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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?"
...with all the people I've helped move lately, I've become somewhat of an expert on taking apart and putting together beds, desks, entertainment centers, large tables, small tables, etc...
libertarianswag.com
Does 'hacking' into my girlfriend count?
I screwed around with a dialpad and set it up so when the right PIN is punched in, it turns on my computer. (I saw someone do it once with a garage door opener too)...
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
I hacked my Sony Aibo into its component parts. Worthless f'n robot.
I performed surgery on my Furby and created a secret stealing super agent. Muhahahaha...
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
3 old dot matrix printers and a dremel become a 3D rapid prototyping machine that can carve a 3D relief into styrofoam (or anything else, if you've got the patience to let it run that slowly...)
I once painstakingly hacked a rotating fiber-optic Christmas tree and removed the parts that made it rotate. Does that count?
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
I know a distressingly large amount of trivial about what USED to be my 1989 Corvette. Just about the only stock part left is the distributor _shaft_.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
phones: see the above webpage.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
phone's are my personal favorite, they are easy to do and you don't get shocked too hard... the light up ones and the caller id's are the best to do, changing leds and such. speaking of changing leds, someone will mention the dreamcast or ps2 LED mod
but phones are simple, and don't hold a big charge... although, there's nothing like a good 9 volt zap in the morning to wake you up.
Runnin' On Empty
Is it staring at me?
I was going to build a cracked speedpass from Sixflags but havent gotten to it yet.
its non-technical, but i think it counts for a hack.
When i was in high school there was a particular big dumb jock that would pick on me. It was a catholic high school. So I stole some official letterhead paper from the guidance counselor's office and an official envelope with the school info on it.
I proceeded to type up an expulsion letter on the letterhead paper, saying he had been caught masturbating on campus, and as a good catholic school we could not allow that. I made it sound much more official. Had my friend forge the dean's signature, and that if they (his parents) had any questions about it, feel free to call (phone number included).
Then I mailed it.
he never found out it was me that did that, and he did still pick on me... but i'd say I got even.
Actually, they've already used a monkey for "Managing the Windows NT Registry".
:)
No - I'm not joking either.
I had some cobwebs up in the corner of the tall "cathedral" ceiling of my apartment. I zip-tied my Swiffer to a mop handle, making an extra-long Swiffer.
If you don't think this is a good hack, you have no imagination.
Many routers (wired and wireless) are free or dirt cheap after mail in rebate. I've attempted to hack cheap belkin and US Robotics routers I've picked up - attempting to pick apart the firmware. The only thing is, once you flash it, if you made one mistake the device is as good as ruined. On the belkin router, I made the kernel out to be a Nucleus Plus kernel with strings with "Aurora" in them scattered throughout. I found a large hunk of gzipped data in the file, but I couldn't find any structures deeper than that. Does anyone know about the structures of this type of firmware, and know how I could take it apart, to at the very least see how it works?
Running solar ignitors to a couple of bottle rockets mounted to the grill of an old Buick Regal, connected to a switch panel in the front?
Ok, maybe not, but it was fun to have bottle rocket launchers in the front of the car.
Once in a while, they actually went where you wanted them to (the rockets, not the car).
Almost any kind of consumer electronic equipment can be modified to do things it wasn't intended to do.
*eyes electric massagers*
You don't saaaay....
The coolest voice ever.
1) Hold clock up by power cord, against wall
2) Position IC over power cord
3) Apply hammer to IC, driving pins 1-16 into wall.
4) Connect ground, Vcc, and inputs as desired.
--Leo
I modded mine too, but I don't think it should count as a hack when someone else's work is implemented.
Unless you improve upon the methodology or end result.
Does using dishwasher parts in my TIG welder count?
Rick B.
Rock crawling is great fun... I currently have an '85 4runner which has Chevy 63" rears, Jeep Wrangler fronts, Inchworm 5:1 transfer case, 5.29 axles, detroit locker, and 35x15.5 TSL-SX tires, and I'm not done yet!
It's a motorsport most people probably can't understand, but once you get hooked, you're hooked.
This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Home ownership: the ultimate hackers dream.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
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 don't see why it wouldn't, it certainly qualifys as hacking.
I hacked a Dakota digital camera.
10 bucks for a blurry 1.3 mp camera, how could I not hack it?
Let's make a difference
If you're looking anywhere other than out your windows or at your dashboard while you're driving, there are issues.
And it's nice to know that my dreams of Internet toast have been fulfilled.
Anyone with a little skill/determination (yeah, that's a slash, not an "and") can hack anything; I think a more interesting article would be about maverick hacks that actually turned out to be useful. Like, say someone turned a toaster into a door-to-door salesman irradiation device. That would be amazingly useful.
The coolest voice ever.
I hacked several functioning consumer electronic devices into fully-working doorstops?
sig under development
You just don't go out with the right sort of women.
"He's got a mistress, she's Puerto Rican, and I hear she's got a wooden leg." -- Tom Waits
KFG
I once dremeled a PCB from an old power supply into several pieces, then resoldered and glued it back together so that it still worked, and tried to sell it on eBay as modern art. Unfortunately, no one bit. An interesting hack I've seen is something I think a lot of electronics slashdotters out there should note: Cheap oscilloscope using your sound card. The software is available on the web, just get your signals into at +/- 1 or 2V range, and you have a dual channel low frequency scope that plugs into any sound card. Check the voltage range of line-out to get an idea of what's acceptable. I started making an adapter to provide a high impedance input and scaling the signal down, but got distracted and haven't revisited the project in a while.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
Plus on 80/90's GM EFI cars, there's a cruise fuel saving routine that's not enabled from the factory. 29 MPG highway from a 350 CI V8 baybee.
My first big hack was tearing into my radio shack scanning receiver and interfacing the serially programmed PLL tuner IC to the parallel printer port of a PC. Gave my cheapo 8 channel scanner an infinite channel memory and other features.
I've also interfaced a "radio controlled clock" to a PC to automagically set the exact time.
Turned an old CD-ROM drive into a hand-powered LED toy for my son.
Latest interesting project was to convert a box fan motor into a permanent magnet for use in a wind generator... that hasn't worked out too well so far.
i have a vege garden with some cucumbers. i've been trying to grow some square cukes similar to the square watermelons.
so far all my attempts have failed, because these cukes were pretty strong, and they just push through whatever box i can find. maybe i need something completely sealed (from birth/manufactured) to achieve my goal.
Recently I've been studying up on electronics and modifying the electrical components to my basses. If you're a geek and into music this can be a lot of fun. It has the added bonus of helping you as a musician really understand every single part of your signal chain.
There are several reasons why this is cool. The components of a passive pickup system are real simple, allowing you to get started easily. As you build up your base of knowledge you can get involved in much more complex projects, like modifying amplifiers, building your own stomp boxes, etc.
Another reason this is a cool field is that you can approach it from different angles. If you're good with calculus you can design and calculate the frequency response of your filters before you build them and know exactly what you're doing. You can design a whole effect if you want and model it in circuit modelling software. In fact, with some programs I believe you can do that and use a wav file for input to get an idea of how the circuit will sound, although I haven't tried that myself.
If you're a physical experimenter kind of a person you can take existing circuits and see, for example, how a tone knob sounds different when the pot is connected to different values of capacitors. Plus, if your favorite part is building, not designing then there is a huge amount of free schematics for things on the web, kits you can order, etc.
It's loads of fun (pun intended?) and you can really individualize your sound (for better or for worse).
A Weber Grill, old hair dryer (metal barrel), and various compression fittings hack nicely into a turbo-grill. Just attach the dryer to one of the bottom ash-emptying holes (and turn it (the dryer) on, 'natch). Turns out Alton Brown also did this. He is the ultimate kitchen hacker.
not quite an electronics hack, and not quite a full modification... more like a hacked add-on accessory...
When the Hasselblad Xpan (makes 24mm x 60 mm panoramic frames on 35mm film) was first marketed, I drooled over the ads, but didnt have the budget for it.
But I did have a medium format Rolleicord TLR (which makes 60mm x 60mm frames on 120 film), and I knew that a 35mm film adapter existed for it, so I shopped around used camera store until I found one that had kits.
Now the full kit prevents you from not using the 35mm mask (to make 24mm x 36mm frames).
Luckily, the store manager had an incomplete kit, which I got at a substantial discount from a complete (collectible priced) kit.
So I used the two parts that serve to hold the 35mm film canister, and used some medical duct tape wound on either end of a 120 film spool to narrow the space for the 35mm film and voila!
Cheap "real panoramic" 35mm photos.
The only downside is that I have to rewind the film in a changebag or in a darkroom.
Back in college, I used to love synthetic programming in an HP-41C. When it was first discovered, one had to use various evil processes (yanking a memory modules, corrupting a magnetic card). The result was programming instructions that HP never intended. With synthetic programming, one could access hidden memory locations, display strange characters, and emit unusual sounds (just be careful with "STO c"). I spent way to much time exploring all of the tricks and documenting what did what.
My favorite little synthetic program made the machine tick ominously like a Geiger counter.
Thanks for bringing back fond memories from 20 years ago.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
See Reed Ghazala, father of circuit bending.
Escape Pod Films: Sketch Comedy and Web Series
If you are interested in EFI, ( even if you wish to keep your stock computer) check out megasquirt . I have learned more about how EFI works, and I plan to use megaquirt on my 65 barracuda. This type of garage/junkyard technology will keep older vehicles on the road, with better emissions and performance.
A much better tool would have been the age of current pot. I don't care if it's being heated or not when it's 12 hours old. And it's probably still hot if it was brewed 15 minutes ago and relatively full.
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.
I took an old remote control car's motor and put it inot a model car to construct my own pulley system to make the car hop up and down just like the real cars on the road with hydraulic suspension setups.
So I took the motor and attached it inside the car (thank you hot glue gun and glue sticks) and hooked up a "T-model" suspension so that when the motor turns it would wind a string up which pulls the suspension "up" towards the car, thus making the car hop.
Then I took my mothers rice cooker power plug and spliced into it to attach it to the motor. Little did I know at that time in my life (9 years old), the value of toggle switches as well as 120v on a motor that was built to handle no more than a 9v battery. Needless to say, instantaneously after plugging in the rice-cooker plug the car hopped once and then the motor sparked like hell (exploded actually), caught on fire, and melted a hole through the floorpan of my model 1968 Impala.
So in the end my mother slapped me for ruining her power cord, I was out a motor and model car, and my room smelled like burning plastic/metal for 3 days. How I miss my innocent days of playing with electricity.
Jesus, the amount of things you can do with a hacked Xbox are insane.
You can turn it into a baby Linux box - Thank God Linux doesn't need much hardware to run well.
You can turn it into a media center - Home brew applications allow for a/v playback of any codec you can think of. Now it even supports HD.
You can turn it into a portable Xbox (Instead of lugging around your games, just put 'em on a HDD)
You can turn it into a homebrew gaming system, with support for stuff like Stepmania (DDR simulator)
You can turn it into an arcade with emulation support for any gaming system that isn't current generation (sans maybe the Sega Saturn).
Well, you get the point. $200 Xbox + $50 mod chip + $100 HDD = $5,000 worth of entertainment equipment
It was my first electric motor. I was about 9 years old and had extracted my first electric motor from some doomed toy, and figured out how to attach wires manually to the brush leads and a battery and make it run. Unfortunately, as with most things I played around with at that age, I didn't know much about cause and effect.
I believe the motor was originally driven by two 1.5 V AA batteries, and I was using a 9V. (Hey, it's easier to connect!) My plan was to use it as a climbing winch, enabling Snake Eyes (tm) to sneak up on the evil Destro(tm)'s clifftop lair. I tied one end of a 3 foot piece of sewing thread to the motor shaft, and the other to Snake Eyes' left hand. I wedged the motor under a book and connected the battery to winch him to the top!
Little did Snake Eyes know what kind of evil Destro had in store for him. Little also did I know - it happened so fast that I am still fuzzy on some details. At some point, Snake Eyes stopped standing on the ground at the base of my dresser and entered into a state where he was spinning at insane velocities about the motor, attached by a tangled 6 inch piece of thread. I have no memory of a transition between these two states.
The moral of the story - if an evil overlord leaves an electric motor conveniently located for you to winch your way up the cliff face to his mountain fortress, don't use it!
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
The best hack I did personally, was to recode the eprom on a Tranz-330 Credit Card terminal. Was able to get the terminal to constantly display the following lines:
Answers: $1.00
Answers w/thought: $2.00
Correct Answers: $4.00
Dumb Answers still free
Visa/MC Accepted...
Sold it on ebay a few months later for like $80.00.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
Within weeks he had his unit all wearing beards.
He arrested a senior member of the army who came back to the base too late after a night out.
And the best bit: In the army one's transport to and from home each weekend is paid for. He lives the other side of Europe from Italy, so they offered to fly him. But no - the rules state that it had to be by train (which takes what, a day? a day and a half?) so he ended up spending just a couple of days a week in Italy...
They sent him home soon afterwards. Nicely. Permanently.
Give this guy a system (of whatever kind) and he'll do scary scary things...
For carving styrofoam a small soldering iron, with temperature control, would do. Less noise, less dust, probably lasts longer.
When I was in college, my friend and I mounted the nozzle from a squirt gun into the grill of his honda civic. We attached that to the windshield wiper supply line and installed a valve under the dash to swithc from windshield wiper mode to soak unsuspecting pedestrian mode. Not very difficult, but man was that good for days of stupid fun.
rumor has it leia did once
Ever notice how it's so difficult sometimes to wake up when it's dark outside? It seems that I'm at higher risk for getting up late when it's overcast or stormy outside. It seems that the light level triggers how awake you are. If I have to wake up early, I'll usually leave a light on in the room; it helps a lot. But it's not the best solution, and I'd love to smooth out the roughly torn edge between sleep and consciousness when the buzzer screams at you.
I'm building a clock that includes a wall socket. You plug a lamp into the socket, and half an hour before your set wakeup time, the lamp begins glowing. It increases brightness gradually over a half hour so that by the time you need to wake up, you already are. It's not really a new idea, but it's fun. It uses a realtime clock chip, a microcontroller, and a triac for power control. Maybe not so much hacking...I guess it does "hack" a desk lamp into a wakeup alarm notification device.
Most of my other hacks are computer related; for example hacking a Sandisk 6-in-1 memory card reader to work with ALL CompactFlash cards, instead of only the new ones, with a single wire. I hacked a Nintendo R.O.B. into an internet-controlled pan/tilt webcam mount in an hour or two. Also ran a small server in college which used fetchmail to check for new messages, and would flash one LED over my desk and one in the door's peephole, so I knew I had mail just by looking down the hall from a friend's room. Lots of random stuff like that. My most recent major project was a small CNC machine, the computer, power supply, and driver electronics housed inside the case of an old Yokogawa data analyzer.
...
TICalc.org has several articles on things like that. My favorites are Overclocking and Battery Expander.
Xbox reviews.. We think they're funny.
I've hacked the hell out of my TiVo. There's nothing like surfing the web browser on your TiVo for the first time! And, no.. XBOX doesn't count. it's PC hardware :)
----
AFK Games
BNT.AFKGAMES.COM - Black Nova Traders
LOTGD.AFKGAMES.COM - Legend of the Green Dragon
All Free!
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
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
PIC processors can be insanely useful for this sort of thing and very cheap (most around $10) and easy to get, and once you've got the basics down (which can seem a bit daunting at first) they are very easy to learn and program to do pretty much whatever you want. The playstation mod chips are cheap miniture 8-pin PICs usually - just to give you an idea of what they can do, and some of the more advanced models have RS232 (i think) builtin so you can directly interface it with your PC. Add to that some cheap easy to use wireless modules (they just take a power supply and you stick the on/off binary signal in and thats all you need, takes 2 minutes) you can do some nifty remote controlled things. Basically anything from just switching something on and off or blinking some leds (which can be programmed in minutes) to full fledged computing can be done with these babys. They have loads of extras too - analog-digital converters, eeprom memory, high-current switching and more.
;)
Remote key-loggers anyone?
The PIC makers
More stuff
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
When I was in middle school I came across an old cheapo 9.6v R/C truck. I took the wires off of the motor and wired it to a homebuilt relay that I made out of a small motor and some aluminum foil (motor comes on, foil on the arm spins and makes contact to more foil, completing the circut. Reverse to stop). Through the relay I connected 2 more 9.6v batteries directly to the motor.
Holy shit that thing was fast. It didn't last very long, was not wired to go backwards, and couldn't turn without flipping over, and took 3 battery packs, but it was fast!
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
"Automotive" nitrous oxide has sulfur dioxide added, to prevent substance abuse. Therefore, for your nose hair clippers, one would recommend using "medical" N2O, which can be substance-abused at will.
I was gifted an Mp3 player that came from China. Unfortunately, it also came with Chinese instructions (though the unit had English on the display and buttons) and a 200-240V adaptor (5V 600mA output).
This was a fairly sensitive unit, so I wanted to be careful about the voltage. A decent step-up transformer for 110-220V is around $70 here. It's also not as easy as one things to find a decent priced 5V/600mA adaptor (most are about 300mA, and not all that "stable").
I eventually came to the bright conclusion that computer power leads have a 5V connector, so I made an adaptor for the front of my PC. I then removed the original 200V adaptor and simply connected the power lead to a plug that fits in the PC. Viola, my MP3 player now charges nicely and plays tunes while I'm on the go.
I had a broken alarm clock and a broken Macintosh SE. Now I have a Macintosh Alarm clock. I cut a piece of Plexiglas to fit where the monitor was and the buttons just poke through the lower floppy drive whole. It looks great and I did not damage the original case.
What happened to my robot, I was promised a robot.
Does this version of the protocol support RFC 2423, the HTCPCP (Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol)?
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
This doesn't exactly qualify as a hack, but I figured it might be of intersest to the same crowd... I managed to crash a gas pump at a Stinker Station once.
It was a fairly new self serve gas pump and I had selected the type of gas that I wanted, but then realized that their labelling was confusing and that I really wanted a different type of gas.
Naturally, I applied my problem solving skills to the situation, deviated from the process shown in the illustrated instuctions printed on the side and attempted to re-select the type of gas that I wanted. There was no response! In fact, ALL of the pumps at the station stopped and the operator's terminal inside of the store locked up too!
They had to reboot the system to get everything working again. They told me that nothing like that had ever happened before and we were all just lucky that the manager, who knew how to restart the sytem, was on duty at the time.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
After hours, the desk attendant is replaced by a rent-a-cop. These rent-a-cops, to make things convinient for themselves, are in the practice of comandering one of the elevators so that it only moves when they put their key in.
Similarly, the cleaning people, when moving from floor to floor, leave their wheeled carts on the elevator and disable the movement of the elevator to save them the trouble of waiting on an elevator and moving their carts out of the elevator.
This has, at times, annoyed me. So I figured out that if I enter the elevator and [b]hold down[/b] the floor button, the elevator door will close and I will move to my floor.
This mischief of mine is mostly directed at the rent-a-cops because when I enter the building it is easist for me to just grab their elevator and ride it up, leaving them thinking that they didn't set it right.
However, the bigger impact is on the cleaning people, for when I take their elevator, I'm also taking their wheeled carts, and it must be a pain in the butt to try get back that elevator (one of three). I mean, they push a return elevator button, and it's 1:3 chance that it will be the right one.... every time! Because of this, I'm much less likely to hax0rz their elevator.
For people in digital camera circles this is likely old news, but my latest hack was last night. I removed the 4GB Microdrive that came in my MuVo2 (total was $198 including taxes and shipping), formatted it appropriately, and shoved it into my 10D. Now I've got room for 588 RAW images on a single card.
The other half of the hack was to get my old 1GB microdrive working in the MuVo. It required a reformat of the drive, and a re-flash of the firmware to get the magic files back on the drive.
I used silly putty to create "timers" for instance to turn off a light switch. By dragging a wire through a blob of silly putty, using gravity or a rubber band, you can trigger lots of things. Silly putty by its nature makes for a relatively constant rate of travel and you can pretty accurately time things.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
Fix it (cat proof!) in a southern window and you get a large rainbow that sweeps across the room on sunny days. Very nice for improving the mood. (You could buy one, but it wouldn't be a hack.) Great for bugging anal managers at the office.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Possibly, though it seems you might need a bigger tool for this job, or so I've heard...
I hacked a cheap Radio Shack answering machine that used standard cassette tapes to never rewind the outgoing message tape. I could then put multiple outgoing messages on the tape that would play a different message to each caller. Gave my friends some variety and me an easy way to tell how many calls where received while I was out.
Until the night when I got someone who just kept redialing the phone to hear all the outgoing messages. (Back in the day when telemarketers did their own dialing, would note interesting answering machines, and then call them up again outside work hours and share them with friends.)
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
When I was in high school, I rewired a string of christmas tree lights from series to parallel so that I could run them off of some D-cell batteries. A little switch turned them on automatically when I opened my locker. It was about a decade before you could buy this sort of thing in stores.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
As a chemist in a fully equiped lab, I've been able to find *interesting* applications around the home for anything that can fit in a pocket...
A lot can be found by google search.
The traditional applications still stand -- dry ice bombs, sodium thrown in water or on ice (potassium can make some nice explosions), and liquid nitrogen experiments.
Liquid nitrogen can be poured on hydrocarbon based compounds, and as it condenses liquid oxygen the hydrocarbons are oxidized. When everything evaporates, you have a small amount of primary explosive. Liquid oxygen makes fire interesting all by itself, too.
There are less violent chemical hacks. Nothing's better than playing poker with "gold" pennies. Just cook some copper pennies up in a sodium hydroxide solution with zinc, then amalgamate 'em with a blowtorch. Viola, brass plated pennies.
Also, nothing gets rid of hard water deposits like a 50% nitric acid solution. (Hydrochloric acid solutions work, too, and don't eat copper; then again, they don't produce nice red smoke, either.)
Nothing cleans grease like hexanes (often mixed with isopropanol or toluene), so bike chains, etc. become much easier to clean.
As long as you're careful, you can usually get better results than commercial products.
a dark room, a mic, a preamp, a silicon controlled rectifier, and a photo flash leads to high-speed sound activated photography: m.i.l.k.d.r.o.p. scene photos and diagram included.
SIGUSR1
...which is more than I can say for my /. karma...
This tagline brought to you by 1500 monkeys in just under 17 years.
I had one of the original Speak & Spells with the raised-button letters (unlike the later models that were completely flat). On all Speak & Spells there is a "Code" mode where up to 8 letters can by typed and transposed into a code that only people with other Speak & Spells could decipher (ROT13, or something else very weak). One day I grew bored with this mode and leaned on all of the buttons at once. This caused the multi-directional character LEDs to all light up like 8 little boxes. I then started pressing the apostrophe key. Each box would turn into an apostrophe. Boop... Boop... Boop... Boop... Boop... Boop... Boop...
As I pressed the apostrophe key one more time to erase the last malformed chaacter, I awakened the demon within the Speak & Spell. All of a sudden the Speak & Spell went into the "Say It" mode where it would teach particular words. Normally, it would show a word like "OCEAN" and the speaker would state, "Say it... OCEAN." But in this crazy mode I had put it into, the speaker would shout incoherently. "Say it...HUGAXCKHUAAAHRETA!!!" It would keep on doing this, screaming incoherently until the enter key was pressed, at which time it would pick a random word and shout it out. "MOTHER!"
It definitely made my parents laugh, and the same Speak & Spell works to this day with the same bug. Keep in mind that the Voyager space probe also had less memory than a Speak & Spell, too...
--Chag
I had a 900Mhz wireless headphones by Recoton, i took apart the headphones, built a box around the components and hooked the audio outs into a battery operated headphone amp, so now i can use my own headphones in place of their inept ones. i can also plug into my stereo line-ins with a 1/8>RCA cable which is across the room. pretty useful
- my userid is lower than yours
A work in progress.
Slowed down recently due to house-hunting, but nearing completion. The hardware is ready to go, just need to write the drivers & integration software.
What were you expecting?
I stick a wad of paper into the latch on the washing machine so I can watch it fill up with the door open.
I have done a few "less interesting" hacks - back in the day...
* Hacked into the school PA system on the last day of my senior yearof high school. Took an old Peavey 400 amplifier, tied it directly into the 70v speaker line for the schools PA system (having unquestioned access to the theatre at school really helped). 5 minutes before the end of first period, weird noises start coming out the school PA system. Best part was the school principal approaching me later that day and asking HOW I did it, not IF I did it! THAT was fun!
* Probably doesn't count under the PC limitation, but I also hacked TRSDOS on an old TRS-80 Model 1. I discovered an undocumented command in the Disk Basic Interpreter (CMD"#"# if you wanted to know). Not being content with this - and TRSDOS Disk Basic had no way to pull a directory of a disk drive, I took the disk directory command from the TRSDOS system library and grafted it onto the code for the above found command. Result, I had a version of TRSDOS Disk Basic that could do something that Tandy/Radio Shack said was impossible to do - I could call a disk directory from BASIC without exiting the BASIC interpreter.
That was back in the day - truely fun times!
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
The pentium flaw could be "fixed" by disabling the FPU in software.
This is akin to getting her drunk to suppress those pesky frontal lobe messages that counter the "I'm horny" feelings with "He's ugly and he reads Slashdot" reasoning.
Actually, this is a bad analogy. The Pentium FPU was disabled because it was giving faulty results. The girl-frontal-lobes are functioning perfectly when they report that you're (*) an ugly geek.
Even hard drive sizes used to be "hacked" bigger by using compression software.
The girl-equivalent being the wonderbra that makes the important things appear larger where it matters (i.e. where you can see them). Unfortunately, like the compression software, you'll eventually see that neither of these methods actually give you more.
(*) No, not you (the parent poster) specifically.... why do people say "you" instead of "one" in English...?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
About 20 years ago I 'hacked' a car LED clock module by wiring some ribbon cable to the relevant parts of the PCB and mounting the unit with a 12V transformer+PSU, programming switches and a 10A mains relay in a small case - the end result was a unit into which I could plug my coffee percolator and have it 'brew-up' at the pre-set time in the morning! Because it also had a 59min count down timer, I could also set the coffee brewing at other times knowing that the timer wouldn't let the percolator boil dry!
My most recent hack was to make up a short lead that runs from a universal (90-250v) multi-voltage 2A DC power supply. On the 'output' side of the lead is a 12V car 'cigar lighter' socket into which I can plug a Belkin 12V 'car' to 5V USB socket adaptor - now with the relevant leads I can charge my phone or PDA or use anything else that normally takes power from a USB port - this means I only have to take one power unit with me on holiday or on business rather than one PSU for phone, another for PDA, another for digital camera, NiMh battery charger etc.
AT&ROFLMAO
When I was growing up, we had a microwave oven in our kitchen whose clock could be set by punching in the time on the number keypad, and hitting the "Clock Set" button. Pretty standard, realy.
So one night, with more free time than is strictly healthy, my friend Steve Roche and I were sitting around microwaving things, when one of us decided to set the time on the clock to "6:66", just to see what would happen.
Fortunately for us, the programmers of the firmware didn't include any validation code, because it let us set the time to 6:66. We sat there for a minute, debating what would happen next. Would it change to 7:07? 6:67? 6:07? 6:67 it was. What would happen, then, after 6:69? Again we debated -- would it go to 6:70? By that time we sort of assumed it would.
Well, it fooled us but good -- after 6:69, it invented a new number . The display read "6:6^", or something like that. We watched with fascination as it made up five more brand new digits, before changing to 6:70.
Damned if it wasn't using hexadecimal.
Then we microwaved some wormy flour, which stunk up the house in some awful, indescribable way, and ended the microwave experiments for the evening.
Clearly this guy has done an excellent job of it, but since plumbing materials were never intended for this purpose my guess is that this qualifies as a hack.
Wow. Heloise could totally own this thread.
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.
+++ATH0
The phone both there would be alot cooler if it actually worked as a phone....and didn't tell you the damd code to enter after picking up the handset.
Linux Works
Once made a wireless trigger/shutter release for my Nikon SLR camera with a hacked wireless doorbell.
I try not to bring it in carry-on baggage on airplanes. I think they might not like a remote control device with a weird wire leading out of it.
Back when I was in high school, I had a friend who always left his old 1970's Mercury Capri parked at his place of work unlocked with the keys in it. He had just installed a new stereo, but didn't complete the job, so there were all sorts of loose wires hanging from under his dash board. One day when I drove past his place of work, I saw his car there and remembered I had an old ahoooooogah horn sitting in my trunk. I decide to stop by and see what kind of evil things I could do to him. I worked for about 20 minutes sticking the horn under the drivers seat, grounding it to a seat bolt, and connecting the positive lead to a switched terminal on his fuse box. When he got out of work that night and started his car, things got pretty amusing. At first he couldn't figure out what was going on, then once he realized what was happening, he started banging around on the horn to shut it off. He finally managed to get the horn to shut off by knocking the ground wire loose, unfortunately, since power was still running to it, it went off everytime he hit a bump. He drove about 5 miles home with that horn going off under his seat, needless to say, he didn't think it was nearly as funny as I did.
I "hacked" my 1997 Acura Integra LS...
:)
There are a few electrical mods here and there... a power antenna control switch, and lots of security (hacked the power lock module to keep the doors locked, even if the thief has a key). Those damn Fast & Furious kids are always eyeing the thing like they want to steal it, but they wouldn't get far.
I take this car racing a lot (SCCA stuff), and it was a good car to begin with, but now there are many performance "hacks". I have added a turbo and to "overclock" the engine from 140hp/126tq to 220hp/209tq (which is a lot in a 2600lb FWD car with short gearing), upgraded the cooling system, swapped in some stiffer springs, adjustable shocks, sticky tires, a bunch of other stuff, and I'll be installing a custom-built race transmission in a day or two.
I don't even want to add up how much money I've put into this, but it is a lot of fun to drive around a race track... It's pretty satisfying to pass Porsche 911s, and other highly respected sports cars, when they have it to the floor.
All right... I know I'm probably going to be giving my web server a Slashdot-class load test by doing this, but whattahey... If it crashes, I know I didn't build it right to begin with.
;-)
In short: The page is one I wrote up detailing the efforts I've put in, over the last three or so years, to "hack" our minivan into a heavy-duty comms vehicle. Can you tell I take my amateur radio hobby pretty seriously?
It also has an onboard computer with GPS and mapping software, which has saved me from getting hopelessly lost in new territory more times than I can count.
Yes, I have been "first responder" in a couple of traffic incidents. This is why I keep a trauma kit in the back. Haven't had to dig into it seriously yet, and I pray I never really have to, but it's nice to know it's there.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I retrofit flashlights with high-powered Luxeon LEDs. There is a fairly good-sized community of flashlight modders, and the work ranges from simple drop-in mods for cheap Minimags all the way to complete retrofits of $400 military-grade Surefire spec-ops flashlights, and some guys even fabricate entire flashlights in their garage.
Some examples:
McGizmo
Mr Bulk
candlepower forums
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
I hacked my son's Darth Vader Toy to spin clockwise when I received and e-mail and counter-clockwise when my machine was attacked (port scanned). I used a floppy drive stepper motor and mouted it in an old CDROM case
r ip heral-2.jpg
http://www.cityhall.com/projects/darth/darth_pe
-Monta at cityhall.com
I was contacted by the author of this book last year and gave him permission to use my plans for building a Macquarium. So, I am chapter 2 of the "Hardware Hacking Projects For Geeks" book
Woo Hoo!
Anyway, my aquariums are here.
The plans Scott used for his book are here. They are kind of old and busted (there's no link to them any more on my site) and I think the author did a great job.
I have to rule out your hack based on the hacking Prime Directive: do no real harm. Don't even risk it. If you are going to drop a piano off the roof of a campus building, you post lookouts to make sure nobody gets hurt. If you are going to scare your clueless coworkers, consider the possibilty they might overreact.
The kid may have deserved to be fired, but he probably wouldn't deserve having the FBI kick his door in.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
they aren't cheap, but a MoTeC ECU will let you play with your injection maps to your little hearts content, along with pretty much everything else that you can electronically control in your engine (uhh...injection mapping, ignition...what else is there?). truly a hacker's dream toy.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
This is the most interesting way I've seen a company try to unload their broken bits and pieces.
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
The most recent actual "hack" I've been involved with is the single-use (Dakota) camera. So far, the 25-picture disposable camera has been made to also support time-lapse computer-controlled photography, continuous video (i.e. Webcam) modes, and been able to store (in my brief, informal test) 58 pictures.
The rest of these might not be considered hacks per se, just projects.
A project that never got finished would have put a high-power subwoofer amplifier in my car, complete with an authentic '60s fluorescing vacuum tube as a level display. Much classier than the usual LED-bargraph arrangements popular with the kiddies these days. Unfortunately, in the middle of building this I got offered a job and moved 'cross-country, but didn't have room to pack the unfinished bits+pieces and all my electrical test equipment in my little 2-door.
In my college years, I had the position of running an underground student newspaper. An issue was released 'every few weeks' when its dedicated editors were free/bored enough to put one together, but one thing everyone thought would be nice would be to commandeer the University (dorm) cable system after-hours for a student-run movie and wierd footage channel. Starting at about midnight or so, this would replace a lame "information channel" text marquee (which was always several weeks out of date and advertising events whose deadlines had come and gone), that was currently occupying a perfectly good cable channel.
We had obtained keys to the main hub room (also the cable feed room), so inserting the signal was not a problem. The student TV footage was intended to begin late at night, when university officials were guaranteed not to be watching, and would be pre-recorded. This presented a minor problem, however: everyone on the 'staff' had early classes and poor memories, and could not be counted on to get into the hub closet after hours to insert the day's programming and press 'play'. Also, while some students (volunteering for the Computer center) did legitimately have access to these areas, students going in and out of there after hours would arouse unnecessary suspicion from campus security.
It was decided that the best solution was to equip the VCR with a 'remote control' of sorts that would allow it to be controlled over the dorm network via the abundant Ethernet connections available in the room. This would allow for automated starting and stopping as well as manual intervention as necessary; footage could then be loaded during the daytime hours at the convenience of those involved.
Making a VCR Internet-ready is not has hard as it sounds. I simply built a board with eight simple Darlington transistor circuits (corresponding to 8 data pins on a parallel port) to drive the important VCR function buttons via this port. A simple Web server (disposable '386) running a perl-based CGI interface allowed Web-based control of the parallel port bits, which in turn operated the disposable VCR with wires soldered into the appropriate front-panel switches.
The tricky part then became finding controversial/interesting/non-stupid, but legal, student-produced content worth displaying, but that's another story.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
it's not a hack if you followed directions.
You need to hack the sound insulation in the walls around er... wherever you are.
Let me be the first to say it... "OMFG wallh4x!!!"
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
So I jumpered the TV output into the speaker using some scrounged wire, and a bic lighter to solder the connections. Worked great, however ...
A week later I was walking through one of the other sleeping areas aboard ship and heard moaning and grunting coming from somewhere (disturbing on an all-male ship). It seemed that the guys in my compartment were playing a porn movie and the audio was being broadcast on "channel one" of every box throughout the ship!
It took lots of explaining when I when I ran back and disconnected the sound from their porn movie!
I hacked my kitchen sink via an electric screwdriver, a cheap mouse, and a fax machine to produce the POWER SINK DUN DUN DUHHHHHH... http://gogglemarks.homelinux.net/cgi-bin/display.c gi?file=projects/powersink
Back when I was about twelve, I found a book on fireworks.
My first try at making black powder, I used a peanut butter jar to heat the charcoal, sulphur, potassium nitrate and rubbing alcohol. I found out what "pyrex" means when the bottom fell out of the jar.
My next attempt worked. I had a nice, big pile of dry powder. I wet a piece of cotton string and rolled it in the powder. When it was dry, I lit it to see if it would burn. It did, FAST! I dropped the fuse...in the pile of powder. Luckily, my eyebrows are very white, so my parents didn't notice they were missing.
I was telling this story to my 10 year old son today, as an explanation of why it was a bad idea to try to make a flamethrower out of bic lighter. Instead, he thought it was cool and wanted to know why I didn't try a third time.
Damn genes!
good site with lots of info, may be related to the original poster...
UIUC acm SIGarch project
Let's see if I can remember this. I must have been around 14 at the time, and my goal was to make a burglar alarm for my bedroom which would keep a record of unauthorized entries but not be too annoying (so as to avoid pissing off my parents if they triggered it).
First step was the sensor. I taped a wire to a small piece of aluminum foil on the inside of the door near the doorknob, then another wire to the doorknob itself with a wadded ball of aluminum foil at the end of the wire. I bent the wire so that the two pieces of aluminum foil would touch as long as the doorknob was in its normal position, but if you turned the knob the contact would be broken.
This and an AC adapter that produced 9vDC were connected to the relay in a Radio Shack 200-in-1 electronic project kit, and wired such that the relay would remain on as long as the circuit was closed, but switch off and remain off once the circuit was broken.
To the other side of the relay I connected a battery pack holding four C-cell NiCd batteries, and the tape recorder for my Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 laptop computer, such that when the relay switched off, power would be applied to the tape recorder.
On the computer (with its own AC adapter) was a BASIC program I wrote. The first thing it did was attempt to read a file off the tape. To do so, it would switch the tape player on, wait until it found the file it was looking for, read the file, and switch the tape off.
Let's review. Normally with the doorknob in its normal position the relay remains on. When someone turns the knob, the circuit is broke and the relay switches off (and remains off until it is reset, regardless of the knob). When the relay switches off, power is applied to the tape recorder. The computer has been waiting to read a file off the tape. The first thing recorded on the tape is the the file the computer is looking for. The volume is turned up on the tape recorder so that when the tape is played, it makes a really obnoxious screeching sound for a few seconds - this serves as an alarm. Think of the sound of a modem handshaking; same idea.
As soon as the computer has finished reading the file off the tape, it logs the occurrance and displays a message on the screen with a timestamp. It then switches the tape back on. After the file on the tape is a recording of my own voice saying something - I don't recall what. The computer waits an appropriate amount of time for the message to finish playing, then switches the tape off. The computer then beeps, and keeps beeping every few seconds for awhile, then shuts up.
So there's the alarm. Now I just have to be able to get in and out myself without triggering it. Getting out is easy - since the relay circuit is only broken by turning the doorknob, I simply open the door, reset the alarm, and close the door behind me without turning the knob. To get in, though, I need a way to deactivate the alarm from outside (before turning the doorknob).
So, I make a keycard. I use a small piece of cardboard, with more aluminum foil and masking tape. I tape non-touching strips of aluminum foil over one edge of the cardboard, connecting two of the strips together and leaving the others not touching. I now have my keycard. The card reader involves more of the same materials, mounted on the wall outside the door with a piece of telephone wire running to it. When the card is pressed against the reader properly, each strip on the card should touch a strip on the reader. The two contacts on the reader that correspond to the two that are wired together on the card are wired in parallel with the doorknob sensor, so that holding the card in place will maintain the relay circuit while opening the door. Some of the remaining contacts on the reader are wired in parallel with the other side of the relay so that if they are shorted together, the tape player will come on - the idea being, if you try to forge my keycard by shorting random contacts, you'll trip the alarm instead of disabling it. I don't recall how well I actually got this working, but since nobody forged my keycard, it wasn't an issue.
So there you have it: my burglar alarm hack. One of many, actually, but this was certainly the most interesting.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
On the other end of the spectrum. I knew a guy with a Civic that put a 12v computer P/S fan in his air intake ducting to "increase" airflow into the engine.
The power supply fan would do very little, since it drives so little air. Most throttle bodies and carburetors are rated in the hundreds of CFM, most small fans like that are rated in the dozens of CFM. If anything, it would reduce the engine's peak power.
At partial throttle, the fan will drive a small amount of extra air into the engine meaning that the throttle won't have to be open as far for a given amount of power.
At wide open throttle, the engine's vacuum would massively outstrip the fan's flow, and the engine would end up dragging the fan. The energy required to spin the fan would be coming from the fast-moving air trying to enter the engine. The restriction and turbulence caused by the fan would reduce the volumne of air drawn into the motor, and therefore reduce the peak wide-open-throttle power.
People who do stuff like this - and, in fact, try to "tune" a Honda or other silly front wheel drive car - almost universally know nothing about cars, then try to take on Mustangs and Camaros which are, by virtue of large displacement V8 engines and rear wheel drive, far more suited to the task of stoplight confrontations.
If the guy were serious, he'd install a very high volume fan. Vacuum cleaner fans have been used as "electric superchargers" but require 120V in your car. Turbochargers and superchargers are far more reliable.
If he were really serious, he'd yank out that cute little 4 cylinder engine and transaxle and sell them. Then he'd cut out the rear suspension, weld perches onto his roll cage to attach the leaf springs or ladder bars. He'd stuff in a nice differential and rear axle (probably a Ford 9"), and stick a big V8 and automatic transmission driving the rear wheels. Personally, I'd stuff a big block Mopar V8 in there, but an early 1980s Buick 3.8L V6 would keep a Civic street drivable, getting over 25MPG and turning reliable low 12-second 1/4 mile times.
If he did that, then he would have a serious car for stoplight confrontations.
Hacking cars? Check this out, it's my buddy's 1986 Chevette. He cut off the back end of the car and welded on the tailfins of a 1956 Dodge Custom Royal. Together, we built a Chevette Targa... it had started out to be a hard-top convertible, but we never finished it.
Me? I do engine swaps. Then I go drag racing.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I don't know if it's a hack or not.. but on an East coast trip in HS a friend and I decided to take apart our disposable cameras for the sake of shits and giggles. After unwrapping them and exposing the circuitry we discovered by accident that if you charge the flash and then touch the two metal rods going to the flash it delivers a nasty jolt that makes your arm shake - all off a little 9v battery.
Needless to say, we carried that thing around everywhere "stunning" people until we were caught and it was taken away.
--
|-_-| . o O ( bEef!)
Do pacemakers come with a lifetime warranty?
Hello, I hacked the Opel display. Normally it shows the RDS information of the carradio. Now it shows the revolutions per minute of the engine. I used a PIC processor to measure the rpm and talk to the display. www.eelkevisser.nl/display.htm
Humor aside;
:)
http://www.honda-tech.com
I'm in the process of connecting a fan to a civic engine - a nifty fan called a turbocharger that spins at around 100,000 rpm, give or take. Estimated wheel horsepower at 10-12psi of boost is 210-240 from a 1600cc D16Y7 engine. Starting horsepower was 107 on a good day.
To accomplish this I'm using a secondary fuel system running a custom intake manifold with 4 extra injectors. The injectors are controlled by a atmel AVR microcontroller programmed with the port of GCC. (avr-gcc, www.avrfreaks.net). How's that, a little piece of GNU in there even. Ignition retard under boost is being handled by an aftermarket controller until I get that figured out.
Obviously the engine internals have been upgraded with forged components that are designed to handle more load. The total cost of the engine and related parts is under $5000 though - with me doing the labour.
Ultimately I want to do my own EFI system based on a real RTOS like QNX. I have done smaller EFI systems for less complicated engines. People have reverse engineered the honda ECU, although in my experience, it's more trouble than it's worth. Check out the systems offered by Hondata, and it's open and free friend, Uberdata.
Anyone can make big numbers with 5 liters of displacement. It's a little harder with less than two. The reason you want more power from a small package isn't just elegance though; lighter cars handle much, much better than heavier ones.
There are very, very fast civics out there. Be careful who you laugh at if your girlfriend is riding with you.. but oh wait, this is slashdot.
..don't panic
I still have my Apple II+ and wanted to see if I could recover the source code to Repton - a game I co-authored back in '82. The end result was that I wired up a cable from the Apple II printer card to my Linux parallel port and wrote some C code that made the Linux box look like a printer to the Apple II card. Since I could not get Merlin ( the apple II assembler ) to boot I also had to write a BASIC program that would read the binary files directly from floppy and send the text out the printer port.
Some day I may try to get the code to actually compile so I can run the game on my Nokia - but I'd have to mess around with getting the graphics files over as well if I want to build the game.
Amazing to me that 25 year old floppy disks - and all the hardware still work - including my Amdek Color monitor. As best I can tell, only the 16K expansion card has problems, and that might be fixed if I could find a 4116 (?) 16Kx1 chip or two.
Apple RULES!!!
Can anyone give a review on the book?
Is it worth spending 30 bucks or should i buy 5 pizzas instead?
A planned hack rather than a completed project:
I want to set my box up with a projector so I can use the same screen to browse the Internet, email and watch films/TV. Saves space, looks cool, impresses the girls. Figured I'd use a wireless keyboard and mouse but then also thought maybe I could do better than a wireless mouse.
First thought was a light gun. ACT do one which works as a mouse with a CRT but they don't work on projectors. So that's out. But I have a cunning plan....
I'm intending to set up a small camera on top of the top of the projector, pointing at the projected image. I'll use 4 lasers to pick out the corners of the projected desktop image, which can then be used as reference points relative to the desktop. My mouse will be a modified laser pointer connected by USB to the wireless keyboard to give the mouse button information and power.
I'll need software to locate the spots, fix the 4 reference spots relative to each other and then use their locations to triangulate the projected spot from my pointer. It'll then need to use this information so that the pointer on screen moves wherever the pointer spot goes (ideally I'll put the on screen pointer down to a pixel so the laser spot *is* the pointer).
Anyone done this already? If so is there code available to save me some time? Any thoughts on improvements to the plan or problems I may not have thought of?
(Unsurprisingly I'm running Linux!)
Thanks for your reply. You are assuming that I don't understand the American woman culture, but I do.
I learned by asking my women friends a lot of questions. I never found any American men who had much insight into women. However, women have insight into women, and I put a lot of effort into learning from them.
I got started when my woman friend at the time, with whom I was living, told me that there was a man in one of her college classes that was extremely popular with women. I asked her, and she said that he was not especially good-looking. I asked her how he did it. I spent a lot of time thinking about the answers.
I never used my knowledge for negative purposes. I always thought I would like to get married, and I was looking for a wife. Obviously, to find a wife it is useful to be popular with women. However, there have been at least 100 women who wanted to go to bed with me for every woman who was serious about wanting a life partner. It is a compliment the first 30 or 50 times a woman wants sex with no relationship, but then it gets annoying. It was either Chuck Berry or Jimi Hendrix who began to try to discourage women by saying, "I can't make your body feel as good as my music makes your mind feel." I'm not a musician, but I sympathize with the problem.
Along the way I learned a lot about things in which I really never had any intention to know. I learned about the inside of the modeling business from two women friends who were models. I learned about the beauty queen business from a woman friend who was a Miss Texas contestant. (She didn't win the Miss Texas title.) I learned how to cure yeast infections. Once a woman friend called me and told me that she had gotten pregnant by a man who was not her husband. (Not me.) She asked me if I knew of an abortion clinic. You know that you are being accepted by women when they treat you as a sister or as another woman friend.
After many years of looking for a wife in the United States, I began to think it was impossible. There were many women available to marry, but none who had the necessary skills or commitment. I spent time with Thai women, but most of them were too silly. I spent time with Iranian women, but they weren't nice enough to men. I found an interesting French woman who was not serious enough.
Finally I found and married a Brazilian woman. She's sleeping a few feet from where I'm sitting. (I slept too much yesterday and woke up early, and decided to check Slashdot.) I am very happy with her. Like most Brazilians, she likes to joke, but she can be serious when it is necessary. Unlike many Brazilians, she is careful with money, and good with details. She is, in some ways, better than me at repairing computers, because she has more patience. She's studying C++. She's good at web design, but doesn't have much time to do it.
It is interesting to note that my comment (#8380610, grandparent to this one) was modded up to +5 during the time Europeans and Asians were reading Slashdot, and is now at +4 now that American men are awake. People from other countries generally recognize that all is not right in U.S. society.
If you are a scientifically-minded person, you will realize that, if you reject my hypotheses, you must then try to make your own:
If everything is okay in the U.S., why is the U.S. the most obese nation in the history of the world? Eating when not hungry is an indication of unhappiness.
Why can't the U.S. government find a way of living in the world that does not involve violence?
Why does the U.S. government spend more money on weapons than any nation in the entire history of the world?
Why does the U.S. government spend more money on spying than any nation in the entire history of the world?
Why does the U.S. government have a higher percentage of its citizens in prison than any nation in the entire history of the world?
Somet
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