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CurlyCart: How To Hack Your Power Wheels
Dana Spiegel writes: "A bunch of us were bored one weekend, so we decided to hack a Power Wheels car (you remeber the G.I. Joe jeep and the Barbie car, don't you?) to make it record and playback where you've driven in it. We're continuing development on this project (covered in web page), but mostly this thing is just fun to play with."
Next weekend you should work on helping me remember where I parked.
Slashdot: Open Source, Closed Minds.
No, in my day, kids actually used what are commonly called muscles. You see, muscles are part of the physical body, underneath the countless fat layers. By using them, primitive people thought that they could derive some benefit from this. This benefit, often called exercise was believed to extend life and lessening the reliance on synth-foods and vita-capsules. What silly, primitive people we were. Little did we know that there was no need to burn calories, potentially losing some of these fatty layers, or, God forbid, doing what was called 'sweating'. We could have just sat in these battery-powered vehicles as children, instead of potentially harming ourselves with this 'exercise'.
If I were hackin on a powerwheels, id drop a 5 litre mustang engine in that sucker with a supercharger. then id race my 5 year old neighbor.. WHAT NOW LIL MAN!!! WHAT NOW!!!
"Think, It aint illegal.....yet" - George Clinton
Back in MY day, kids utilized the muscles present in larger organisms known as "parents". The powerhouses could easily tow a small child in a wagon or even lift the child off the ground to a height of around 5 feet. Of course, this presented some safety hazards so the practice has been discontinued.
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324006
It reassures me to see stuff like this.
:)
Lately, I've been more of the opinion that fun projects have no potential to ever be profitable. Once upon a time, guys (and they were all guys) did interesting things in their garages for grins and later found out they could get rich. The stories of Wozniak, Jobs, Gates, and Torvalds seem like legends of a bygone era -- a rare cosmic convergence of being the right place at the right time doing the right thing.
Clearly, this tracking technology has commercial uses. The rogue hackers in this story can almost certainly expect phone calls from the likes of General Motors, Daimler-Benz, and Kia.
My advice? Get your patents now, fellas.
-- In the future, everyone will code Perl for 15 minutes. --
The entire project took the four of us all weekend to complete (Friday night to Monday morning, with a normal amount of sleep each night!).
The bold is my emphasis. This is unbelieveable. Putting aside all technical considerations, these guys actually slept during a project! This could be a serious breakthrough! Maybe now I can point to them and tell my boss, "Hey, they got to go home and sleep, and look at the fantastic job they did with that car. Don't you want those kind of results? Yes? Ok, I'm not working this weekend."
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
Now what would be really cool was if I could right a program in the aforementioned display scripting language and have the powerwheel creep out my neighbors by making an unmanned 'morning round' every morning.
Neighbor: "What-what the hell was that?"
Me: That was my brother's powerwheel jeep from 1982. One day, he was hit by a car in it. He was killed, but the controls on the thing were broken anddon't work anymore. Now it just sits around. Every morning, it goes just where he used to ride.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
You can do that now. It's called "riding the bus".
Dancin Santa
Forgive me if this is all addressed on their page - I couldn't get to it.
Okay, I have a hard time figuring out what you mean..
e r.html
You could look up the definition of 'hacking' and go from there. A good defination is at:
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/hack
Remember the hacked Actimates Barney and Barbie?
If not, check out: http://www.geekchic.com/~jpd/barney
The perfect combo would be a hacked Road-Rage Barney screaming profanities out of the GI Joe Jeep.
If you watch TV news, you know less about the world than if you just drank gin straight from the bottle.
I'm one of the guys who hacked the CurlyCart. Fisher-Price encouraged this; they dropped off over a dozen toys to the Lab, and then everyone grabbed one, and tried to make it do something cool(er). Unfortunately, due to the New England snowstorm, their reps weren't able to make it to the lunch meeting last Monday when we presented it, but they'll get video :)
BTW, if you look real close next to my hand in the pic programmer shot, you'll see a CueCat as well. DigitalConvergence via WPP dropped those off :) All I've done with that is linked it up to some perl scripts running my personal library.
The point was to keep click-happy people from slashdotting sites.
Let me know when someone hacks a toilet, that I would love to see [root@toilet.root] $ rm -rf dev/toilet/airfreshener.c
"He Who Laughs Last, Is Just A Hand In The Bush" - Ozzy Osbourne
http://smg.media.mit.edu/projects/
And then click on "Curly" on the left menu section.
They've just blocked Direct access to those pages.
If (lastpage_seen=slashdot){
&bugger off;
}
else {
&Let_them_in;
}
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!