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If you're handy you can make a 24" Android tablet and God's own wireless keyboard. It's a shame we can't get anybody to sell that to us.

Make your own UAV!

This linux-based helicopter is only ~$70CDN: http://forums.hackaday.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1743 ... still needs a little bit of work, but should be capable of recording video to a flash drive soon. Accelerometers, GPS, battery mod are in the works.

Oh hey someone's doing it: http://hackaday.com/2012/01/31/3d-print-in-wax-cast-in-metal/
Printing powdered wax into a wax form, and doing lost wax casting.
(All the advantages of lost foam, with much less smoke. This does limit you to castable refractory, which gets expensive, but they have castable refractory that can handle platinum, so you could do steel with this.)

*I* certainly have never seen a mill/drill under $1500 that's useful for anything other than a boat anchor. A coworker got a Smithy Granite 1224 that he thought was fairly useful, but it sure wasn't $1500. (And of course that's a pure manual machine, so you still have to add at *least* $500 of electronics to get CNC -- and for that same $500 you can buy a complete 3D printer kit and be printing stuff in two hours, they claim, whereas it took me about 20 hours to convert my manual mill to CNC.)

Emboss the card with a QR code. Leave it with no ink on the outside but inside is the printed code with a logo http://hackaday.com/2011/08/11/how-to-put-your-logo-in-a-qr-code/ Use metallic conducting ink and a real tiny Arduino or maybe just a simple circuit, using the conducting ink and make part of the inside of the invitation a speaker. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1F5Gg4bG3o playing the wedding march with words. http://www.oracleband.net/Articles/wedding-march.htm

Spygears app building site http://www.spygear.net/build.php HackADay's spytrakr hacks http://hackaday.com/?s=spy+trakr

Most of the police departments are moving to APCO P25 which just so happens to be extremely vulnerable to a simple hack...

http://hackaday.com/2011/08/18/project-25-digital-radios-law-enforcemnet-grade-vulnerable-to-the-im-me/

I don't think the strength of the encryption matters much. Gang bangers breaking into cars probably aren't hacking even the most simplistic systems. Criminals with enough knowledge to hack a system like this are probably way out of scope.

Most of the police departments are moving to APCO P25 which just so happens to be extremely vulnerable to a simple hack...

http://hackaday.com/2011/08/18/project-25-digital-radios-law-enforcemnet-grade-vulnerable-to-the-im-me/

Hi, I am the person who did this with a g1. The source and schematics have been available at http://hackaday.com/2010/11/10/android-talks-pulsewave/ for a little longer than a year now. We've been selling these things since March 2010. No slashdot for us?

Submit your story, the gods of what gets posted seem to have gone really soft lately, lots of first time submitters getting published lately.

For Super rating on the post, i'll just copy the good HAD comments here, all in one post!

"It’s like a high-powered Segway and a unicycle got it on"

"Looks amazing.
But what a “face plant” under heavy braking."

"20 mph top speed with a 30 mile range?
try a bicycle."

"Monocycle perhaps?"

"It’s a darn good thing the Ryno comes with a Windshield so you can use it in the rain! "

http://hackaday.com/2010/08/20/electric-motorcycle-rocks-one-wheel/

Somebody ask for a 3D printed computer?

http://hackaday.com/2011/10/27/3d-printed-electromechanical-computer/

To Degauss, Shred, or Burn the old HDD/SSD is the question.
Degauss and reuse, shred and recycle, burn and bury the old HDD/SDD.

http://www.datadev.com/degausser-government-nsa-dod-approved-data-security-erase.html
http://www.americanrecycler.com/0510/223spotlight.shtml
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4147847319296070400
http://hackaday.com/2008/09/16/how-to-thermite-based-hard-drive-anti-forensic-destruction/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-ckechIqW0

The burn and bury is fun and some think best.

If you are not averse to tinkering with electronics and have a little spare time you could create a propeller clock. Or a slick 16-segment POV hard drive clock.

Otherwise just drill a few holes through the drives (possibly through the platters).

http://hackaday.com/2011/08/16/i-have-seen-the-future-and-it-has-swarmanoids/

If you want to support game developers or the industry, buy new products, whether it's games or licensed T-shirts. There's precious little to be found in emulation that could possibly help their bottom line.

I presume you've never owned a Nintendo Wii then?

In response to the originally asked question, the only way to have a legal ROM without buying it directly from the publisher (which isn't going to happen) is to make your own ROM. Get something like this: http://hackaday.com/2009/06/19/usb-reader-for-snes-game-carts/ and make your own. And don't distribute them.

http://hackaday.com/2011/05/27/speak-your-mind-and-help-radioshack-suck-less/

Even radioshack dreams about radioshack not sucking...

Sad to say, I can't really imagine them selling more than a few kits to the geezer/nostalgia crowd these days. The younger folks don't want to *understand*. They just want to blindly buy and use.

Hehe, you need to get out more. Here's one example: http://makezine.com/ (warning: some of the things they do may make oldtimers' hair stand on end).

Then there's hackaday: http://hackaday.com/

1 watt lasers have been around for years. You can buy the diodes. This is just cute packaging. It's not powerful enough to be a useful weapon or cutting tool, and it's too powerful in a narrow beam to be a useful illumination source.

In the CNC laser cutter world, this is viewed as a very weak laser. Commercial laser cutters start around 30 watts (for thin plastic and wood) and go up to about 5KW (sheet steel).

All the early MPEG 4 accelerators I saw were implemented in FPGAs. Of course much of that was encoders instead of decoders, since that is the harder problem. Now you can buy cheap mpeg 4 asic/ip core accelerators. Those are still going to be much more energy efficient than using the array of general cores on a GPU.

As for implementing GPU pipelines on FPGAs, it has been done: http://hackaday.com/2008/05/21/open-graphics-card-available-for-preorder/ I'm sure I've seen other research projects or maybe just people screwing around and implementing GPU pipelines "because we can". Its also a convenient solution for educational purposes. But no, if you want to make an efficient GPU for general use, it does not make sense to map GPU logic onto the FPGA fabric. You would loose on the order of an order of magnitude in clock speed, and doing it that way you completely toss away the positive benefits of the FPGA architecture.

I think you might have a skewed impression of how complex mpeg4 encoding and decoding is, and how much area it consumes. Also in the comparison of FPGA logic cells and "gates" in a GPU is a bit faulty. In terms of raw transistor count the largest FPGAs tend to be a little ahead. That "million" or so logic elements in a FPGA does not translate to simple logic gates or transistors. The logic cells are multiple input lookup tables that are used to evaluate arbitrary boolean functions. How many traditional gates can you replace with a single 4 input lookup table? What about an 8 input LUT? The answer does depend on the logic you are mapping, but its almost never a 1:1 mapping.

Also FPGAs do have ram, fixed logic cores (dsp blocks/multipliers, etc), and even conventional processor cores. While its true that however big the array, someone will have a problem that won't fit, you can put an awful lot on a modern FPGA.

As for your final thought about fixed silicon. Not necessarily, look at this fellow's research: http://cas.ee.ic.ac.uk/people/nachiket/ He goes into why CPUs and GPUs are slow for running SPICE circuit simulations. Despite running at a fraction of the clock speed, his FPGA implementation completes the simulations faster and consumes much less power than the CPU or GPU. True a fixed logic accelerator specifically designed to implement the algorithm would be faster, but how many special purpose fixed accelerators do you want to put on your chip? What if the implementation can benefit from dynamically adapting to the current problem? Sometimes it really is more efficient to provide reconfigurable logic and load in the best implementation you have for each problem. Dynamic hardware acceleration is likely one of the reasons intel is producing Atom-FPGA combos. There are ongoing research projects examining the benefits for mobile computing devices. Transistors are cheap, but people want to use cell phones for all sorts of strange things, and there's always something new on the horizon.

http://hackaday.com/2011/07/24/hacking-14-year-old-power-pc-mac-back-to-life/

It is a geek thing. We wonder if you could run a website from a Commodore 64 (I will be nice and not link to that one), a two-axis panning time lapse rig built from Lego, or build a nuclear reactor. You don't need a practical purpose to do these things. The point is to see if they can be done.

Now I have to agree with the first poster that installing an old version Linux on a 386 doesn't rank too high on the scale of these sorts of things. It would be interesting just to remind us how far things have progressed since then.

I have to admit I have an installation of Windows 3.1 running on DOSBox for this very reason. But that is not too hardcore either. Much more amazing is the fact that I know someone who still actively uses their Windows 3.1 system as their only computer. When you see how capable Word 6 was, it shows that things haven't improved a great deal in the word processing world in all that time.

You think too small and assume barriers of cost and practicality, common mistakes when estimating what regulation is necessary. I could see advertising agencies flying swarms of these to track people. See what stores you go to and what you do in your free time to target products at you. Maybe put embarrassing pics of you up and then make you pay to take them down, like the mug shot racket. Just the other day I saw an RC plane body that was spat out by a 3D printer and assembled in 10 minutes. These things will be cheap enough to be almost disposable quite soon.

If these things are allowed I'd expect commercial use to meet hobby use within a year (it's a small hobby), and who the hell knows how big it would get from there.

(Just to save anybody the trouble of correcting me, it would be the case that the sequence of images thus generated would make brute-forcing the password much easier: If you knew the sequence of N images, with M legal characters for the password, you'd only have to do N rounds of between 1 and M guess-and-checks, rather than between 1 and N^M guess-and-checks... So, it would be grossly unsafe to let an attacker have accurate copies of your image sequence. It would still, though, be substantially less unsafe than having the last character display, or having the keys light up when pressed which is bad...)

http://hackaday.com/2009/03/03/distributed-computing-in-javascript/ - nothing new under the sun! However, to all those who say "it would be way too slow in JavaScript", I refer you to the entire OS in browser (previously on slashdot) http://bellard.org/jslinux/

A bike-laptop reminds me of this, so awesome. And he did cycle while using it, although it was to power a different thing than the computer ;)

This is what I read Hackaday for. I read Slashdot for...something to do while I'm on the toilet, I guess?

Ten years from now we will have a push to IPv8 addresses as there will be a shortage of IPv6 addresses.

Everyone will want an IPv6 address for the lights on their Christmas trees and house displays.

Ask, and ye shall receive.

A buddy of mine (not the guy in the article) went and bought a couple sets of these lights (on sale after the holidays) just to do exactly that. It's serially controlled via an Arduino, so it's not IPv6, but his heart's in the right place. :-)

http://hackaday.com/2008/09/16/how-to-thermite-based-hard-drive-anti-forensic-destruction

So to upgrade... do you flush the bios?
How does it handle backups?
Does it support pipework neutrality?
Or pee-er to pee-er streaming?
Is it torrent-ready?

How long before someone connects it to twitter?
oops - too late: http://hackaday.com/2009/05/05/twittering-toilet/

Must be delayed April 1st. Sony is actively promoting rooting their android phones and gives you a simple method of doing it too

There is a current vulnerability where a specially crafted MP3 file can run arbitrary code in the car's player, and since some of them now have access to the general CAN bus, the possibilities are huge. Cars can be hacked with music.

My understanding is that this is an old idea, and the core method is definitely ablation not the negligible force of radiation pressure.

This system is intended to stop particles that are between 1 and 10 cm in diameter. Currently deployed technology allows for reliable ground tracking of debris that is approximately (supposedly) 10 cm, though proposed laser based tracking systems would detect debris in the 1 cm range. Presuming a 5x5x5 cube of solid steel, that's more like 1kg. Individual hobbyists are creating handheld personal laser strong enough to liquify bits of metal already. It's not too much of a stretch to think of a ground based laser in a housing the size of a building could be strong enough to get through the various atmospheres on a clear day and transfer that much energy to an object in LEO. And while the atmosphere is going to be fighting you every step of the way, at least the change in angle for refraction will tend to place the laser target at the front of the object. And aiming lasers and optical telescopes through atmospheric distortions is something that NASA has faced before, on their ground-based telescope initiatives. Lasers are how we aim things, and we're pretty good at it.

The goal is to get the perigree of the orbit low enough that it skims the upper atmosphere and loses energy on its own. A small change in velocity can lead to significant orbital eccentricity, and greater eccentricity generally leads to a lower perigree.

Obviously, I'm too tired to do the math right now. But it seems like you are dismissing the idea a little prematurely.

Arduinos can be used so many different ways... here're a few things you can do with them:

http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Projects/ArduinoUsers

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/category/arduino

http://hackaday.com/category/arduino-hacks/

If it's like almost all the other RFID badges in the world, someone could easily clone it just by walking past you. They can even build the reader and transmitter into one handy self-contained cloning unit:

http://hackaday.com/2011/02/07/simple-rfid-access-system-clone/

There's a recent trend of prosecuting people for "unauthorized use of online systems" when all they did was violate the terms of agreement of Facebook or the like. It's a real stretch to call that "hacking" but they sure tried hard in the 2008 Lori Drew case:

http://hackaday.com/2008/05/27/violating-terms-of-service-equals-hacking/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lori_Drew

They actually failed in that case:

http://www.burneylawfirm.com/blog/tag/hacking/ ...but it was *federal* prosecutors who argued that the same thing the Air Force wants to do is in fact illegal if private citizens do it. And that wasn't the only such case - two more are discussed on this 2010 page:

http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/6189-can-terms-of-service-turn-you-into-a-criminal

On top of all those issues, there might be something else illegal about this, something unique to government actors. Is it constitutional for the state to lie to influence public opinion? Seriously, are we a "democracy" (yeah, I know, technically a Constitutional Republic) anymore, if public opinion can be systematically shifted via...well, bullshit? We have "freedom of information" laws - doesn't that at least imply that information coming from government sources not be a total fraud from top to bottom?

If we let government actors spread BS at will...ummm...we have some really ghastly examples of where that leads. North Korea is probably the worst of the worst possible endgames there but there's a ton of others worldwide.

What I'm a little confused about is that the CIA claims to have made fully flyable dragonfly-sized drones in 1970. I can't find it but wasn't here a slashdot story about this a while back?

Anyway, a link to the CIA 'bots is here, but I'm skeptical of the validity of this bot, even with the provided video: http://hackaday.com/2011/02/10/the-cias-amazing-bots/

If all messages originated by my car are digitally signed by a cert created specifically for my car by the car company and signed by them, I could be held legally responsible for the accuracy of those messages. If I hack my car's electronics to make it send erroneous messages, I could be held liable for any damages that might ensue.

If all messages originated by some guy's car are digitally signed by a cert created specifically for his car by the car company and signed by them, he could be held legally responsible for the accuracy of those messages. If [b]I[/b] hack his car's electronics to make it send erroneous messages, jhe could be held liable for any damages that might ensue.

I mean, it's not like there are any sources of car parts where you could walk around anonymously and just pick out the parts you needed. It'd be like getting a next-to-free GPS receiver out of an OnStar unit in 2005, or later.

Also hackaday.com has some interesting projects about it. So far I remember this one among those trying to make the kinect portable to gather data.

Other than maybe "it's already packaged".

Search Google for "Home Made CNC". People have been making these out of OSB & plywood for a while.

Here's a pretty nice one using an off the shelf router.

Hack a day has an article from 2008.

Another.

They do require some technical knowhow. But that's about it. I think the most basic use parallel ports for IO.

It's Arduinos all the way down!

http://hackaday.com/2009/12/02/arduino-shield-for-arduino-no-really/

Whatever. The point is that the expensive part of Kinect is what's inside the XBox and much more difficult to get to.

And what expensive part would that be that would make this so useful. The open source Kinect projects have done everything from allowing people to draw with their hands in 3D space (control) to actively identifying and separating the bodies directly in front of it (user separation). Tell me what more than identifying the object of control which belongs to each player does the Xbox actually do to control their games?

The actual "expensive" part inside the Kinect was trivial enough to write that it took less than a week for any element you could imagine being required for the control of games to be posted on hackaday Go through the examples and tell me if there's any algorithm they are missing.

Jeri Ellsworth, AKA "Lady Ada"

Read some of her articles on hackaday.

Brilliant, clever, and resourceful. Definitely hero material.

Jeri Ellsworth, AKA "Lady Ada"

Read some of her articles on hackaday.

Brilliant, clever, and resourceful. Definitely hero material.

Jeri Ellsworth, AKA "Lady Ada"

Read some of her articles on hackaday.

Brilliant, clever, and resourceful. Definitely hero material.

There are plenty of excellent DIY sites out there. I have a couple of projects featured on Instructables -- their interface makes is really easy to share your projects step-by-step.

Strange that Make Magazine is missing. Or Hack-A-Day.

because this "trusted" hardware will/can have a specialized chip that contains a non-tamperable key.

Its not easy - but TPM has been proven breakable.

http://hackaday.com/2010/02/09/tpm-crytography-cracked/

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10625082

I'm not really sure how much of a change they would have to make, considering there was an article earlier this year on how someone removed the 3G unit from their iPad and replaced it with the insides of an.. wait, you guessed it, a MiFi. (article) My point being the 3G unit is modular in the iPad (unlike a phone's, which is integrated with the radio which is deeply involved with the phone's operation) and they could probably make a CDMA version.

But if you're a serious DIY person, I think that analog chip is going to be hard to beat.

At work I use a Yokogawa WT210, and it's fantastic -- distortion out to the 50th harmonic, scads of power factor and real power measuring abilities -- but it's also like $7K, and a bear to learn to use. Le sigh.

With all THAT said, I don't know of any accurate, networkable, completely non-intrusive load monitoring hardware, which is a shame.

If all you want is graphing, then Google Power Meter is probably the best way.

That said, there have been a few articles on Hackaday recently concerning methods of interfacing meters with Google's API. I assume that once you submit it, you can get it back out.

Or, if that doesn't do it for you, I'm sure you could adapt one of the projects on Hackaday to your own ends.

That's why I read Hack a Day.