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(although, I hear Franklin Mint is coming out with an Intel vs. Motorola "CPU Civil War" set).

Taking this hack a step farther:

Since Roombas can be made to connect to computers via bluetooth adapters, it stands to reason that if they are sufficiently programable, they could be made to respond directly to the Wiimote via bluetooth, without a Mac playing middleman. This might even eliminate a lot of the the lag the story mentions.

Some of us would be interested in reading more. Even without design info, I would be interested in costing information. It could appear next to an add-to-cart button on http://store.makezine.com/SearchResults.asp?Cat=20 or http://www.adafruit.com/ if you like.

I don't know if this is the case. Everyone seems to assume you can "intercept" the RFID information from many meters away. I guess I'm not sure which technology is used in credit cards, but if it's anything like ISO 14443 standard or even ISO 15693, the max distance is only going to be 1.5 meters or less.

Anyone stating "max distance" for RF is creating limits where none exist. With a correctly-sized transmitter, a sensitive enough receiver, and a large enough antenna, there's nothing preventing reading over much greater distances.

The "hacker" world distance record for reading RFID tags (not necessarily the same technology that's in these credit cards) was set at Defcon in August 2005. It was 69 feet, or over 21 meters. You can see the Make Photo Blog pictures of the gear used. While the kit may look bulky, 69 feet would allow you to have it in a van parked outside a store shooting in through the windows.

Regarding the correctly sized antenna, the WiFi shootout that year scored a record 125 miles for an unamplified 802.11 link. 125 miles from a pair of hundred-milliwatt transceivers chatting at 11 mbps.

And don't assume it's not worth the trouble, either. You don't know what dollar values may be transacted via RFID, nor what thefts may be possible with the intercepted data.

That's not to say that encryption isn't capable of rendering the data useless to an eavesdropper. We don't know if it is or isn't good encryption, but that's immaterial. Don't rely on distance alone to protect you. It won't.

For a long time I would have agreed with you completely, but since an example of someone fixing their TV turned up on Make today, I'm not so sure.

Yes, TVs and other consumer electrics may be getting more proprietary in their construction, but people are also less inclined to fix them, although examples exist that demonstrate that it is possible.

I think you're in danger of harking back to some "good old day" that never existed whilst also ignoring the fact that most people these days don't want to fix a TV or mess around with a soldering iron in the back of their hi-fi. It's easier, quicker and nicer to buy something new: We don't fix things any more because we don't want to, not because we can't.

For those interested, the current issue of Make magazien has a longish interview with the inventor.

Sorry, to read the article online you have to also subscribe, but Make is a great magazine and you should probably be subscribed anyway! This particular issue (issue 8) is a very good one overall so you might want to check it out on the stands.

The quarterly Make magazine fits nicely with the other hobbyist books.

Amazon has subscriptions and back issues.

Not a ninja, but how about a guy in a Zoidberg costume?
Note the description of the photo (Zoidberg: Dog not amused)

I don't work for Google or Microsoft, but I do live in the SF Bay area. I moved there after over 20 years in the Midwest. The first shock was paying three times the rent for a worse quality apartment. The second shock was the absolutely fantastic weather, and the variety of places and activities within easy reach. The weather alone, for me, is almost worth the high cost of living. I like cooler weather and daytime temperatures hover between 68 and 74 F most of the year, dropping to mid-50's at night.

Then there's the tech aspect of the whole area. We've got ALL the cool stuff...Maker Faire, RoboGames, and a new startup called TechShop where for a reasonable fee you can access many types of machinery and take skill classes (+5 Experience Gained, CNC Milling!). If you've got a little experience and some enthusiasm, it's also a good place to be if you end up looking for work.

Yet if I were raising a family, I'd probably head for cheaper areas.

Just build your own, maybe a few small ones or one larger one.

http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/06/diy_1 000_watt_wind_turbine.html

a bit of JFGI and I found it:

makezine article

... lack of schematics for constructing this kind of board ...

I don't think it runs Linux (yet), and I hate to sound like a shill for O'Reilly, but this seems like a step in the direction you are describing:

http://makezine.com/controller/

But honestly, this is not the kind of article were you can learn how-to do a linux-running: it simply says how they use it, but you are not going to find anything "usable" from there.

Try digging in HackADay or Make instead.

It is not modern electronics that are the problem, it is how corporations package and sell electronics as passive consumer products. To learn and thrive, children need less of "do not open, do not copy, no consumer-servicable componentents inside" and more of a "let's take it apart and fix it" mentality.

That "Let's fix it" attitude is certainly possible with modern electronics, just look Make Magazine as an example. We just need to do a better job of teaching "Let's fix it" to our children.

It's rather late to be fearing that. Farmers and gardeners have been messing with genetics and releasing the results of that into the wild for over a thousand years - it's called "selective cross-breeding". Just about everything food product you buy in the supermarket was created by science, not chance, and has been for as long as you've been alive.

True, selective breeding has been going on for a long tyme, but that's not the same as inserting the gene from a fish into the tomato or one from the brazil nut into soybeans. These are totally different genuses never mind species so they don't cross breed. Selective breeding is for increasing benefitual gene expression and decreasing undesired expressions for traits that are already in the plant. Yes, I used to hack, er grow, gardens and had a green thumb. Actually the current issue of "Make: technology on your time" has some good articles on hacking plants.

Actually, I would give Cold Fusion a far bigger chance of becoming something real than anything which uses magnets.

A nice interview about Cold Fusion with one of its researchers was published in Makezine magazine last year. You can find an interesting interview with Ed Storms about this subject here (sans the images):
http://www.makezine.com/extras/12.html

Also interesting:

Cold Fusion: an objective evaluation: http://home.netcom.com/~storms2/review8.html

After reading some of this material; I'm not saying that it is simply impossible anymore. I also realise that billions have been invested into hot fusion and there is a large group of people who don't want to see their investments going up into smoke.

Sounds interesting, the tip about IR-reflective tape especially. It got me thinking ... if reflective tape is expensive enough to warrant hunting for cheaper sources ... And you also need to get IR light sources, wouldn't it make sense to invert the lighting, and put IR-emissive dots directly on the mocap actor? Something like LED throwies but with IR LED(s) rather than visible light? Perhaps it's still too expensive and/or impractical what with batteries and so on, though. I do wonder how it would compare, brightness-wise. Anyone tried it?

Have you considered disconnecting his computer at night? Unless he has his very own phone/cable line that enters the house at his bedroom, his connection point should be easy to access. Maybe if you are hardware oriented, ya can make a little automated box and submit it as a project to Make

MAKE has a couple of photos of Joe Grand's PCB/PIC/LED badges in their blog.

I prefer the type of phone that you crank in order to get the operators attention, and then say "Maybel, connect me to my mother."

Well, people have already done a rotary-dial mobile phone, and some mobile phones support voice recognition, it might be amusing to have a mobile phone in an old-fashioned housing, with a crank input and voice recognition, so you'd turn the crank to activate the voice recognition and then tell it whom to call.

Hi friend of digital freedom,

Your thoughtful gift today of $25.00 means a world of difference to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and our ability to defend digital freedom.

On behalf of our Board, staff and volunteers, thank you for your contribution and for helping to protect digital freedom. Our friends at MAKE Magazine and Anonymizer.com also appreciate your support! Take advantage of their EFF member exclusives:
- Get a discount on your MAKE subscription with this promotional
code: CMAKE. http://www.makezine.com/subscribe/
- Try Anonymous Surfing with your free 30-day trial! Download the
software here: http://secure.eff.org/anonymizer (Please note that
the software only runs on Windows 2000 and XP.)
Sincerely,
Nicole

Nicole Nguyen
Membership Coordinator
Electronic Frontier Foundation
415-436-9333 x120
nicole@eff.org

PS: I will send you an acknowledgment letter and any associated premiums to the mailing address listed below. Your gift is tax deductible as allowed by law. Our tax ID number is 04-3091431. EFF respects the confidentiality of its supporters and we do not lend, rent or sell our lists of donors at any time. No goods or services were provided in consideration of this contribution.

Read the article in the upcoming Make magazine.

Oh? Upon what is that conclusion based? You might want to examine your underlying assumptions. "Oil" is just an arrangement of carbon and hydrogen atoms. If there was sufficient incentive, someone could invent multiple ways of turning sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into a substance that was as identical to petroleum as you could wish. Nobody's going to do that, of course, because the there are already ways to convert the output of plants into replacements for the three main uses for petroleum (as a fuel, as a chemical feedstock, and as lubricant) so there's no point in attempting to duplicate petroleum.

Now, the reason that plant products haven't replaced petroleum for those three main uses is primarily economic: Petroleum is still cheaper than the plants required to turn the plants into biodiesel, lubricating oil, and plastics. Further, the current high prices are viewed by a lot of people as being temporary which limits the willingness to invest in improving the technology to the point where it would even be cost-effective with oil at the prices being paid for it two years ago.

The thing that sticks in my craw is the fact that I would be a prime target for an electric vehicle, but they cost too damn much. I pay $400 per month for the minivan (because I need the seats for all the people in my family) I just bought (because some idiot in a pickup truck didn't know you shouldn't drive 70 mph in a parking lot) and it burns $150 per month in gasoline. Even if I were to entirely eliminate the cost of fuel, I could only justify paying $550 per month for an electric vehicle. That's not enough to buy an $80,000 car, not unless the note is for substantially longer than six years. (My current car note is a sixty-month note.)

Anyway, that leaves me with the option of buying a gasoline-powered car and converting it. That actually is cost-effective (and here is a link to some information about building your own electric car) and I've been interested in that option since I read the article about it in Make but that requires a commitment to the effort (in time, energy, and a reasonably stocked workshop) that I'm not currently willing to make.

Please take a look at this page form february 2006. It shows some very nice toys that are actually based on technology, like the bug sound amplifier (bugs to be collected by the kid himself) a toy creator set, where you can mould your own toys. And some moldeable moon sand. All these modern technological toys really stimulate kids discorvering the world, and technology is in there, but not in the way. And dammit, I wish I had some of these things as a kid! By the way, lego also contains a lot of technology, one way (how come the bricks stick so nicely but are also easy to remove from eachother) or another (the new robotics sets).

As I understand it, RFID cards don't do anything until they're exposed to an electromagnetic field, which gives them just enough juice to fire off a message, usually an identity code.

They can broadcast whatever they like. In the case of passports, it's much of the information in your passport: name, gender, birthdate, nationality. Several countries are trying to get various forms of biometric information, especially your passport photo.

Unless I've been completely misinformed, you'd have to generate quite the field to even have a chance of reading one of these things at a distance. I know that my RFID card doesn't work until it's within a coupla inches of the appropriate reader.

That's because there is no good reason for, say, an RFID door key reader to detect keys furthere away than a few inches. Any further and you risk someone loitering near the door accidentally letting a bad guy in.

If you're actively interested in reading RFID at a distance, the rules change. The theft detectors in stores are all RFID and some have ranges of 5 or so feet. At least one group has developed tech capable of reading RFID at 69-feet. (Sadly the 1, 2.) It's a big rig, but small enough to hide in the trunk of a large car.

The whole "it's broadcasting all of your personal information!!!!" hype is a bunch of FUD. The only way it could really be a security risk is if the card itself was stolen, and then it's really no different than having your S.S. card or driver's license stolen.

It's broadcasting most of the information in your passport: name, date of birth, gender, nationality. The last one is perhaps the most important. Want to kill some Americans, but don't want to be nearby when it happens? Plant a bomb attached to an RFID reader. You don't need 69 feet of range, 10 or so will be plenty. When it detects 2 or more American passports nearby, explode. Looking for an American to kidnap? Future versions are likely going to be broadcasting a low-resolution version of your passport photo. Set up a scanner in your backpack and wander around.

Only because people raised concerns like this the passport design was modified with a shield in the front cover. If the passport is closed, in theory no data is broadcast. That reduces the exposure, which is good, but isn't perfect. If you're in a foreign country you need to display your passport occasionally: airports, checking into hotels, and the like. The window of exposure is smaller, but not zero.

For the "hackable devices in general" you seek, this controller looks really cool. This presentation also gives some cool, potentially less expensive ideas.

I agree. I pretty much follow the same algorithm. Slashdot is invaluable. In addition if you are the builder type I would recommend Makezine Blog

They also had Einstein and Jim Henson, and I've never heard Apple is working on theoretical Physics or making puppets...

There was an article about this in the last issue of Make
http://makezine.com/06/platform/ (subscription required to view the article)

It is interesting reading and looks like a fun project. RFID for Makers

Also, check out this guy's dissection of a used can.

Sorry to reply to myself, but Make Blog has a much better dissection

Sure: 69 feet and counting...

At defcon 2005 some guys set a record for reading passive tags at 69 feet. With pics :)

the last link to the story isnt to the original wireless mod which i did and posted over at make: http://forums.makezine.com/comments.php?Discussion ID=33, its to the guy who made the self-contained music playing guitar. i dont believe that functioned at all as a controller for the game like mine did.

rock on! I *love* the battery pack idea! top of my list for revision two :)

This was on makezine.com:
www.proxflyer.com/pi_meny.htm

However, I think the point isn't the size, it is that it emulates insect vision to sense its environment and avoid obstacles.

http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/02/touch _screen_for_39.html

These seem to be just overlays for LCDs, but they are pretty cheap. I can't vouch for quality, though; I just remember seeing the link and almost buying a couple.

So the only question remaining is: Am I supposed to bring my own vegetable oil?

The first thing to realise there are plenty of technology related hobbyists around the world, although most are not high profile and some may be different very different demographics than yourself.

Some (hobby) groups to consider looking towards for ideas and help include: woodworkers, metalworkers (hobbyists using micromills and mini-lathes from TaigTools and Sherline, etc.), model railroads, model aircrafts (static and RC), robotics, amateur radio (ham), 2600, LUGs, and Artist Run Centres/Communities

Random list of some I use or know of:
  Make magazine http://www.makezine.com/
  Instructables http://www.instructables.com/
  ARRL http://www.arrl.org/
  http://www.sparkfun.com/ (check out their tutorials)
  http://www.fpga4fun.com/ / http://www.knjn.com/
  QRP-L http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/qrp-l/>
  GQRP http://www.gqrp.com/
  http://www.pololu.com/ (cheap stencils laser cut, e.g. 3x4 for $32)
  http://www.diyaudio.com/
  http://www.digikey.com/ (if you're still buying electronics from Radio Shack, get these 3 catalogs now!)
  http://www.mouser.com/
  http://www.jameco.com/
  the ton of various surplus/NOS dealers online
  http://www.frontpanelexpress.com/
  http://www.seattlerobotics.org/
  http://www.chibots.org/index.php
  DorkBot
  http://eyebeam.org/production/production.php?page= tools
  MIT CBA FAB http://fab.cba.mit.edu/
  http://www.leevalley.com/
  http://www.smallparts.com/
  http://www.danssmallpartsandkits.net/
  http://www.wmberg.com/
  http://www.acklandsgrainger.com/
  http://www.grainger.com/
  http://www.onlinemetals.com/
  http://www.amqrp.com/
  http://www.princessauto.com/
  http://www.sherline.com/
  http://www.taigtools.com/

After reading this article in MAKE I found out about Big Blue Saw, which is similar to eMachineShop. They'll take a DXF file and will produce machined parts in a handful of materials (plastic, steel, etc) and thicknesses. They even provide & promote links to a bunch of Open Source CAD software. Good stuff.

Still there seems an interesting group of people who are still working on Cold Fusion:
http://www.makezine.com/03/interview/

Personally I'm not ruling out anything too soon. Remember that first we would never be able to fly and driving faster than 50 miles/hour would kill you.

These phones are just GIGANTIC compared to the really, really, ridiculously good looking phone carried by Derek Zoolander in the biopic of the same name.

Luckily rather than waiting for the Korean product to arrive here, you can make you own Zoolander style phone.

Nintedo could hold little development competitions (Sony did that once with the Yahorzee, I remember playing the games on a PlayStation Underground CD) which fosters talent, good will, etc.

I don't understand why these companies don't do this. Why not do it for the older consoles? Now that the PS3 is out (hypothetical), release a dev-kit for $100 that lets you make PS2 games (I know you can do it with the Linux kit, but they need better libraries instead of "here is the chip manual, figure it out" which is where I understand the Linux kit puts you).

And if they don't sell the console at a loss (or sell a "developer" version for an extra $50 or something) then they will only make money off the people who buy the console to develop for it.

All I'm left with right now is waiting for Parallax's Propeller chip (read about it here) which looks like a great little console on a chip to me.

Hmm.. Some do..

Sony's libriE and their new reader run Linux as well, it has been hacked: http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/ccg//people/dan/software /librie.html, there is at least one freeware text converter available: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t= 2544, and it all looks rather pretty: http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/06/sony_ librie_hac.html.

Enjoy.

http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/02/linux _running_on_an_intel_imac.html

The last issue of Make magazine had a multi-page article on creating your own headphone amplifier that fits into an Aldoids can. That link doesn't have the full article, but it does have some comments that readers posted.

You can see a current take on it (with quite a few links) that works in Windows XP here: http://www.makezine.com/extras/41.html [makezine.com

Great, just what I need, *another* piece of generic PC hardware with a Windows logo permanently printed on it. I was slightly annoyed when keyboards started to sport a dedicated Microsoft key, but having a LCD display with the same thing will really get on my nerves...

This has been talked about for a few months, ever since Asus demoed a version like this. You can see a current take on it (with quite a few links) that works in Windows XP here: http://www.makezine.com/extras/41.html

Granted, it's ugly as sin, but it works and gives you space to start working on potential applications and uses for this technology.

photos...i'll miss those guys

Sure.