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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 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."
Is it staring at me?
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.
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.
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
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I hacked several functioning consumer electronic devices into fully-working doorstops?
sig under development
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.
We built a fireplace and I wanted something cool for the kids so I took one of the kid-high rocks and drilled a hole in it then epoxied in a brass "peep hole". I put a geode behind the rock and ran some fiber optic cable to it then mortared the whole thing up.
The other ends of the fiber optic cables went to a hidden box which contains the guts of one of these fiber optic Xmas trees (including the spinning color wheel).
Push a secret rock near the peep hole rock and the whole thing turns on - cool crystally color changing happiness. The kids love it. Now on the other side of the fireplace I installed a "peep show" but that's a different story...
I've made up my mind and now I've got to lie in it.
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.
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.
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
MAN SHOOTS ROVER!
Slightly OT
I once bought an original Pole Position II arcade off ebay (about 120). After a few months the screen went a bit screwy, so i found a newsgroup concerning acade repair.
The people on the group were really helpful and were talking me through fixing the problem... however I kept the arcade plugged in so I could see the results. FZZZZZZPT! I get knocked about 5 foot, manage to crawl to my laptop and type very slowly "brb, ambulance"
my gf was first shocked, then scared, then calling me "pathetic"
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?
I did that for my kids once, too. Lessons learned: 1. Don't put the peephole on the inside of the fireplace. 2. Kids are fuckin whiners.
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
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
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?
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).
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.
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
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.
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
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
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