongle from Apple Core which would automatically hack an Apple TV, just by plugging it in? Well, EFiX is a cleverly named device which claims to do the same thing for a PC, allowing you to install Mac OS X on any commodity PC hardware.

Detail on the site are sparse (in fact, you're most likely to come across Error 404 pages), but from the name, we guess that the EFiX dongle somehow patches the EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) of Intel based PC hardware to fool the OS X install DVD into thinking it is inside a Mac.

This could be great news for armchair hackers (imagine an Eee PC running OS X) but is unlikely to make Hackintoshes a viable business tool, despite the developer's claim that "Industry leading professionals (who work for TV stations, recording studios and many others) rely on EFiX and Mac OS X running on standard PC hardware to get their tasks done."

The box will apparently be released on June 23rd. From the FAQ:

Continue reading "EFiX Dangles Hacking Dongle Before Apple's Lawyers" »

I read this tip on BoingBoing Gadgets and thought it must be a very early (or very late) April Fool gag. But no -- it works. An unknown coder at Google has built Konami's famous cheat code into the Google Reader. Hit the right combo and you'll a cute little ninja pops up in the feed list to the left. Try it:

↑↑↓↓←→←→BA

That's my day wasted. I'm going to spend the next few hours entering up, down, left, right, Y, B, X, A into Twitter to see if I can get a "Turbo" edition which will stay online for more than five minutes.

↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A: Google Reader does Konami code [BBGadgets]

For $70, you can now buy a relatively simple-looking kit to give your EeePC a touch-sensitive display. People have been hacking the Eee to give it touchscreen capabilities for several months now, but this kit is the simplest we've seen yet, requiring just nine steps, none more complicated than undoing a few screws and plugging a few things in. You're going to want some knowledge of Chinese before placing your order, however.

(Via Hack a Day)

The makers of a third-party Apple TV upgrade, which gives the device support for new video file formats, video streaming and full web browsing, have pulled the product over unspecified "fair use" concerns.

Until yesterday, Highlands Ranch, Colorado-based Apple Core sold a very handy little USB stick called aTV Flash. The thumb drive was a plug-and-play solution to hack your Apple TV, bringing a slew of extra features for just $60. After restoring your Apple TV to factory defaults, you slip in the aTV. It goes to work and installs all the extra software needed. Because the process is reversible (just do another factory restore) and it doesn't involve physically opening the Apple TV, it doesn't void your warranty.

But yesterday, the company pulled the aTV Flash from its lineup and canceled and refunded all outstanding orders for the product, citing "questions arising regarding the fair use of a particular file present on the aTV Flash."

An Apple Core representative contacted by Wired.com said that the company was not pulling its product due to legal pressure from Apple.

"We need to clarify some licensing issues.  But for the record it was not due to outside pressure," said James Abeler, an Apple Core partner.

In a statement posted on the aTV Flash product page, the company cited concerns over whether its use of a particular file would qualify as a "fair use" exemption under the U.S. copyright code.

In our interpretation of the fair use doctrine, our software does not cross any lines, but since this is a grey area issue, we have taken a proactive approach and decided to seek clarifcation directly from the rights holder before we offer the product again.

Abeler declined to state which file was the source of the concern. He stated that the company intended to bring the product back on the market once the "licensing conflicts" are cleared up, but did not have a timeline for doing so.

"We had to disappoint a lot of people by cancelling the orders," Abeler said, noting that the company now has "many people on our waiting list once it becomes available again."

Image: After installing aTV Flash's software, the Apple TV menu contains a variety of new options, including the ability to stream Jaman movies or browse the web via the "Couch Surfer" application.

Continue reading "Apple Core Stops Selling Apple TV Hacking Dongle" »

Russell Davies slathered blackboard paint onto his MacBook Pro to turn it into a low-tech note-taking device. He loves it. So does Jason Kottke, and so does The Cory. We like to look of it, and the low-fi hackery involved, but in the end we side with the guys from MTAA, who point out the dust problems and the chalky sleeves that the BlackBook Pro entails.

It’s only a good idea if you never, ever remove the laptop from your desk and never open it. Sometimes the techno-nerds really lose all perspective.

And before you start posting comments on how dumb this is, be sure maximize your angry, bile-fueled reply by taking a second look at the picture. Notice the Moleskine in the corner? Go.

BlackBoardPro [Russel Davies via Kottke]

Blackboard pro = dumb [MTAA]

If you buy one of Psystar's Hackintoshes, you'll get even less than you thought you might. Macworld ordered one to test and has filed an unboxing post on the site. We've already heard about the leaf-blower fans, but Macworld's Open Computer came with a power cable tangled in the fan and, according to reviewer James Galbraith, "As soon as I hit the power button it sounded like I’d turned on the garbage disposal". Attention to detail: Minus one point.

Apple's legendary packaging design is also missing, replace by a cardboard box full of foam packing peanuts. But the most important missing feature? The "it just works" design of all Apple products. Time Machine fails (there is a fix on Psystar's site), FireWire Target Mode doesn't work. Neither do "SafeBoot, zapping of PRAM, and startup drive selection via the Option key " or, as previously mentioned, Software Update.

So it looks like the PC level price will get you a PC level experience: hardware troubleshooting, downloading and manually applying patches. This isn't to knock PCs – there will always be incompatibilities with such a huge array of hardware and software available. Apple makes the whole shebang, inside and out. That's why it just works. And Psystar's little science project is the best argument yet against Apple licensing its OS to third parties.

Opening up Psystar’s Open Computer [Macworld]

Troubleshooting page [Psystar]

Maker Faire wasn't all exploding battlebots and 300,000-volt giraffes. There were food hackers at work, too, like Michael Zbyszynksi, who explains how to make carrot caviar in this video.

He starts with a beaker of ordinary carrot juice mixed with sodium alginate -- a derivative of seaweed -- at a ratio of 2 grams of sodium alginate to 250 grams of carrot juice (a 0.8 percent solution).

He then uses a syringe to drop small beads of the solution into a bath of water with a couple grams of calcium chloride dissolved in it. The calcium chloride hardens the sodium alginate from the outside in, giving it a "skin" that holds the carrot juice inside.

After rinsing in plain water, the caviar-like beads are ready to be used as a surprising garnish. Nifty!

Video production: Annaliza Savage. Camera: John Ross. Editing: Michael Lennon. For more Wired video, see video.wired.com.

Wired.com takes you inside the do-it-yourselfer's Mecca known as Maker's Faire in this exclusive video. From electric cupcake cars and robot giraffes to massive Van de Graaf generators and scale-model battleships that fire actual ordnance at each other, we've got some of the most amazing highlights from this annual gathering of hobbyists, roboticists, crafters and artists.

Video production: Annaliza Savage. Camera: John Ross. Editing: Michael Lennon.

Jordan Bunnell has put the Air in his MacBook Air. He cracked the svelte case open and popped in an EVDO card. A Verizon USB727 Aircard, to be precise. Thanks to a few extra USB connections on the Air's circuit board, Bunnell avoided losing the sole external USB port.

The hack was not done without sacrifice, though. To make room for the card inside the tightly packed case, Bunnell had to remove both the Airport card and the Bluetooth unit. Depending on your point of view, the Mac is now either set free or crippled. Either way, we admire the hack, and the step by step instructions on Bunnell's site show that with some confident soldering, this is quite an easy project.

Project page [Getlistedlocally via TUAW]

The guys at Psyster ought to take a look at this video. Who wants a cheap and shoddy version of something Apple already sells when you could have the smallest Mac in the World?

OQO Talk forum member trf managed to get Apple's OS up and running on the tiny OQO handheld. The opinion from other forum members seems to be positive, no doubt helped by the full version of trf's video, which shows the excruciating startup time of the dual-boot machine. According to trf, "Sound, wifi, power management, and usb are working fine and the system is very responsive". It even copes with Leopard's Cover Flow view, although you can hear the fans kick in to keep things cool.

A very nice hack indeed, and we are promised full details once trf irons out the remaining wrinkles.

Now OQO is the smallest MAC in the World [OQO Talk via Engadget]
Original, un-embeddable video [YouTube]

Gizmodo reader Patrick sent in a video and photo gallery of the new Psystar Open Computer, pre-loaded with OS X Leopard. The video shows a feature that the original Apple hardware lacks: Hit the "on" button and the thing goes off like a leaf-blower. Nice touch. Also, check the guts of the machine (the Psystar box is on the left, in case you weren't sure). Sure is pretty, huh?

Exclusive Video: Psystar in the Wild [Gizmodo]

Exclusive Photos: Psystar's Case, Shipping Contents [Gizmodo]

Psystar, maker of the much debated Open Computer (nee OpenMac) has posted a video of the hardware in action, presumably to ward off the label of vaporware. Several copies have found their way onto YouTube, and some have already been removed, but you can always head to the Psystar site to see the original Quicktime clip.

So what does it prove? Not much. If we assume that there isn't just a Mac Mini sitting inside the PC case then what we see is a HackinTosh. It's possible to get Mac OS X to run on off the shelf PC hardware, as we've seen before many times; the trouble comes when Apple pushes out a simple OS update and disables the hack. This is why unauthorized Mac hardware can never be more than a hobby project. We remain unconvinced. If you want to send us a test model though, Psystar, we'd be happy to take a look. In fact, we double dare ya.

A Peek at the Open Computers [Psystar via O'Reilly]

L.A.-based artist Nick Rodrigues' "Porta-Party" is a roughly iPod-shaped booth you can walk into. Just shut the door, crank it up, and get crazy. But watch out: Once you go in, it appears that the iPod's screen displays a video of whatever is happening inside. So if you were thinking of using this as, say, a makeout booth -- like LAist editor Zach Behrens -- you better be a bit of an exhibitionist.

"Is this a statement about isolation or just a fun place to make out and do other scandalous activities?" Rodrigues writes on his site. "Who knows, what I do know is it's available for rent at your next party."

Once you have yourself a NES On a Chip (NOAC), any classic Nintendo mod is as much a feat of imagination as it is of engineering. And that is exactly why we love French hacker Retrotaku's NES-in-a-NES-Cart. He took the notoriously dodgy NOAC and slotted it into an original Mario Bros game cartridge. The tight squeeze called for some dremel work, and the result is a truly fitting home for the 8-bit wonder machine. The only thing that would be better is a SNES-in-a-cart running Super Mario Kart.

If you need any confirmation as to the poor quality of those grey market chips, check the picture below to see how it handles the colors for Super Mario Bros. 5. Hold on. When did they make No.5?

Project page [Retrotaku via Geekologie]

Continue reading "Retro Recursion: NES Mario Runs On NES Mario Cart" »

Here's a casemod that would make even Jonny Ive proud. Fashioned from two sheets of white acrylic and lined with perforated steel, this desktop system was once an old and busted Apple PowerBook -- that is before Richard Hunt worked his modding magic. Hunt removed the PowerBook's guts and delicately placed them inside this slick hand-built case. The result, one must admit, looks like something Apple might ship itself.

As Hunt explains, there are even some added benefits of transferring laptop parts into a roomier desktop home:

Cool side effects: The machine has its own built-in UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) because it still retains the original laptop battery. The machine runs much cooler, thanks to all the extra space. So you could add a much bigger heat sink/fan and overclock it (I didn't).

The project wasn't without its challenges, but Hunt's casemod clearly demonstrates you can do some pretty amazing things even with out-dated hardware.

[Macmod via Technabob]

Continue reading "Mac Modder Transforms Old PowerBook Into Sleek Desktop" »

This is Kotakuite Zooie's homage to the second greatest* games console of all time, the NES. A Super Famicar, if you will.

It's little more than a custom cover designed to look like the famed thumb-blistering controller, but the fact that Zooie took this much trouble for something most people will never see marks him as a geek of the first order.

NES Controller Car Engine Mod [Kotaku via Geekologie]

*The greatest? The SNES, of course.

Jem Stansfield's moped uses tanks of compressed air to power a pair of rotary engines, which drive the rear wheel via chains. Because the air comes from the same supplies as those used by divers and firefighters, Stansfield says that the bike's emissions are actually cleaner than regular city air. Recharging is fast, too, but as the moped only has a range of seven miles and a top speed of 18mph, that's pretty essential.

We can see this converted Puch being useful for short runs, though, and Stansfield himself suggests that you could "run a fleet of delivery bikes on it."

Next up: Money that grows on trees.

Air-powered scooter leaves city centres cleaner [Motorcycle News]

Continue reading "Four Camera Hacks You Can Do Today" »

Continue reading "Four Camera Hacks You Can Do Today" »

The Evil Mad Scientist's Sawed-Off USB Key project is perfect for a rainy afternoon: It's cheap, easy and you probably have all the parts you need lying around the house or office. The project page has a detailed step-by-step, but you can probably guess how it is made: You just hack off the end of a USB cable, slit open the plug and slide in the internals of a USB stick. It looks cool, and has obvious prank-appeal.

Here in Berlin it's raining (again), so I'm off now to hunt through my junk box and make one of these.

Project page [Evil Mad Scientist via Make]

Ben Heckendorn's Apple ][ laptop may be one of the cleanest mods we've seen. So, it's no surprise that the guys at Linden Labs went under the hood for their Apple ][ hack. Through some serial cable tweakery and a custom screenshot program, the guys were able to get an Apple ][c to display a very, very basic version of Second Life. Be sure to check out the full tutorial video above!

[Via Tech Digest]

The Arduino platform lies somewhere between Technic Lego and the low level geek world of circuit building. It consists of two parts; the hardware and the software, and with these you can build almost anything, from a simple flashing light to a box of tricks that sends you a Twitter message when your houseplants get thirsty.

Continue reading "Just What Is An Arduino, And Why Do you Want One?" »

Oh my: Steampunk and Star Wars together in one quite special package. Custom figure builder Sillof (real name unknown) took two years to design and craft these exquisite versions of our favorite characters. As you might expect, he started young, and his bio offers us this quite disturbing picture of his childhood:

My first customs would have been simple things when I was a kid. Things like putting a regular Luke head on the X-Wing Pilot Luke body or cutting off Bespin Luke's hand and drilling it out, and putting a nail in it to make it re-attachable

The Darth Vader is our favorite, although arguably Vader verges on the steampunk already. The most amazing thing, though, is that Sillof managed to make C3P0 look butch.

Project page [Sillof's Workshop]

Continue reading "Steampunk Star Wars Figures" »

Ben Heckendorn, the man whose life's work is to make good gadgets better, has built a Playstation 3 into a laptop. Inside is the original 60GB model, bought before Sony crippled backward compatibility with PS2 games.

The mod has all the trimmings necessary to make this a true Ben Hack: USB ports, stereo speakers and amp, HDMI connection, full keyboard and a huge 17" 720p LCD monitor. There's even a slot loading Blu-ray drive, something not even seen in many "real" notebooks, and the whole box is thinner than a stock PS3, although at 16lbs, this is less a portable and more a luggable.

Ben built this to order for his second home on the web, Engadget, which intends to sell it in a charity auction. Do want.

The PS3 Laptop: from Ben Heck to Engadget with love [Engadget]

Project Page [Ben Heck]

Word to the wise: if a mechanical engineer challenges you to a game of oneupsmanship, just fold. Otherwise, you may find yourself going up against the likes of Kettering University student Will Foster. After visiting a local paintball field and seeing players scooting around in their "tanks" -- which were little more than dressed up golf carts -- Foster got an idea. Why not build a real tank that can fire paintballs?

The fruit of Foster's labor is a diesel powered half-scale replica of a German Panzer. The miniature is roughly the size of a small car and travel at 20 MPH on a set of real treads. Oh, and that turret on top? Totally works.

[Via The Flint Journal]

Flickrer George has posted details of a clever project, wherein he turns an ordinary 32oz styrofoam cup into a ring flash. It's as ingenious as it is simple: The large end of the cup is cut off and flipped, then re-glued to form a collector for the camera's built-in flash.

It's designed to be used for macro photography: there's too much light-spill for regular shots, but the results when combined with an add-on Raynox close-up adapter are stunning in themselves, before you even consider the simplicity of this hack. Check 'em out.

CCRRFD-RNX Magnum - "How To Make It" [Flickr via Make]

Picture: [George/Flickr]

"Overclocking" might not be exactly the right word for boosting a strobe's output but, as you can see above, it carries the same dangers to your kit. David Hobby of the excellent Strobist got a tip-off from an MIT student, detailing a secret diagnostic mode in certain Nikon Speedlights (those using the NEC 40-108 processor).

Continue reading "How To OverClock and Kill a Flashgun" »

"Overclocking" might not be exactly the right word for boosting a strobe's output but, as you can see above, it carries the same dangers to your kit. David Hobby of the excellent Strobist got a tip-off from an MIT student, detailing a secret diagnostic mode in certain Nikon Speedlights (those using the NEC 40-108 processor).

Continue reading "How To OverClock and Kill a Flashgun" »

According to The Register, the attack took a good deal longer than Charlie Miller's two-minute subjugation of the MacBook Air. Macaulay's attack was initially neutralized by Windows Vista Service Pack One, but after some more work he and his accomplice Alex Sotirov managed to route around it with a little javascript.

The perpetrators get to keep the Fujitsu U810 and $5,000 as a prize. Might we suggest that the first things they do is to wipe the Windows install and load it up with Hardy Heron.

Only Ubuntu left standing, as Flash vuln fells Vista in Pwn2Own hacking contest [The Register]

According to The Register, the attack took a good deal longer than Charlie Miller's two-minute subjugation of the MacBook Air. Macaulay's attack was initially neutralized by Windows Vista Service Pack One, but after some more work he and his accomplice Alex Sotirov managed to route around it with a little javascript.

The perpetrators get to keep the Fujitsu U810 and $5,000 as a prize. Might we suggest that the first things they do is to wipe the Windows install and load it up with Hardy Heron.

Only Ubuntu left standing, as Flash vuln fells Vista in Pwn2Own hacking contest [The Register]

What's cooler than an electric ATV? An electric ATV that's been chopped to look like a giant muffin zipping down the street!

BoingBoing TV tackles the sordid subject of "Cupcake Cutthroats," with some really over-the-top 1960s kids-and-drugs style voiceovers. And, of course, lots of footage of the cupcake cars zooming around Berkeley, terrorizing old ladies and glorying in their sugar- and transfat-fueled lifestyle. "It's all about raw sugar and raw power for us," Xeni says. "There's no mercy in cupcake road racing."

It's all tongue in cheek, of course. The cupcake cars are, in fact, transfat-free.

BoingBoing TV: Cupcake Cutthroats

Over at security conference CanSecWest, hacker Charlie Miller has successful broken into a MacBook Air, winning him both the slimline notebook and $10,000 in the PWN 2 OWN contest. The exploit, will remain a secret until the show's organizers are have passed the information on to, we presume, Apple. What we do know is the Miller managed to hack the Mac in just two minutes by browsing to a website containing malicious code.

Two other notebooks remain to be won, if they too can be cracked. The Mac might have fallen first because it was less secure. More likely is that contestants ignored the Linux and Windows boxes in favor of trying to win Apple's svelte and desirable notebook.

Gone in 2 minutes: Mac gets hacked first in contest [MacWorld]

Conference page [CanSecWest]

SlySoft, the makers of DVD cracking software, have finally released the long-promised BD+ crack for Blu-ray discs. We first reported on the company's claims back in November of last year, but it has taken SlySoft until now to actually make the crack public.

Continue reading "Blu-Ray Cracked, For Now" »

My oh my. This unholy union between the classic Sinclair ZX Spectrum and a Toshiba Libretto is not only one of the best hacks we've seen but possibly the cutest UMPC ever. The Frankenbook uses the internals and display from the Libretto coupled with the frustratingly poor rubber keyboard from the Speccy, and battery life is a surprisingly good couple of hours.

Right now, the ZX Spectrum Laptop is running Linux (of course) but the unnamed hacker responsible plans on running a Spectrum emulator for that true, portable 8-bit gaming experience. One problem: The CD-ROM drive is broken and the floppy has some weird proprietary interface. Loading up new software requires removing the motherboard from the machine. That starts to make the MacBook Air look positively practical.

Project page [Srimech via Hack A Day]

There must be some case-modders working at Sun Microsystems: Someone installed glowing green lights underneath the raised floor in a server room at the company's headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif. The effect, as anyone who has ever installed glowing lights inside their own PC knows, is sweet.

This photo comes from Patrick Norton, host of Revision3's Tekzilla and cohost of systm (where he's building compressed-air cannons). Thanks, Patrick!

What's cooler than a green laser? A green laser that paints semirandom moving spirograph patterns on your wall. Toronto-based hardware hacker Artur Petrovskyy shows you how to make one of your own from about $80 in parts in a new how-to on Instructables.com: Laser show for poor man.

Apart from the laser, the key to the magic is three mirrors mounted on motors, positioned so that the laser beam bounces off each mirror in turn before it passes out of the box and onto your wall. Petrovskyy mounted the mirrors slightly off from perpendicular to the motors' axles, so the mirrors oscillate as they spin. The combined motion of the three motors gives the laser beam a lovely eccentric path, which you can control by twiddling three knobs that vary the speed of each motor. Petrovskyy also added a microcontroller to randomly change the motors' rate of rotation.

Not only does this project look fun, but it's also relatively inexpensive and seems fairly achievable, even for someone with minimal gear hacking skills such as myself. OK, so chip programming is probably beyond me -- but I believe you could do a simpler, analog version by connecting the potentiometers under the knobs directly to each mirror's motor.

Petrovskyy points interested people to a $17 green laser module from DealExtreme.com, and other parts are probably available from Edmund Scientific, Jameco, or your local Radio Shack.

Matthew Davidson is on the way to building a photo-taking robot. He modified a Manfrotto quick release tripod mount with a Lego technical brick, so now it will click into place on any Lego construction he can come up with.

Seen here is his Canon G7 on top of a manual hand-dolly, but Matthew's future plans include using Lego Mindstorms to make a remote controlled cart and trigger the shutter. Say "cheese!".

Lego Bogen Manfrotto Camera Mount [Stretta via Make]

Sometimes, the best hacks are the simplest, when an existing gadget can be repurposed without a Dremel or a single inch of duct tape. Kevin Kelly, hacker, nerd and "Senior Maverick" at Wired, saw the potential in a popcorn maker and turned it into a coffee roaster.

The $3 thrift store popper turns out to be a perfect match for green coffee beans. Just pop them in, prop the popper so the beans don't jump out, and six to eight minutes later you have a half a cup of hot-air roasted beans. Kevin left the roast for a day to de-gas the beans, so it's not quite instant. If you're selling your house, though, the smell of roasting coffee is probably better than baking bread as a psychological hack.

Popcorn Popper as Coffee Roaster [KK]

Is the three pound MacBook Air a little heavy for you? Then dump the metal case and replace it with carbon fiber. That's exactly what Makezine reader John has done with his brand new glamor-book.

Right now, he has replaced only the back section, but already the Mk I version is a little flimsy. He plans to try a 33% thicker panel and add some air holes, but even at this early stage it looks a lot nicer than the hideous sparkling monstrosity from Crystal Icing.

Carbon fiber Macbook Air [Make]

This little case-mod is so sweet it almost seems that the parts were made for each other. Mark Irwin took a Dremel to an old 35mm slide viewer, adding two speakers into the capacious case to make a standalone, slot-in media center for an iPod Nano. A quick Google reveals that this was indeed a match made in retro-heaven:

iPod Nano – Width: 2.06 inches

35mm Slide Mount – Width 2 inches

With 1970's manufacturing tolerances taken into account, that amounts to exactly the same size.

At the risk of gushing, this is probably one of the neatest, smartest little DIY projects I've seen. Plus, it has Zoolander in it.

Upgrade Your iPod Nano's Screen The Retro Way [Retro Thing]

It looks like Apple's programmers might have a little time on their hands after going all-out to finish the iPhone and OS X 10.5 Leopard. First we saw a speech from ex-president Lincoln in an iPod Touch software update, and now there is a quote from George Orwell's 1984 in a keyboard update.

Tucked inside February's Built-In Keyboard Firmware Update is this line from Orwell's (surprisingly accurate) vision of a dystopian future:

WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The other snippet, concerning "Sand dunes and salty air" is from the 1957 song Old Cape Cod, sung by Patti Page. No doubt there is some hidden joke in the juxtaposition of these two quotes. To find them, you'll need to open up the update package (right click and choose "Show Package Contents") and then open the HIDFirmwareUpdaterTool in a text editor.

Apple: Have a keyboard update! Oh, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH [Ars Technica]

Add one more nagging time-sink to your Twitter account: your houseplants. Botanicalls is a system which monitors the moisture level of your plants and lets them telephone you when they need water. Voice, though, is so 2005, which is why you can now add your plant to your Twitter list and have it message you when it's thirsty.

The principle is simple, but you'll need to be a confident circuit-maker to get the kit up and running. Two nails are pushed into the soil. When the humus is wet, a current flows between them. When that current drops, the Arduino-based circuit will connect to the Botanicalls network via a built-in, low-powered Zigbee radio and send you a Twitter update. It's up to you to actually water the plant. If you have arranged for a neighbor to take care of your flora, however, you can still keep tabs them: the plant will Twitter a "Thank you" when watered.

Product page [Botanicalls via Crave]

A German art project could help the British avoid the oppressive proliferation of surveillance cameras in their country. The I-R.A.S.C is simple, consisting of a circle of infra-red LEDs mounted on a headband. The infra red is invisible to The Man, but will cause CCTV cameras to flare out over the face of the wearer, obscuring his identity and making this the digital equivalent of a hooded sweatshirt.

This is not a production unit, but given that you'd only need a hat, a battery and a few LEDs, you could easily knock one up in the garage.

Project page [Oberwelt via BoingBoing]

A German art project could help the British avoid the oppressive proliferation of surveillance cameras in their country. The I-R.A.S.C is simple, consisting of a circle of infra-red LEDs mounted on a headband. The infra red is invisible to The Man, but will cause CCTV cameras to flare out over the face of the wearer, obscuring his identity and making this the digital equivalent of a hooded sweatshirt.

This is not a production unit, but given that you'd only need a hat, a battery and a few LEDs, you could easily knock one up in the garage.

Project page [Oberwelt via BoingBoing]

Lisa Black's Steampunkish animal mods leave us a little confused. While grafting clockworks onto already expired creatures is probably further up the moral scale than say, battery chicken farming, it still creeps us out.

The pictured sculpture is called Fixed-Fawn, and replaces the dear deer's eye with what looks like a sewing machine bobbin holder. In the gallery you'll also find the Fixed-Ferret, Fixed-Duckling and the truly horrifying Fixed-Baby Crocodile, a truly Victorian wind-up reptile. There's even a video on the site showing the little croc ticking. Has the sculptor been watching too many David Cronenberg movies?

Project page [Behance via Gizmodo]

Apparently so. It seems the iPhone's convenient slot-in SIM card carrier doesn't really seat the SIM very well, something which might cause low signal strength. According to Jeggrey Swiger, a reader of iPhone Atlas, if a SIM is not seated to be in proper contact, signal strength can suffer greatly.

The fix? Scotch tape. Applied to the blank side of the SIM, the tape bulks it up enough to ensure a snug fit on insertion. MacGyver would be proud.

Boosting iPhone signal strength … with scotch tape [iPhone Atlas]

For those of you who remember the Amiga demo scene back in the 1990's, this video will be a spectacular nostalgia trip. Back then, hard-coded graphics and music pushed the hardware to do extraordinary things, and were distributed on floppy disc (or by BBS). Below you'll see an oscilloscope hack from Assembly 2007, complete with the required techno soundtrack.

Waxy has a whole video gallery dedicated to more of these.

Oscilloscope Fun and Games [Waxy via BBGadgets]

To illustrate the power of the Maxablaster, here's a quote from the inventor, Ralf Ottow:

It’s not a torch you’d walk your dog with [...] It would probably cook your dog.

Ottow took an off the shelf flashlight and, one mercury arc bulb and 54 batteries later, he had himself a beam that can easily light up object four miles away and has managed a nine mile range over open water. The arc bulb creates a small, intensely focused plasma light, and needs a UV filter to make it safe: early versions could cause sunburn.

The project took six months and cost $1800. You can see a gallery of images over at the Popular Science blog.

Handheld Sunbeam [PopSci via Neatorama]

Ben Heckendorn has completed another amazing console project, this time an XBox 360 Elite laptop. The box squeezes in everything: a keyboard, an Xbox Live Vision camera, amplifier and speakers, DVD drive, 120GB HD and even the Ring of Light.

The controller is wireless and there's a hand wrought HDMI-to-DVI connector for when you need a bigger screen. Take a look at the video below to see just how well made this hack is. Bonus: You'll also get to see the lair of our favorite hardware hacker.

Project page [Ben Heck]

Continue reading "Ben Heckendorn's XBox 360 Elite Laptop" »

At first glance, this modified Cuban bike is just a regular pushbike with an engine bolted on. Look closer, though, and all sorts of neat details appear. From the beefed-up front forks, through the front chainwheel with the pedals removed – and now driven by a belt from the engine (an ingenious way to get the power to the back wheel by using the existing drive mechanism), to the motorbike-style suspension on the seat (itself a bunjeed-on cushion).

The whole thing is so gloriously crude, yet shows the elegant simplicity born of need. Form is certainly following function here, and it' wonderful. Walter Gropius would be proud.

Cuban Motor Bike [Street Use]

Prince Charles delivered a message to an Abu Dhabi conference by appearing onstage as a "hologram." Howtosplitanatom explains the trick behind the technique, which goes back over a century and from which is derived a certain phrase regarding misdirection and trickery.

In short, they did it with—you guessed it!—smoke and mirrors!

Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing editor, copyright crusader and be-goggled and gowned balloon riding blogger has posted this photograph of a hand made razor on his Flickr stream. The blade is from an antique cut throat razor and the handle is lovingly crafted from an old circuit board. The maker is named Jack, and he turned up at one of Cory's lectures at UC Berkeley wielding this thing. Chillingly, nerdily beautiful.

Homemade circuit-board straight-razor [BoingBoing]

There comes a time in every modern householder's life when the need for a salinometer becomes immediate and pressing. How, when the time comes, will you accurately measure the dissolved salt content, in parts per million, of the solution before you? By building one from bits of junk around the house, of course!

EC TDS PPM Meter project [via Hacked Gadgets]

The Apple TV hacks dried up a bit after the first bloom. Now Canadian Brandon Holland has a plugin headed to the device, adding yet more functionality on top of the recent Apple software update. Skype can already be run on the Apple TV, but it requires Application Loader, which essentially turns the box into a stripped down Intel Mac.

The plugin uses the Skype API to hook into the network, and will allow the Apple TV to send text messages and make calls to anyone in the Skype contact list using a regular USB headset. SMS messages won't be any easier to enter than on a normal phone, however: you'll need to use the Apple Remote to enter text.

While not yet finished, we have confidence: Brandon has already hacked together a couple of Apple TV plugins, one for wireless keyboards and one for GPS (which should be useful to tell you your Apple TV is in the living room).

Project page [Brandon Holland via Apple TV Hacks and Engadget]

Resetting your computer's clock is one of the oldest hacks on the planet, used to trick software into thinking you have, say, ten years left in your demo instead of ten days. And guess what? It work with iTunes movie rentals, too.

The picture you see above is the result of setting the clock forward a couple of years after downloading a rental movie from iTunes. It'll be a month before we find out if this works, though, but if it does, it's a rookie mistake by Apple. I'm here in the backwaters of Europe, so I can't test it, but if any of our intrepid readers would like to check if this trick works with the 24 hour time limit, too, tell us about the result in the comments. And turn off Time Machine before you start monkeying with the system clock.

iTunes rentals and the system date [TUAW]

Dave Clausen has completed this great Mac hack just in time for this year's Macworld. The 512k Mac is fully functional and runs Mac OS X. Inside is a Mac Mini and a black and white CRT, and various daredevil hardware mods keep the original accessories in pristine condition (the USB conversion goes on inside the box).

Why "daredevil"? Dave says

Note that this project involves dangerous high voltage electronics. If you decide to take apart your computer or monitor, and you touch the wrong thing at the wrong time, you could be killed.

Do want. Even the floppy drive still works!

Project page [dclausen via Make]

Mac users: Enjoy this video of Spinning Pizza of Death. Windows users: Bookmark this post to use next time a smug Mac user makes a Blue Screen of Death joke.

Sebastian Errazuriz brings us this unholy union of anatidae and Anglepoise. Despite the obvious creepiness, the design kind of works, but if you want one, you'll need to head out on a duck hunt: This is a one off art piece.

Product page [Meet Sebastian via Oh Gizmo!]

The cheese-grater Power Mac tower is just perfect for holding a dot matrix display, and it looks like Anders Lundberg thought the same thing:

I was looking at the front grid on the computer one day, and it struck me that 3 mm LED’s would fit perfectly into the front grid holes.

In proper hacker style, Anders took an old alarm clock, threw away the extra parts and from there, designed a circuit board. The clock needs an external AC power supply, but what's one more wall wart? Best of all, he's selling kits, starting at $70 for a self assembly red LED set and $85 for the ready made.

Product page [Paulanders via Make]

The Touchmods team have released version 1.0 of SIP-VoIP for the iPod Touch. This hack will allow the Touch to make phone calls over its WiFi connection. Although named version 1.0, it is most certainly still a beta, and will take some special magic on your part to get things going.

The Touchmodders are giving away the software and hope to make money on their iPod Touch microphone, without which you'll be having a very one-sided conversation.

Continue reading "VoIP For iPod Touch is Here" »

Graffiti Research Lab, makers of that giant building-painting laser gun, has posted meticulous instructions on how to build a bullet-time camera array. This is where a row of cameras fire in quick succession and the shots then compiled into movie frames. Which is to say that it is where you leap face-down into the dirt and people are more interested in the full-speed youtube of it shot by your "friends" than the horrible Matrix fanfilm you made from it.

Source [GRL via Make]

Meet Harry Cordaiy, a modern-day McGyver. The 11 year old schoolkid from Sydney, Australia got so sick of a mystery schoolmate stealing lunch money that he hacked together a tracking device from a mousetrap, a $5 bill and some green food dye.

The thief, who was already living large on the $165 amassed in previous raids, took the bait. The trap was in the back pocket of Harry's backpack, and when he discovered the cash missing, he alerted classmates. Accoring to the Syndney Morning herald:

[A]fter he spread the word among classmates - a witch-hunt began.

Continue reading "Australian Kid Hacks Mousetrap into Burglar Alarm: Catches Lunch-Money Thief" »

Meet Harry Cordaiy, a modern-day McGyver. The 11 year old schoolkid from Sydney, Australia got so sick of a mystery schoolmate stealing lunch money that he hacked together a tracking device from a mousetrap, a $5 bill and some green food dye.

The thief, who was already living large on the $165 amassed in previous raids, took the bait. The trap was in the back pocket of Harry's backpack, and when he discovered the cash missing, he alerted classmates. Accoring to the Syndney Morning herald:

[A]fter he spread the word among classmates - a witch-hunt began.

Continue reading "Australian Kid Hacks Mousetrap into Burglar Alarm: Catches Lunch-Money Thief" »

Like the look of the iPhone or iPod Touch? Too cheap to buy a new one? Then why not hack your way to a sweet new interface. Apple's newest products have a habit of making the old ones look out of date, so the chaps at iPod Hacking have redesigned the interface of the 5G and 5.5G iPods to use the new style graphics and icons.

It's a simple job: Just download the firmware and load it up using the iPod hacking tool, iPodWizard. There are some glitches, though. You need to have your menus customized in the correct order for the icons to match the function, but otherwise it's a nice bit of eye-candy.

Product page [iPod Hacking via Engadget]

Asus Eee PC is, as expected, getting hacked every which way, and Brit Paul O'Brien has managed to squeeze the bloated Windows Vista onto the little Linux laptop. Using vLite, a tool to customize a Vista install before actually installing it, Paul shrunk Vista Home Premium and put the custom disk image onto a USB stick.

Continue reading "Vista Running on Eee PC" »

Lifehacker has a fine compendium of ideas for hacking new life into old gadgets rather than running out and buying the new thing. Turn your Xbox 1.0 into a media center! Make your aged iPod do tricks! Turbocharge your old WiFi router!

Worthy ideas, all. And if you think any of these is going to get you out of buying new merchandise this time of year, we'll have a puff of what you're smoking.

Breathe New Life into Your Old Gadgets [Lifehacker]

Brano Meres puts the industrial in industrial design. He modified this 1960s Soviet telephone handset with "titanium and high quality wires from dismantled Scud missiles". This refugee from Doctor Strangelove has a power socket, Bluetooth, volume up/down, power, and call answer and end switches.

All it needs is a matching umbrella accessory and Meres will have the full KGB field kit.

Project page [Bmeres.com via BoingBoing]

So, you have your shiny, handmade microphone dongle for your iPod Touch, but recording messages to remember the milk is getting a little old. The next step in iPod Touch VoIP has been reached by hackers Eok and Samuel, who have compiled the Nintendo DS SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) application – SvSIP – to run on the iPod.

Currently, there is no sound (which is usually essential for phone calls), but the Touch can place calls and receive them, albeit through a command line interface. Having got this far, though, it can't be long before the microphone and headphones are hooked up and all bundled into a shiny GUI wrapping.

iPod touch VOIP update: SIP signalization working [TUAW]

The Zune 2.0 update abolished the 3-plays-or-3-days limit on shared music received over WiFi. You still only get to listen to squirted tracks three times, but the absurd three day time limit has been lifted. Zune Scene has discovered a way around this restriction, too.

Apparently, the workaround is as simple as changing the genre of the tracks to "Podcast", which stops the Zune adding DRM to otherwise plain and open MP3 files. It seems that the trick only works on outgoing music, allowing you to share anything in your own library. If either of our Zune owning readers would like to try changing the genre of incoming shared music, let us know if it works.

Bypass 3 Play Rule for Shared Music [Zune Scene]

The iPod Touch microphone hack we reported on two weeks ago has made it to actual, ready-to-buy status, and for a home-made solution, it's very pretty. The Touch-4-VoIP slots into the Touch's dock connector and enables audio-in, for voice notes or, more importantly, VoIP. That's right. There's now an off the shelf way to turn your Touch into an iPhone, albeit a limited one.

Hacker Marian, who made this sleek dongle, is offering them for sale, although you'll have to email to get a quote (I have done, and hopefully I'll have a price later today). Now all we need is a Kindle VoIP hack. Amazon's eBook reader has a free EVDO connection. If anyone makes this, though, please build it into a Bluetooth headset. We're nerds, but not nerdy enough to hold a Kindle to our ears.

Product page [Touchmods]

This is possibly the most geek-cool hack we've seen. The Flickr caption sums it up:

Mame + sound card + oscilloscope = star wars arcade game

We're not sure if photographer Moose2000 made the mod or just snapped the picture, but on the nerd scale, this one goes all the way up to 11. The only way to top it would be to hack an oscilloscope to read the XKCD RSS feed and draw the stick-man cartoons on screen. Please, somebody do that. Now.

Photo page [Flickr via BoingBoing]

Above you see a real beetle, lovingly implanted with clockwork watch parts. Mike Libby, of Insect Lab (no relation), got the idea in a typically serendipitous style:

One day I found a dead intact beetle. I then located an old wristwatch, thinking of how the beetle also operated and looked like a little mechanical device and so decided to combine the two.

It seems so obvious, now we think about it. Mike's tiny sculptures range from spiders to dragonflies, with scorpions, hoppers and praying mantises coming on line soon. The cybugs are for sale, from around $350 (Paypal accepted). Apparently the "Beetles continue to be a big hit".

Now, make these things remote controlled and we're in.

Product page [Insect Lab via BoingBoing and Watchismo Times]

Flickr member Dan Dixon snapped this G4 Mac case mod in Te Atatu, Auckland, New Zealand last year. We don't even know where to start with all the email/mail/spam jokes, so we'll leave it up to you. The worst pun in the comments wins a Gadget Lab gold star.

The only good use for a mac... [Flickr via Superuse]

This iPod has been split and separated like an exploded diagram, and encased in resin. The amazing thing is that it still works. Poured in layers, just like jelly, the iPod sits in a bubbly cube, with control via the included dock internals. And the project, by Billy Chasen, is made geek-perfect by the inclusion of Lego feet.

Hopefully Billy will go to work on a more recursive meta-project next: An Apple G4 Cube, encased in a cube.

Project page [An Error Occurred While Processing This Directive]

Continue reading "Exploded iPod, Encased in Resin" »

It's official. Gadgeteers, hackers and tinkerers are now cool. The Discovery Channel is currently casting a new weekly, one-hour show called Super Rubes. As you might guess from the name, it's a Rube Goldberg (UK translation: Heath Robinson) inspired challenge game, where contestants work together to build a Chain Reaction Machine:

The point of a Chain Reaction Machine is to do something very simple, like turn on a light bulb, using as many steps as possible.

Continue reading "Super Rubes: Rube Goldberg Inspired Reality Show" »

There are beautiful, hand crafted PC case-mods, planned and executed with love and panache. Then there is the utilitarian. This is neither. Instead, Peter Edge simply strapped 66 fans around this PC using not much more than cable ties and some old shelving.

We admire the sheer uselessness of the mod, which, as it houses only a Intel P4 3GHz Prescott CPU, is unlikely to be fit for much more than some Extreme PowerPoint.

Project page [Peter Edge via 2DayBlog and Engadget]

Big news for iPod Touch owners. The Touchmod blog has discovered that the dock connector has the full set of pins, which means that it accepts audio-in. Which in turn means VoIP won't be far off, and therefore the iPod Touch will become the phoneless iPhone, with a phone.

The intrepid hacker, Marian, has successfully made a recording using Erica Sadun's (of The Unofficial Apple Weblog) recording software. It's a hardware hack right now: You'll need to grab an old dock connector and do some soldering, but it shouldn't be long before somebody gets the Griffin iTalk to work with it.

Line In Audio active on the iPod Touch [Touchmods via TUAW]

Forum post [iPod Touch Fans]

Taking design cues from the venerable Airstream trailer and the Republic series, King of the Rocket Men, Nemo Gould's scooter is put together from old junk. From vacuum cleaner tail-lights to a head unit made from an old street lamp cover, the whole thing is based on found objects.

A kinetic sculptor, Gould has a history of hacking junkyard finds into incredible pieces of art, although our favorites are of course the more functional. Check out his Re:cycle, a pedal powered chopper fashioned from what sounds like the shopping list for a Mafia torture room: baseball bats, a meat grinder and a circular saw blade.

Project page [Nemomatic via BBGadgets]

Engadget big-cheese Ryan Block offers a taste of the future over on his personal blog. He swapped out the hard drive in his first-gen MacBook Pro with a 64GB Samsung solid state drive. The result? A cool running, superfast and silent drive, free of worries about head crashes (now you can finally blog from the bus).

Ryan posted a video of the boot sequence, which takes around 20 second on a fresh OS X Leopard install (with a few applications set to launch at login). Head over to the blog post to see the video. We'd post it here but it's, well, a video of a Mac booting.

The first MacBook Pro with a 64GB SSD? [Ryan Block]

Nobody is ever going to look cool on a Segway, but that hasn't stopped some optimistic folks from trying. There looks to be a whole underground movement dedicated to customizing the nerd-mobile.

From custom paint jobs to "visually non-rotating, aluminum colorDiscs", the efforts are valiant but in the end, just desperately futile, although we have to admit Josep Mora's Segway Wheelchair looks pretty useful.

All a man needs is a breadboard, a boxful of LEDs and a couple of cheap microcontrollers. Bliss. Global Thermonuclear War, presumably, requires a more capable processor.

Electronic Tic-Tac-Toe [Hacked Gadgets]

The relentless "whoop! whoop!" of instant messages never ends. An intuitive solution is to eat stimulants or turn the damn thing off. A counter-intuitive solution is to slow them down. The so-called "Slow Messenger," a deliberately primitive text display that turns the torrent into a trickle, takes the latter route.

Continue reading "Slow Messenger Rehumanizes Instant Messaging" »

We promise not to go Hallowe'en crazy, but these little Mac-O-Lanterns are too good to ignore, from the pun-tastic name to the mouse-as-pumpkin-stalk detailing.

The project, by Jim Siedell at the Bad Banana blog, requires a working Mac Classic to display the face (Jim's cycles through several eerie expressions), and aside from cutting the mouse cord, the computer remains alive throughout the operation.

The most difficult part? Finding a floppy disk and drive to transfer the face artwork.

Mac-O-Lanterns [Bad Banana Blog via TUAW]

Attention, writers! Reuters and Nokia offer up plans for a "mobile journalism kit," including The Noke's fancy N95 cameraphone, a bluetooth keyboard, a wee tripod and a decent mic that plugs right into the handset.

"By running on handheld devices, rather than on bulkier laptop computers, the mobile journalism application enables us to create complete stories and file them for distribution, without leaving the scene," Nic Fulton, chief scientist of Reuters Media, said in a statement from the two companies. "This saves us time and benefits our audience by ensuring that they receive high quality news that is absolutely up-to-date."

The idea intrigues. Reuters ran some field tests with an N95-compatible application, and has plans to make a finished "product" available to "professional journalists." Nonetheless, obvious problems lead inexorably to obvious criticisms.

Continue reading "Journalist Gadget Kit Draws Criticism" »

Take one SonyEricsson K800i, rewire the capacitor which feeds the camera flash and you have a cell phone capable of dumping those farads into a human body. While we don't recommend the use of any weapons, non-lethal or otherwise, we admire the hacking spirit in any form.

If you can't read the multimeter in murk of what looks like a typical teenager's bedroom, it shows 300 volts. Cameron20020, the video's creator, describes it thus:

[...]while it doesn't make a big spark, it hurts a f*****g lot.

Cell Phone Taser [Hackaday]

Forget about flying cars. If you want to get off the ground, build helicopter. Nigerian physics student Mubarak Muhammad Abdullahi did exactly that, making his four-seater whirlybird from old car seats, parts from a Boeing 747 which crashed nearby and the engine from a Honda Civic.

The 133hp engine will lift the copter to an altitude of seven feet, and Mubarak controls it with a joystick and accelerator lever. It even has a camera underneath, connected to a screen, to give ground vision, and – somewhat inexplicably given that the vehicle never gets much above head height – a radio transmitter.

Speaking to AFP, Muharak said that he learned to fly from the internet. And this is just v1.0. He's already working on MkII, a two seater with a whopping 15 foot altitude and three hour flight time. Muharak: We hereby name you the Gadget Lab hacker of the week.

Home-made helicopters hit northern Nigeria [Yahoo/AFP via BoingBoing]