Now that the CCC is over, we finally dug ourselves out of a ginormous pile of cables (Kabelsalat ist gesund!) to bring you this round up post about the best stuff from the last two days of the con.

First up on day 10 was I See Airplanes!, Eric Blossom's excellent speech on creating hardware for making homebrew radars and software using the GnuRadio project. He uses bistatic passive receivers in the 100 MHz range doing object detection using other peoples' transmitters. The project has a lot yet to accomplish including the use of helical filters (if there are any antenna freaks reading this, contact Eric, he's looking for a bit of help).

Next on the third day we attended Ilja van Sprundel's huge fuzzing  extravaganza. Fuzzers generate bad data that is designed to look like good data and will hopefully break something in an interesting way. Our fav part? When the list of irc clients broken by his ircfuzz tool was so long he had to use 10pt font to get it all on one slide (see slide 53)! His paper can be found here and the slides here.

We then wandered to Harald Welte's talk on hacking the Motorola EZX series phones (which we've reported on here before). In case you forgot, the EZX series has a linux kernel. Incidentally the phone runs lots of stuff it really doesn't need (like glibc, 6 threads for just sound processes, and even inetd). He presented the project for the first time in an official context since we saw him at 0Sec in October. Apparently lots of kinks have been worked out and there's an official code source tree here.

The clincher for day 11 was FX and FtR of Phenoelit's semi-controversial talk on Blackberry security (covering both handheld devices and server based RIM products). This talk was a bit of a wake up call for RIM and thus the slides are still not available online so keep a sharp eye out for the video when it's released by the CCC.

Also available from the CCC are the full proceedings in a downloadable pdf (also available in paper format for you physical-space-doodle-in-the-margin freaks).

Today and yesterday's 22C3 included tons of fun hacker stuff. Highlights from day 00 and 01 included a slew of topics from politics to hardcore geekery. We toured the CCC's annual hackfest to bring you the best of the new hacks.

We commence our tour with Hack-A-Day's friend Dan "I Like Big Graphs and I Cannot Lie" Kaminsky. Dan presented yummy OpenGL graphics and DNS cache proof of the Sony Rootkit around the world. He also released Xovi, a tool which allows you to do network visualizations in realtime. Realtime: we dig it.

Next on to fun scanning of 3G wireless networks! The team of btk and ahzf presented a rather thorough intro to GPRS/UMTS packet theory (we use the term theory rather concretely here because packet loss and lag are rampant on cellphone based data networks all over the world). Slides for the talk in PDF format are here. They showed how to circumvent packet filtering / port filtering / data type filtering on data networks. This can be extremely useful when trying to run VoIP applications over a cellphone network since they are usually blocked.

Also of note was the talk on IrDA hotel system hacking presented by Major Malfunction. Which we mentioned when we were at Toorcon.

Hack-A-Day is here at 22C3: Private Investigations, the Chaos Computer Club's annual hacker conference in snow covered Berlin, Germany. The CCC's annual Congress is the European answer to Las Vegas located DEFCON. This 22nd annual conference has been lengthened from three days to four to be able to accommodate more talks.

We'll be here all week reporting on the coolest hardware hack topics at the conference from talks to Blinkenlights. If you're here, drop us a line in the comments!

We've posted Part Two of the Magic Phone How-To over at Engadget. In this Installment, we show you the process behind creating the custom circuit that will live inside the rotary phone. This circuit is as small as possible by making it two-sided and by using surface mount components. Part One of the How-To covered number pad matrix decoding on just about any phone or number pad.

For this week's Nano Hack we will cover how to get power off your iPod Nano's battery. Power can be useful when you need to run other small low power devices in conjunction with the Nano. These devices can be small circuits, lights, etc. In next week's installment we will use the power we draw to power a glowing sleeve for the iPod Nano.

What you will need:
- an iPod connector cable to cannibalize (we used a Dock Connector to USB 2.0 + FireWire)
- a multimeter
- a soldering iron
- some sort of thin knife or miniature flat head screwdriver to pry open the connector

We are starting a new feature for Thursdays here at Hack A Day: Thursday Nano Hacks. Our "hack" for the day is more of a mod out of necessity: Those ugly white headphones with a black iPod nano? Ew! Please come back next Thursday for a real iPod nano hack alrighty?

Scroll on for our little stroll through recoloring cables, and please read the conclusion. (Let's just say that this hack is not exactly the stuff dreams are made of.)

What you will need:
- iPod headphones. They only come in white.
- PlastiDip in black (we used the dipping kind, but we recommend the spray aerosol kind in black)
- a tiny paintbrush you can throw out when you're finished
- toothpicks
- stick or chopstick to stir the PlastiDip
- coathangers
- masking tape
- lots of time to waste

We've posted our How-To for the week over at Engadget. Do you have an old modem lying around? Have you been dying to record some of your phone conversations for those podcasts or homebrewed movies or crazy flash animations you make? Wait no longer! Build yourself a little circuit to change the analog phone's audio to regular line audio to record with your sound card. Remember that it is illegal in many places in the world to record phone conversations without both parties' consent.

We've all played with Google hacks. Here is a short, quite incomplete list of irreverant uses for our engine of worship. Post your favorite Google hackage in the comments. I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords.

Google cooking, around since 2002 and perhaps even before: simply list the various ingredients in your fridge and your cupboard to google-spit out a recipe

Perl fun with the Google API: $1

PyGoogle for Python fanatics: $2

Being able to Google in your command line: Priceless

A whole book chock full of Google hacks including yummy adwords hacking [pdf]

Craigslist + Google Maps == bliss for apartment hunters

A sobering use of Google Maps: updatable trajectory of hurricane Rita [via BoingBoing and Markie]

When video met Google, DVD Jon wrote a script to use Google's VLC video player to play non-google-hosted content

Fun for VJ's and Anit-TV-peeps

A Honeypot for those of you worried about others using malicious Google hacks on your sites

Once again, post your fave Google hacks in the comments.

We've posted our How-To of the week over at Engadget.com. Take a peep at our cool little mod for embedding a wifi sniffer into a backpack strap or messenger bag strap. Haven't you always wanted to have squishy switches and LED's built into your bag? Well, now you can! The How-To even has spiffy Flickr photos for your viewing pleasure.

If you make a cool version of this hack, please let us know. We're sure you'll come up with all sorts of ways to make this mod better: super bright LED's, luminescent wire, fibre optics, etc. Take this How-To and run with it yo…

Continuing on our streak of Friday coverage of cool hackerly events, we would like to say a few words on Dorkbot and Artbots.  Dorkbot started as a New York City monthly meeting for robot and homebrew interactive device aficionados.  It has now spread to many cities, perhaps even one near you.  Guests are invited to speak and afterwards, the hardware hackers mix and mingle to the geekery beat.  The collection of projects presented in the past are stored on their site with linkage for you to peruse.  We at Hack A Day are a bit sad that neither Paris nor Nebraska hosts a monthly Dorkbot.  That said, you are invited to start a new Dorkbot chapter near you if you so desire.  The next New York City Dorkbot meeting is on Wednesday, October 5th at 7 pm.  Check the listings and/or mailing lists for the city nearest you.

As if Dorkbot's artsy tech scene wasn't cool enough, once a year Douglas Repetto also organizes Artbots: The Robot Talent Show.  We had a chance to attend Artbots 2003 at the Eyebeam Gallery in NYC.  Particularly marking that year was Stijn Slabbinck's scratchbot which has been covered rather extensively elsewhere. LEMUR - the league of electronic musical urban robots -- was also in attendance in 2003.  This year's Artbots was held in Dublin, Ireland and included workshops: a MIDI scrapyard challenge and a 60 minute bot building course.

Some of our favorite artist installations from this year's Artbots include:

Yes there's still a how-to this week, even though we pretty much how-to'ed a hack-cake yesterday for our HADA01 celebration.  Here's the low down on today's how-to up on engadget:

I bought an older graphite 400 mhz G4 tower from ebay.de (germany is a great place to buy tech here in europe) a while back. The motherboard and the manufacturing of the AGP G4 series, codenamed "Sawtooth", are really good (i.e. there weren't huge amounts of AGP G4's that failed in weird ways over time). After doing some preliminary reading I learned that doing a processor upgrade for a G4 can sometimes require messy heat sink paste. Some other mac proc upgrades use the same heat sink provided with your original proc. I decided on a choice that does not require thermal paste and has a larger new heat sink and fan included: the PowerLogix PowerForce47 G4/2.0GHz with 512K 1:1 L2 Cache Per Processor. (note: I was not payed by Powerlogix nor did I receive free merchandise for this how-to nor is this article a review of comparable mac proc upgrades). After having a really hard time getting this proc upgrad to work, I just  wanted to put this information out there to help who it may as clearly as possible, after all I never enjoy seeing macs in the trash (unless I get to take them home and adopt them!)

Click to read "How-To: Upgrade the processor on an older macintosh G4" on engadget

We usually post stuff related to case mods rather than cake mods, but today is an exception. It's our 01-th anniversary today and to celebrate we decided to bake a Hack-A-Day logo cake! The cake is a vanilla cake with vanilla frosting served on a homebrew circuit board platter. Celebrate our 01 Hack-A-Day style.

For this cake-mod you will need:
vanilla cake
frosting
various knives (spreading knife, box cutter, sharp kitchen knife)
chopstick or other square ended small clean tool
large green circuit board (like our motherboard isa bus extension card found on the street)
clear plastic from a zipper lock bag (to protect your cake eaters from solder lead and to protect your circuit board from cake and frosting)
black foam core board or similar
green lighting (super bright green led's, green christmas lights, etc.)

Hack-A-Day wouldn't exist without our venerable readers. As a HADA01 tribute, here is a mini photo essay of the many and varied ways you've displayed the skully hardware hacker logo. If you've tagged anything from towers to notebooks with the skull-and-hack-bones, please leave a link in the comments. From us to you: thank you and keep ripping that gear apart.

pictured above: [ryan] was the first to send us a pic of our buttons or stickers in use.

In last week's installment, we showed how to get started with Csound.  This week we take it to the next step by constructing a homemade MIDI controller circuit and use the new device to control Csound in real time.

What you will need:
a computer on which you have Csound up and running
a MIDI adapter for your computer (usb to midi adapters are the norm here)
a microcontroller / breadboard / microcontroller programmer (in this example we will show some BX24 sample code)
a MIDI female connector (either a cable or circuit board mount type, also known as 5 pin din)
a 2N2222 NPN transistor
some resistors (10Kohm and 220ohm)
some sort of sensor or button or potentiometer or any combination of the above

My What the Hack! experience was very much a positive one due to the cute bunnies and the fun atmosphere of the BSD tent where I resided during my stay (the blue arrow points to my spot on the bench).  Hardware people were a bit few and far between, but one day when I was in severe need of resistors for a project I went wandering and found stephanie at the wireless village: thanks! My DECT phone was in a state of severe disrepair/hackage so I may have missed out on meeting a ton of people that were trying to call me using the free DECT network. All in all I managed to not stay glued to my computer/soldering iron the entire time and actually attended some talks and geeked out with friends and new peeps. I've chosen to highlight three talks from WTH to share with you.