Weekly Roundup 1/21/11 In case you were asleep at the wheel, here are our top stories of the week. Our most popular post was one that shows you how to make your own ‘personal assistant’ using Wolfram Alpha, text to speech software, and the phone network. It still won’t get your coffee though. You’ll just [...]
Computing with the command line Here’s something we thought we would never see: computing with just pipes, /dev/zero, and /dev/null. As a though experiment, [Linus] imagined a null byte represented an electron. /dev/zero would have an infinite supply of electrons and /dev/null would make a wonderful positive power supply. With a very short program (named mosfet.c), [...]
Ball-in-maze game shows creativity and classic 8-bit sound [M. Eric Carr] built this a long time ago as his Senior Project for EET480. It’s an electronic version of the ball-in-maze game. We’ve embedded this video after the break for your convenience. The game has just one input; an accelerometer. If you’re having trouble visualizing the [...]
Stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation It doesn’t take much imagination at all to see what a horrible effect this censorship could have on sites like Hackaday. Please do your part to stop internet censorship. Imagine how many companies would rather us not share with you how our brilliant readers have hacked their hardware to do [...]
Commandeer X10-based home automation with your favorite microcontroller X10 has been around for a long time. It’s the brand name for a set of wireless modules used to switch electrical devices in the home. There’s all kinds of different units (bulb sockets, electrical outlets and plug pass-throughs, etc.) and they’re mass-produced which makes them really [...]
Intelligent flashlight will literally show you the way Flashlights are so 20th Century. Be it the incandescent type that popped up very early on, or LED models with came around in the 90′s, there’s not much excitement to the devices. But [Sriranjan Rasakatla] is doing his best to change that. This is his WAY-GO Torch, [...]
Turn your camera phone into a Geiger counter Next time you’re waiting in the security line in an airport, why don’t you pull out your smartphone and count all the radiation being emitted by those body scanners and x-rays? There’s an app for that, courtesy of Mr. [Rolf-Dieter Klein]. The app works by blocking all the [...]
[Jamie Zawinski] controls his drapes from the command line As one of the founders of Netscape and the Mozilla Project, [Jamie Zawinski] is no stranger to frustration elicited from syntax errors, terrible implementations, and things that don’t work even though they should. This familiarity of frustration is what makes [jwz]‘s command line controlled curtains so great; [...]
Laser-triggered camera rig update: 2011 version [Fotoopa] keeps churning out new iterations of his laser-triggered camera rig. This is his latest, which he calls the 2011 setup. Regular readers will remember that we just covered a different version back in November; that one was the 2010 rendition. It had two DSLR cameras offset by 90 [...]
Cheap WiFi bridge for pen testing or otherwise Twenty three dollars. That’s all this tiny pen-testing device will set you back. And there really isn’t much to it. [Kevin Bong] came up with the idea to use a Wifi router as a bridge to test a wired network’s security remotely. He grabbed a TP-Link TL-WR703N router, [...]
