A little history on Phrack…The in-house magazine of the digital underground, Phrack, is closing after 20 years as its editorial team steps down. As much manifesto as hacking handbook, the magazine was hugely influential in the early days of hacker culture. Link.
MAKE Flickr pool member gadgetgirl posted photos on how to make your own Magial Money. You’ll need Gold, silver and bronze Fimo, a rolling pin, small circular cookie cutters, some sort of alphabet rubber stamp set, mythical themed rubber stamps or charms (I found these in the scrapbooking section), black acylic paint and gold acylic paint. Link.
Roger W. Sutton, an inmate at Mountain View Correctional Institution in Spruce Pine, NC, built a working clock out of paper, popsicle sticks, and pencils, using only a razor blade, tweezers, and nail clippers as his tools (Mountain View must allow access to sharp objects). The clock has beautiful colors, too! I’d imagine that being imprisoned gives people a keen interest in the passage of time– and that there are probably many other amazing but little-known projects by prisoners. Link.
The unhackable BIOS exists for one very simple reason: the manufacturer wants this PC to work for the broadest, simplest set of PC users. In other words, it does not want to have to bear the cost of support calls related to hacked BIOS settings. Completely understandable if this is a family PC but very frustrating if you’re a real techie and wish to experiment. All hope may not be lost. Many vendors use the same or a similar version of system boards that you can get off the shelf or by mail order. Link.
The site is about a home-built, all-purpose machine tool that can do every type of job a regular machine shop does and that can be easily built with scrap material. Although it weighs almost a thousand pounds, the machine tool is capable of doing accurate work on everything from the smallest models to large industrial parts. They sell the plans for it, looks kinda neat. Link.
Is this the end of Word as we know it? Scribe adds Word Processor like functionality to web forms, including opening and saving form entries as files. Open and save form entries as files. Quickly save to a local file as you type. Never lose a post again due to your internet connection being dropped or laptop battery going out. [via] Link. OpenOffice, Word, Pages, all word processing apps should all have hooks like this.
Adjusting the power supply voltage to your CPU can make all the difference between an erratically performing speed-hack and a stable screaming demon. Overclockers love to tweak every available parameter in attempts to squeeze every bit of performance out of their CPUs and system boards. Cranking up the speed is the most obvious way to get the CPU to run faster, but to get or keep it running at higher speeds you may have to jack up the CPU’s power supply voltage a notch or two. Link.
