What (non-PC) Hardware Do You Hack?

Lis writes "Mike Langberg at the Merc News interviewed Scott Fullam - Scott wrote the book 'Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks' which includes things like a video periscope for your car, an Internet toaster, Cubicle Intrusion Detection Systems, and talking Furbys. (Instructions for the toaster and coffeemaker are up on the O'Reilly site.) Almost any kind of consumer electronic equipment can be modified to do things it wasn't intended to do. Ok, you'll probably void your warranty in the process, but you could end up with something even better than the original. Or not. But it's just gotta be interesting. So what have you hacked, and into what?"

Comments

Programmable thermostats

[promethean_spark]

I put the thermistor on a programmable home thermostat on the end of a cable to allow for remote programmable temperature control of reptile cages and aquariums. Half the price of commercial solutions, with more features and higher reliability.

Re:xbox

[s4m7]

I can't afford an Xbox, you Insensitive Clod!

Besides doesn't the posting specify "non-pc" hacking? An Xbox is really just a neutered PC. Now if you made the Xbox actually DO something cool, other than just boot/run unsigned code, that might be worth mentioning.

My other Xbox is a Long-Range ballistic missile guidance system

Re:How about...

[freshmkr]

building a Apple Lisa (more or less) from the ground up for a class with nothing but the 68000 reference material, the chips, and wire.

I find that unlikely. Among other quirks, the Apple Lisa has a home-grown MMU, developed in house by engineers who empirically determined what 68000 instructions could be restarted after a page fault, and how. The 68000 was not designed for virtual memory, you see, so the Apple folks had to experiment and create their own software and hardware to make it happen.

I would be surprised if anyone put that much that effort into a class. If you built a 68k computer with a bitmap display, then you have something there, but it's not a Lisa. Don't think that just because the Lisa came out before the first Mac that it's a more primitive system--in fact it's quite the opposite.

Please substantiate your claim!

--Tom

You know...

[StarKruzr]

is anyone else disturbed by the seemingly huge amount of misogyny in the Slashdot readership? Reading through the comments to this story reveals a lot of "jokes" about "hacking up women." Sure, it's mostly AC trolls, but it's kind of scary. Just because you can't get a girlfriend, guys, doesn't mean we need to kill women.

Re:You know...

[dandelion_wine]

WOW. Wasn't aware that /. filters the AC's to the bottom of each string. I had no idea what you were talking about and wondered if they had been edited out from above. That's a hell of a FP.

Still, is the word misogyny not a wee bit overblown? Even jokes in poor taste are jokes, despite what Freud might have said. On the same subject, I might really dislike a female coworker without it necessarily meaning that I'm secretly attracted to her. This is not a fancy way of saying "lighten up", but seriously, do we not take a thousand-fold more blase attitude toward violence directed at men? Actually, I think he said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. /derail

How to hack the American woman culture.

[Futurepower(R)]

Here are some ideas and suggestions for those who want to hack the U.S. woman culture. The first thing you should know is that hacking your own culture can be scary. It's definitely an E-Ticket ride, for those who want to tackle something seriously complex.

Bitching is part of the American woman culture. It cannot be disabled. For a better experience, try a different nationality. In the U.S., the word "bitch" means both "complain" and "woman". Did you know that there are no other English-speaking countries in which this is so?

This is a bit extreme, but a good exaggeration might be that if you have only known women of the U.S. culture, you have never really known a woman at all. Women in the U.S. commonly: 1) are infantile, 2) live in a fantasy world in which the rules of life don't apply to them, 3) are self-destructive, 4) want control, 5) believe that men are reponsible for all of their problems, 5) are irresponsible to an amazing degree, and 6) use anger and hostility to try to intimidate and get their way.

Want examples? Read the women's magazines on any newstand in the United States. Watch some of the episodes of the Oprah Winfrey show, in which men are seen as the objects of fantasy, or as inherently evil enemies.

If there are any readers who want to give an instant negative reaction to this, please think carefully first. I've traveled to 33 countries and talked with hundreds of women extensively from other countries about their lives. I'm serious about understanding the problems. Ask yourself, are you? Do you really care about what happens in your country?

When I lived in England, it was common to see English and European movies in which there would be a comedy episode in which an American woman did something selfish and out of touch.

That said, the American woman culture can be successfully hacked. It's a limited kind of success, like living in a cesspool and saying that you like the brown things that float past better than the black ones.

First, don't take American women seriously. That gives them responsibility and they don't like that.

Second, don't depend on them. They may want sex with you today for no good reason, and not want to talk to you tomorrow, also for no good reason. A Russian woman said, "It may take me only one minute to fall in love, but I have to be in love to want sex. American women sleep with anyone." I've heard that from people of several nationalities.

Third, don't blame everything that happens in your relationships with U.S. women on yourself. If you did something bad, accept that. But recognize that a common way for a U.S. woman to get control is to try to get you believe that you are an inferior kind of being.

Fourth, spend considerable time understanding the U.S. woman culture. It is, in many ways, not what it pretends to be. For example, women in the U.S. often project confidence, when they don't feel confident at all.

Fifth, stay with what is logical. Logic has little importance for many U.S. women, even those who are successful in the U.S. computer industry. If you stray away from what is logical, you may soon be as confused as her.

Sixth, treat women right even if they treat you badly. Everyone needs more experience in learning how to be good to themselves and others. I'm not religious, but it happens that Jesus Christ was right: Don't answer violence with more violence; don't answer bad behavior with more bad behavior. Like it said in the movie, "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure", "Be excellent to each other." Being excellent to women does NOT mean spending money on them. You should each contribute equally to your relationship. If she doesn't want to do that, she doesn't want a real relationship.

The U.S. is suffering a social breakdown. The breakdown is caused in part by the largely hidden breakdown of the U.S. woman culture. When a man cannot find a suitable woman friend, when a man and a woman cannot make a stable relationship, wh

Re:How to hack the American woman culture.

[big_gibbon]

I think somebody just got dumped :)

P

Re:How to hack the American woman culture.

[rark]

I have mod points, and I very nearly modded this flamebait.

But I've realized (after careful reading of this post and some perusal of your website) that this isn't flamebait or a troll, in the usual senses of the words, and that you seem in some ways to be a very thoughtful individual, if rather misguided about some issues.

So I'll rebut your arguments instead.

"Bitching", defined as complaining, is hardly a pursuit limited to women (american or not). I've worked in male-dominated (not purposely, just because it fell out that way) offices that held 'bitch sessions' that were called exactly that.

The use of 'bitch' to denote all women is a misogynist term, and almost certainly did not originate with women. The more or less male analog to this is 'bastard', yet not all men (american or not) are illegitimate.

> This is a bit extreme, but a good exaggeration
> might be that if you have only known women of
> the U.S. culture, you have never really known a
> woman at all.

Just for the record, my mother is Japanese, as is her mother. So I grew up with women who were not socialized predominately in the U.S. While I have not been able to leave the U.S. as an adult, I have certainly dealt with women who did not grow up here. So this argument does not apply to me.

> Women in the U.S. commonly: 1) are infantile,
> 2) live in a fantasy world in which the rules
> of life don't apply to them, 3) are self-
> destructive, 4) want control, 5) believe that
> men are reponsible for all of their problems,
> 5) are irresponsible to an amazing degree, and
> 6) use anger and hostility to try to intimidate
> and get their way.

Oprah Winfrey and Women's magazines in general are not indicative of 'women's culture' any more than esquire, playboy and sports illustrated are indicative of 'men's culture'. They are corporate entities created to make money. Nothing more, nothing less.

So, unless you would like to try to claim that men are 1. infantile, 2. live in a fantasy world in which the rules of life don't apply to them, 3. are self-destructive, 4. want control, 5. believe that women are reponsible for all of their problems, 6. are irresponsible to an amazing degree, and 7. use anger, hostility, violence and a larger body size to try to intimidate and get their way. I'd suggest you either reconsider your sources or reconsider your hypothesis

Incidently, all of these things are true for individual examples, regardless of gender. None of these things are true for the entire gender.

I fail to see a problem with some of these things ('want control' -- I want control over my life, and I fail to see why it's wrong for a woman to do so) and some of these problems (irresponsibility, blaming others unreasonably, intimidation) are problems in American culture, period, and are not particularly gender linked, though the way they manifest may be, i.e. statistically, women will be more likely to use emotional manipulation, like crying, where men will be more likely to use physical intimidation. But this is still statistical, and any individual may use either or neither, regardless of gender.

Also, these traits bear startling resemblance to the psychological profiles of a healthy woman (as in, this is what a psychologically healthy woman is like -- a woman who acts as an adult, is responsible, likes men [and therefore sex], etc is neurotic and requires treatment) from the first half of the twentieth century. If you are not aware of this you may want to do more research here. A fair chunk of women's problems in this country stem from psychological and psychiatric practices.

And yes, I really do care about what happens in my country. Which is one of the reasons I hate seeing energy wasted on misguided attacks and other strategies.

I fail to see how the satiric practices of any country accurately reflect the reality of any other country reliably enough to draw good conclusions about that cou

Re:If you don't like my hypotheses, what are yours

[rark]

To clarify, I don't particularly disagree with your assertion that Americans have some serious problems. What I do disagree with is your analysis of women's culture in the U.S. (I think you've got a very narrow band of data, I'll eleborate below) and that somehow women are (or women's culture is) somehow more responsible for the problems in the U.S. than men or men's culture or any other factor. If you'd posted something that criticized all Americans I probably wouldn't have blinked, if you'd posted something that was critical of women, but didn't echo known, common anti-woman beliefs/propaganda (for lack of better words for the phenomenon), I would have been less likely to react as well.

Your complaint about women not wanting to commit is interesting, as it's one I'm more used to hearing from women about men than vice versa (though I've heard it from women about women and men about both men and women, so no one gets to completely avoid it, I suppose). I don't find that surprising. Marriage has it's pros and cons. It's not just about committing to have sex with only one person. There are a lot of practical aspects -- financial (dependant on where you are and who has what money and what income, you can lose quite a bit of money in taxes and such if you're married that you wouldn't if you were single), geographical (if one partner gets transferred at work, do both move or does that partner have to lose their job and find another?), emotional (living with someone is very difficult -- esspecially if one was an only child in a 'standard' household [parent(s) only, no extended family]) etc. And some of these fall particularly hard on women, because traditionally they've been the ones expected to make greater sacrifices for the marriage. If a woman wants to have a career or continue her education than it makes sense to delay marriage. And all of this is intensified if children are expected to be part of the package.

My mother went to four different colleges and ultimately decided to go into nursing rather than medicine, because she got married and had to follow my father around. Two years later she had me and three years after that my sister. It took her fourteen years to get her BA in Nursing, and she started before she met my father (and she was her high school valedictorian, so I don't think that was a problem with the academic work). Now, she doesn't (to my knowledge) regret any of this, and I respect the decisions she made as those that were best for her, but I certainly can understand why a woman would *not* want to do that. I don't think one can explain away difficulty finding a wife or the rising age of first time brides by claiming that women on the whole have become less willing to commit. The social and economic factors affecting marriage have changed in the last two generations, and they combine to make getting married, and esspecially getting married young, a less attractive choice than it was before, at least unless one really wants to have children.

Incidently, life expentancy stats would seem to bear this out. Married men have longer life expentancies than unmarried men, but the reverse is true for women.

On a related point, to find a wife, being popular with women is not really the best strategy. It's being appealing, as marriage material, to at least one woman (and it only has to be one, though I suppose increasing that number would increase your odds somewhat) who is interested in getting married. I know one guy who is really popular with women, but not in any way that would be useful to find a partner -- for various reasons he's very popular with..lesbians. Not very useful for getting married or getting laid, but his parties are great. Actually, I exaggerate a little -- he ended up marrying a woman who thought she was a lesbian, but decided she'd just hadn't met the right man. This is, however, a lousy strategy in general and I don't recommend it (because it wastes your time and annoys the lesbians :) ).

Modeling and the whole beauty queen business is

Re:Microwave Oven

[BillX]

Bah, this is an ancient thread now by /. terms; I'm sure this won't get read :-)

The behavior you're describing sounds suspiciously like a discrete BCD-to-7-segment decoder (74LS47?) chip when it's given bit values corresponding to values above '9'. The decoder's input is 4 bits, giving up to 16 possible digits to be displayed. Since they're only 'expected' to display 0-9, however, part designers are free to choose arbitrary patterns for the remaining bit combinations. (Or are they meaningful patterns to someone, somewhere?)

Any 'LS47 designer out there know why these particular patterns were chosen?