Slashdot Mirror

IMHO this has more geek points.

I see your bet, and I raise you one nixie clock built in a bottle.

Here is an easier method (version that may make from work).
There are commerical version that do alot better bending job, try http://www.garner-products.com/ for videos and pictures to gladden your hard drive destroying heart.

That guide was posted a while ago...

Here is a company that sells it premixed and has been around for several years.
http://www.innovationcooling.com/

An idea that was recently (2 days ago) discussed on Hack a Day was using diamond stropping paste
http://hackaday.com/2009/08/03/diamond-thermal-paste/

Here is a reliable review of Diamond thermal paste.
http://hardwarelogic.com/news/137/ARTICLE/2752/2008-03-03.html

As far as just hoping on Ebay and buying your own, good luck. Finding a distributor for your dust and suspension will take you some time.

I think the most important thing people should consider and hasn't been mentioned so far is that the equation for heat transport is linear. Changing the adulterant in the suspension will be more noticeable as the temp increases. IMHO for most people it's a total waste of materials, for some people it's a decent alternative, and for a very small number of people it's a good idea to spend the time locating materials to make a batch.

Hackaday has a decent guide:

http://hackaday.com/2007/11/16/how-to-where-to-find-parts-for-your-projects/

The 555 can be used in a lot of interesting, simple projects. I like the idea of audio, because it's something that (IMO) a lot of young students will find interesting compared to some of the other typical beginning electronics projects.

One very easy 555 project is an Atari Punk Console. I built one of those a couple of years ago and took it to a party and it provided hours of entertainment.

Another option might be a simple resonant low-pass filter, since any of the students who've listened to electronic music will immediately recognize the effect and want to play with it.

While I'm sure you were jesting (though someone is liable to believe you!), wireless keyboards aren't safe either.

There are only two decent ways to sequence DNA: the capillary electrophoresis method, and the historical gel method. No one uses the gel method. It is nothing more than a novelty at this point.

There is no place in serious research for time-wasting, money-wasting, novelties. It's like making a c64 twitter client. Cute, but pointless.

As for sequencing techniques worth consideration, I stand by my original statement. I also stand by my estimates, which I clearly identified as my estimates, not hard facts.

I'm trying to be a good example of my profession and enlighten the general populace about the realities of the scientific community. What exactly are you trying to do?

I have been thinking about it since I have read that comment on hackaday

He knows his daughter better than we all do.

Although I agree that using a GPS tracker is crazy when a mobile phone appears more sensible. I don't see any real solutions here to what the guy is asking, after 800 comments. Ignore the morality of it, and you're fairly restricted on options.

First though, something worth considering is the wikipedia article, and instead of it pushing her GPS location back to you, try a 'data puller' instead, so you can somehow contact the device and get her co-ordinates sent back to you.

Either way, unless you're looking at installing her with a satellite, connect a very long cable up, or some sort of elasticated wireless router rebroadcasting operation, you've gotta go with the mobile phone network. As far as I know there's only GPS trackers that use the mobile network, or using a mobile phone itself.

As everyone's mentioned you could use a commercial GPS location service from your network provider, or use a mobile phone and opt for writing your own software. Alternatively if you find the right dedicated GPS commercial device that uses GPRS and uploads it to your own server, then you can deal with it how you like.

If you're more willing to hack some hardware together yourself, DEFINITELY check out HackADay's section on gps hacks as a starting point.

I hope this is actually some help to you!!

Here's a DIY solution since every other comment I've read said to buy a cellphone. There's also a link on that page to another project that did gps tracking and worked in the middle of nowhere using shortwave radio.

If your applications are google centric and your not doing anything intensive (video editing) then you should be good with an iPhone and keyboard.

http://hackaday.com/2009/03/24/external-keyboard-with-an-iphone/

I don't see a way to do it with the G1 but I would think you could.

Of course if your storing data from camera's etc... then you will need a small NAS or USB/eSATA storage system. You can make your own or buy something about anywhere these days.

More likely it's ripping off these people. http://hackaday.com/2009/05/17/magic-wands-for-disney/ They released open source code for their project here. http://gitorious.org/fantasia

that would make it "prior art", and even I do not think MS could be such a noob.

According to this item at Hackday.com anyway.

More likely it's ripping off these people. http://hackaday.com/2009/05/17/magic-wands-for-disney/ They released open source code for their project here. http://gitorious.org/fantasia

http://hackaday.com/2007/09/02/o-scope-pong/

It's from 2007, but it proves someone did it.

"Behead" it. http://hackaday.com/2008/07/24/behead-your-laptop/

Most of that is completely over my head, but it does sound interesting.

Today I stumbled on yet another Propeller project - A wiki reader.

http://hackaday.com/2009/05/02/wikibrowser/

The project homepage is linked in the comments. I think the reader would be better with some formatting, but still quite neat!

I'd rather find out about interesting and unique chips, rather than ones that "shook the world".

Like the Propellar, with its interesting interrupt handling, and non-stamped design.

And to think that it seems all the rage is to be upgrading Atari's with an Svideo board as featured on hack-a-day a few weeks ago http://hackaday.com/2009/04/05/s-video-from-an-atari-2600/ . Honestly I don't know why people want to make their TV's look like a 30 year old TV display. The reason for all that bleeding was the circuitry that converted the video and audio signal to RF and then the deconverting of that signal in the TV. It is beyond me why anybody would want to make something look like it did, instead of how it should look. I grew up playing the Atari 2600 and I thought it was fun, but I certainly am not fond of how it looked. I'm just waiting for my SVideo converter board to arrive so I can upgrade my 2600 to look how it should, not how it did. (And I'm still using a CRT TV as well none of these new fangled LCD TV's). - XSS

You don't have to buy them. You can get titanium dioxide from donuts and use that to enhance your solar cells.

Our food really is filled with crap!

What's with this fad of making everything controllable by a Wiimote? It's losing it's charm. Maybe I should stop reading Hack a Day: http://hackaday.com/category/wii-hacks/ :p

People have this too - although it has to be trained. Most of our extra senses are so underused, that we need to kickstart them somehow, before we become consciously aware of them.

http://hackaday.com/2009/02/05/haptic-compass/

After using his vibrating belt for a while, he knew exactly where he was and what direction he was going, even with it taken off.

Brains are amazing. If you provide them with more info, they figure out how to use it.

Probably for reasons like this
Imagine a hidden closed-version of this. Also:
Why do we care about open source software anyway ? We have the bytecode after all...

Is Slashdot turning into Hack a Day today, or what?

I remember that Boston incident: it wasn't a Lite-Brite, it was a hand-built blinking widget clipped to her sweatshirt with wires and things sticking out of it. (Picture at http://hackaday.com/2008/09/19/boston-led-sweatshirt-arrestee-interviewed/). She also was holding something made out of clay in her hand (as it turned out, a rose sculpture). In this day and age, it's very understandable to think "holy cow, idiot terrorist with plastique!!!!". And some of us are old enough to remember when American college kids did noticeable amounts of poorly targeted anti-war violence. (I'm old enough to remember the Weathermen, and Patty Hearst.)

So the security response there was perhaps excessive, but understandable. Please actually do a bit of research before claiming that something was wildly out of line.

Never talk to a police: http://hackaday.com/2008/06/16/dont-talk-to-the-police/ The presenter (and the detective) make good points. There are tens of thousands of laws, you may be breaking one of them without your knowledge.

http://hackaday.com/2009/02/23/sslstrip-hijacking-ssl-in-network/

http://hackaday.com/2009/01/23/adding-right-click-to-a-macbook-pro/ Hackaday got you covered.

If you guys like this sort of thing, check out the hackaday blog.

It gets a lot of stories that slashdot eventually picks up - usually sooner.

But I find it deals with cool hardware/software a lot more than slashdot does, and less with industry news.

So, let's assume you've discredited Ohm to some degree. But, is that degree relevant? The general points you've made to do so have some merit. However, Mr. Ohm is probably a lot closer to having the pulse of the US legal community that you or I. Therefore, even if he's done work for the RIAA, Exxon/Mobil, Altria, SCO, *and* Lord Cheney himself, his legal insights are going to carry more weight than ours. Why? Because he (probably) has much more extensive experience in how DAs, courts, and Federal/State/Local law enforcement work than we do.

Hell, even a law professor at Liberty University - of all places - has a leg up on 99.007% of the citizens when it comes time to decide: 1) am I about to step into the kimchee, and 2) if I do, what my odds are of keeping my okole and my assets out of harms way.

A DIY version of this was just on hackaday today actually.

http://hackaday.com/2009/02/05/haptic-compass/

It's apparently _very_ easy to build...so if you want one, build it! :)

Nope! Go get a BlackBerry Storm. Touch screen device that is improved via mechanism to detect difference between touching a widget and pushing a widget. I used to have one of those other touch screen phones, and navigation was a complete pain in the ass. My new phone with the clicky screen is much better, and it still uses multi-touch for on-screen text selection purposes. Interface improved, patent improved, life goes on.

You know, it's interesting. I have an iPod Touch and find its interface to be vastly superior to the Storm, which I have borrowed a few times from friends and thus had an opportunity to try out. However, I asked someone who was obviously not familiar with touch screens to type in their address on my iPod Touch the other day, and they had a very difficult time working out how to use the thing. They kept trying to push down on the "keys" and were frustrated when it wouldn't click. The idea that they just had to tap was apparently very difficult to comprehend.

On the other hand, to me (having used touch screen technology in general, and the iPod Touch / iPhone interface specifically), the "clicking" that the Storm implements seems forced and hokey. I thought it missed the point of the, "But there are no buttons!" complaint, since one still can't type without looking at the screen (i.e., one can't feel their way around the keyboard). I had not previously considered that it might be a more intuitive interface for someone who had never encountered touch screen technology before.

I have an ipod Touch,Storm and an HTC tytn 2. The apple stuff works wonderfully for the two finger zooming on the web browsing and photos, but the storm is nice when you want to enter something as you can hover over it and click - it is better as a blackberry email device(on a touch screen). The Storm is not fast but I get a lot of incorrect presses on the IPOD.
The tytn2 works well because it has a keyboard when you get bored of touch ;) It makes it a fair bit heavier. I think the storm is the best overall for portable email but I saw how it was constructed on hackaday. Hackaday Blackberry and that had me worried as to longevity.

If you like playing with LEDs, follow the Hack A Day blog. At least once a week, there's a post involving home-brew LED projects, some of them quite massive and/or impressive. For instance,

• a 12-foot long digital wall clock
• the huge GameBoy color display made out of a zillion RGB LEDs

If you like playing with LEDs, follow the Hack A Day blog. At least once a week, there's a post involving home-brew LED projects, some of them quite massive and/or impressive. For instance,

• a 12-foot long digital wall clock
• the huge GameBoy color display made out of a zillion RGB LEDs

Yeah, it's not a solution. It simply seeks to make it more obscure but an attacker would certainly still be able to pull off the attack.

From what is on that blog, there's still a full keyschedule in memory at this time. This is how we reconstruct the key, the redundant information in memory; it's not just the 128/256 bit key itself. For older methods, they needed the actual specific key bits but we don't need them because we recreate them.

Basically, the CPU is acting as a ghetto crypto co-processer. Emphasis on ghetto. It's a nice suggestion but the devil is in the details and sadly the details in this case aren't really up to snuff. It's a bogus solution.

but the Nerd was loud and clear!

I like http://www.hackaday.com/ better.

Surely this stuff should be on the idle section of slashdot!

If I want DIY servo controlled stuff I can go to http://www.hackaday.com/ or http://www.hackedgadgets.com/ or http://www.hacknmod.com/ or even http://www.instructables.com/

At the moment there is no evidence of openness that I can find.

you either didn't look very hard or don't have much in the way of researching skills.

http://www.roku.com/community/gpl_nfp.php

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=2932

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/30/1645200&from=rss

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10050649-93.html

http://hackaday.com/2008/07/02/netflix-player-source-code-released/

http://forums.rokulabs.com/viewtopic.php?t=17046&highlight=&sid=1bea026fdae6ddaace484e70273f2d0d

I'm not saying much has become of it, but Roku has already released all GPL code and is hosting forums for their users where they allow talk about hacking it at least. They publicly state their intentions to allow any content provider to use their box to distribute content, and mention the release of a software development kit to help people do that.

I don't know if you are claiming there is no evidence of "open" as in FOSS or "open" as in allowing other companies to use the platform, but there seems to be plenty of evidence of both.

Now I can't see the video, so it could be the same (though I doubt it), but isn't the summary pretty damn close to one of these?

Trample on it.. http://hackaday.com/2008/12/09/swiitboard-high-impact-wii-balance-board/

Probably not as practicable, but isn't http://opencores.org/ kinda missing from this list.

Also, a lot of fun to be had with FPGA-based boards (http://www.fpga4fun.com/, http://hackaday.com/2008/05/22/fpga-projects-roundup/)

Acid?

Real Men use Thermite.

Bonus: If the thief is holding it in their lap at the time, they have been REMOVED from the gene pool.

oh shit, you'd better go tell the guys that run http://hackaday.com/ . Thanks dude, I had no idea!

Hack a day has a much better looking flying car..

http://hackaday.com/2008/11/13/flying-cars-a-reality/

I found this http://www.eissq.com/DialADC.html while reading hack-a-day. This may be exactly what you are looking for. Enjoy. http://hackaday.com/2006/02/18/digitally-reading-analog-gauges/

I found this lower down, since it's IR, you can probably achieve the same thing with a web cam.

http://hackaday.com/2007/05/30/uk-power-meter-monitor/

You may or may not be aware that this very hack happened with the European version of the RFID passport in september :

http://hackaday.com/2008/09/30/cloning-and-modifying-e-passports/

By the way, the most "funny" thing I saw about RFID passports was that in Pakistan, at least one occurrence of "American passport bearer detection" has occurred in a market crowd. Fortunately, the goal was then to steal the passport, not behead the bearer.

http://hackaday.com/2008/04/23/24-core-ikea-cluster/

http://hackaday.com/2008/06/17/iphone-used-to-control-squad-of-uavs/ and http://hackaday.com/2008/10/05/ardupilot-pro-autopilot-drone/

http://hackaday.com/2008/06/17/iphone-used-to-control-squad-of-uavs/ and http://hackaday.com/2008/10/05/ardupilot-pro-autopilot-drone/