• iPhone look-alike on your kitchen wall
[Ryan] and his wife wanted to have a touchscreen interface in the kitchen to store their recipes and for various music, video, and Internet entertainment. We know where they’re coming from, we’re quite tired or cleaning flour (or worse!) off of our palm pilot screen after baking. The display you see on the wall is [...]
• C64 interface for your computer
Before we get started, lets just point out that this C64 was broken. He did not take a functional C64 out of operation for this. What he did do, was to build a hardware interface for for his VICE system. For those unfamiliar, VICE is a cross platform C64 emulator. [Simon] points out that the [...]

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• LCD backlight repair
Another broken LCD TV came [Steve DiRaddo's] way. This one had a broken backlight that he wanted to fix. He scrapped his LCD light table in order use the inverter. The two televisions were not the same size, nor made by the main manufacturer, but backlights all operate under the same principles. Using an inverter [...]
• Hardware store follow focus
Want to do quick and accurate focus change with your DSLR? Here’s a discussion thread covering dirt-cheap solutions. It starts with a broccoli rubber-band and a couple of zip ties. That being a bit chintzy, the more popular build seen above uses a hose clamp, rubber band for padding, a drawer pull, a nut, and [...]

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Mainly because of college winter vacation, I decided to start watching short anime series. Yesterday, I finished one entitled MoonPhase. It has only 26 episode. Anyway, I’m no good at descriptions, so I’ll post one from AnimeNewsNetwork:

Plot Summary: Photographer Kohei Morioka, while on assignment for a magazine devoted to the occult, enters a dark castle in Germany where he encounters a young vampire girl named Hazuki who tries to turn him into her servant. While Kohei doesn’t succumb to Hazuki’s will, he does set her free from the barrier keeping her in the castle. He is surprised to find her living with him in Japan.

My micro review: Though the anime had potential (I found it funny how they had a constant theme of pans falling on top of people’s heads) — it fell a bit short of being “good”. It’s a series that I would watch once and never again…Though it wasn’t bad, I can’t see how I’d be able to recommend it to anyone either. Oh well.

My next anime to watch (I’ve begun it already): Ghost Hunt

It’s available subbed and dubbed too for those who are too lazy to read captions or dislike them! It’s also only 25 episodes…so expect a micro review soon!

• SpiderBot prompts laser envy
[Daniel's] horrifying hexapod makes us wish we were sitting next to a laser cutter. The parts are cut from 4.9mm plywood and include laser-sculpted sections to allow the twenty servos to properly seat in their mounting spaces. We would suggest that you build it in secret so as not to ruin the surprise when your [...]
• Adafruit Eagle library
We love it when a PCB comes out right the first time. We’re careful enough with our designs that if something is wrong it’s usually a footprint problem, like we picked the wrong package for the components. Adafruit is helping to make the design process easier by sharing their Eagle library. Like the Eagle library [...]

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• Billy Bass with selectable clips
[Will] enjoys giving hacked items as Secret Santa gifts and this year he decided to augment a Billy Bass. These gag items have become a popular hack to use as a prop or to read your Twitter updates to you. Right of the bat he scrapped the original PCB and sent it to the gift’s [...]
• NES console to cartridge security in depth
[Segher] has reverse engineered the hardware and command set for the NES CIC chips. These chips make up the security hardware that validates a cartridge to make sure it has been licensed by Nintendo. Only after authentication will the console’s CIC chip stop reseting the hardware at 1 Hz. The was no hardware information available [...]

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• Cell phone based car starter, another take
[Dave] Had been working on a cell phone activated remote start for his car for a while when we posted the GSM car starter. While both do carry out the same job, we feel that there is enough good information here to share. He’s gone a pretty simple way, by connecting the vibrator motor leads [...]
• Polymorph in practice
[Leesam] tipped us off to this cool tutorial for shaping Polymorph. For those who haven’t, it is pretty cool stuff. It is a plastic that comes in little pellets. You can melt it down at relatively low temperatures and mold it to the shape you need. We’ve seen it used on several projects, most notably [...]

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• The most complicated, and simplest binary clocks.
We were going to take a break from posting clocks. Really we were. This one came in the tip line today though, and we just couldn’t pass it up. [Alex] has built, what might be the most complicated clock we’ve seen. At least, it would appear that way initially. This Binary clock shows Hours, Minutes, [...]
• The Pololu 3 servo hexapod
Here’s a great tutorial on how to make a tiny hexapod walker. While this was written specifically for a kit that is sold by pololu, we like the simple layout. You could implement your own electronics if you prefer something else.  If you want to follow along with their components, you’ll end up with a [...]

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The game Rope’n'Fly is currently free to download today only! You can Get It Here. The premise for the game: Use your ropes to swing from on skyscraper to the others. You have full control over your ropes, touch on a tower to throw your rope there, touch once again to release it and use your acceleration to fly through the sky. Touch again once you come too near to the ground before your break into smithereens.

• RGB display development
[SeBsZ] tipped us off that he’s working on a display using RGB LEDs. He’s etched some nice surface mount controller boards to carry the ATmega8 microcontroller and NXP PCA9635 drivers. This setup uses the I2C bus to address each expansion board of 5 LED modules. Theoretically this hardware would allow for 638 RGB modules but [...]
• Guerilla theater hits two wheels
[Tom] wanted to take the show on the road so he added lights to his bike using theater grade control hardware. The picture above shows three tail lights comprised of 195 LEDs. Built on perf-board, a DMX512 controller can display several patterns on each module. The lighting technician (bike pilot) controls the patterns through a [...]

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• iPod peripheral: iSee360i hacking
[James] has done some work reverse engineering the protocols for the iSee360i peripheral. This iPod addon is a media player housing that features a 3.6″ screen. It can be used to play video on iPods that don’t otherwise have the capability because it just uses them as a hard drive. He picked up the device [...]
• Russian billboard includes a “happy ending”
It seems someone hacked into one of LED billboards and added porn video clips to the rotation of advertisements. We caught a glimpse before YouTube yanked it. We’ve pixelated the shot above which already had some blackbox censorship from the OP but we assure you, it was hardcore porn.
The 9-by-6 meter billboard is in downtown [...]

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