Posted May 22nd 2008 3:00PM by Juan Aguilar
Filed under: laptops hacks
Back in November
we asked what you would do with an old unused laptop. If you have an old laptop that's not doing much more than gathering dust, chances are you could put it to better use. You could sell it, but you probably wouldn't get too much for it. Donating or recycling can also get it out your hair, but if you'd like to try something different, read on for some ideas.
Continue reading What to do with an old laptop?
Posted May 22nd 2008 12:30PM by Jason Rollette
Filed under: misc hacks, how-to, daily
We covered many of [Jason Rollette]'s personal projects in the past and are happy to welcome him as our newest Hack-A-Day contributor.
The electronics industry has shifted to lead free compliance, but most hobbyists haven't even considered the personal impact of using lead. Today's How-To will cover what it takes to switch from tin/lead solder to completely lead free. Our previous posts Introduction to soldering and the follow-up still apply to lead free. You may have never considered switching to lead free before, but we hope to help you make an informed decision.
Continue reading How-To: Go green with lead free solder
Posted May 22nd 2008 10:00AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks, daily
[Ryan] sent in this writeup on some
DIY projector repair. The write-up is a little hard to follow, but maybe it'll inspire some future projector landfill saves. [Dissident] replaced the light bulb and ballast in an older DLP projector with some salvaged MR-16 hardware from an even older over head projector. The main trick required was to bridge the trigger leads that tell the projector that the bulb is on and working.
Posted May 22nd 2008 3:30AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks
FPGA's have become especially useful to the hacker community of late. Once upon a time, these lovely pieces of dedicated hardware were fabled to only be within reach of deep pocketed graphics card producers working to up their shader and vertex counts. Today they're often found in the bowels of high end network gear. As reprogrammable arrays of logic gates, FPGAs represent a happy middle ground between general purpose CPUs and dedicated silicon. After the break, we'll recount some of the more interesting FPGA projects we've seen, like the
open source graphics card we featured yesterday.
Continue reading FPGA projects roundup
Posted May 21st 2008 10:00PM by Sean Percival
Filed under: home entertainment hacks
Who doesn't love a good corporate espionage story? We certainly don't mind them, especially when they involve hiring a notable hacker to do the company's dirty work. It seems this is exactly what happened in the case of Dish Networks vs NDS Group. Last month, Christopher Tarnovsky
admitted he was paid $20,000 in cash to crack the security protocols used on DISH Network access cards. NDS Group claimed the reverse engineering was simply for comparative reasons while DISH is said it resulted in $900 million in damages.
The trial
came to an end this week with the court finding NDS group guilty of cracking 1 card (a fine of $49.69) and liable for an additional $1000 in damages. Not quite the big payoff DISH was hoping for, but both companies have expressed feelings of vindication about the decision. DISH Networks says that the jury ruled in their favor, proving that they were right all along (just not $900 million dollars right). NDS maintains that Tarnovsky's work was never publicly shared and that they never intended to flood the black market with cracked cards as DISH has implied.
Posted May 21st 2008 9:00PM by Sean Percival
Filed under: laptops hacks
While we haven't talked about the OLPC
XO laptop much here, don't think we haven't had our eyes on its developments. Originally shipping last November, this unit captured the interest of many for its humanitarian goal, low cost, and potential hackability. After the break, let's take a look at what has been done with this device and poke at the prototype for version 2.
Continue reading Hacking the OLPC now and the future
Posted May 21st 2008 8:00PM by Juan Aguilar
The market is flooded with new media streamers, but which one is for you? One of the cheapest and easiest options is the unambiguously titled
Netflix Player. With an active account, the Netflix Player streams movies and television shows from their online library (currently around 10,000 videos). It connects to the internet via 802.11b/g WiFi or ethernet, but delivers low-quality video if your connection speed is less than 1Mbps. It costs $99 plus at least $8.95/mo for a Netflix subscription. It
runs Linux so hopefully we'll see some hacks for it soon like we did with
previous Roku products. A fine device, if you want to stream movies and nothing else, but if you want to stream data from other sources, like a network, usb hard drive, or (gasp)
bittorrent, you'll have to look elsewhere.
Continue reading Media streamers: buy or build?
Posted May 21st 2008 3:00PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: pcs hacks, daily
The Open Graphics Project has started
accepting preorders for their OGD1, a graphics card with a completely open source design. This initial release is billed as a high-end FPGA prototyping kit specifically designed to test computer graphics architectures. The card has two DVI connectors, S-Video, 256MB RAM, and a 64bit PCI-X connector. The core of the system is a Xilinx Spartan-3 XC3S4000 FPGA. A nonvolatile Lattice XP10 FPGA is used to bootstrap the Xilinx at power up. Here's the
layout of the specific components.
An open design like this could prove very beneficial to the free software community. The open hardware makes driver development much easier; binary drivers from traditional graphics manufacturers have been very hard to work with in the past. The OGD1 could also be used with CPU architectures that wouldn't be unsupported by normal graphics cards. An FPGA based design means that CPU intensive processes like video decoding could be offloaded to the video card without needing a dedicated chip. There is still a lot of work to be done and at $1500 we're pretty sure most of you won't be buying the first generation. It's still exciting to see traditional PC hardware getting reinvented and opened up. Check out the
OGD1's FAQ for more info.
Posted May 20th 2008 10:00PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: cellphones hacks, news
A fundamental problem with flash memory has just gone mainstream. A detective successfully
recovered data from a refurbished iPhone purchased from Apple. Flash memory controllers write to blocks randomly so using standard secure erase techniques are no guarantee that all of the storage space will be written.
[Rich Mogull] has posted a method that should
wipe out almost all remnants of your personal data. You start by restoring the iPhone in iTunes and turning off all the syncing options. Next you create 3 playlists large enough to consume all of the phone's storage space. Sync each playlist in turn and your residual personal data should be obliterated. All that's left to do is sit back and wonder when the first article about the MacBook Air SSD being impossible to securely erase will be published...
Posted May 20th 2008 9:00PM by Juan Aguilar
Filed under: gameboy hacks
Running homebrew applications on the Nintendo DS is easier than ever these days, but if you didn't get into the scene on the ground floor, knowing where to start can appear much more daunting than it actually is. The great thing is: you don't need to crack open your DS and void the warranty. There are numerous peripheral options that handle this easily with no hardware mods required.
DS Fanboy has served up a useful guide to the most popular peripherals and homebrew software. They explain the pros and cons of each peripheral along with the installation and uses of a few popular homebrew apps.
Already well versed in the homebrew arts? Then try some hacks we've featured previously, like
building a serial interface or installing
DSLinux and loading it with with software like this
on-screen qwerty keyboard.
Posted May 20th 2008 5:22PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: robots hacks
[Erik] Sent in this modular robot video. It's not as mentally disturbing as the
snake robots we featured before, but it's still pretty cool. It looks like it's using
M-TRAN modules. Details are completely lacking, so if you've got some, share 'em.
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