Don Dunkee converted his EVT 4000E scooter into a mobile electric solar power station complete with fold out solar panels. He has a set of panels that can generate up to 120 watts/hour which charge the on board battery for the scooter. Great way to charge the battery while it’s sitting outside all day. So far he’s put 900 miles on it using sun juice.
Here’s a pretty clever hack for finding deals on the web by bolting together Thunderbird and RSS feeds from shopping sites. You use Thunderbird to subscribe to all your tech/computer related sites you might buy from via RSS and set up a folder with filters to watch for specific things you’re looking for. “Now, instead of spending a bunch of time watching these sites, you only have to keep an eye on the “watched for deals” folder. If it’s ever bold, then it means there is something in the folder that is of interest to you”.
Matt writes in and says “Two bored physicists, a machine shop, a spoon, a leatherman, and a vision…”. Jen bought me a Leatherman tool adaptor for my Leatherman. It came with a few square attachments crytpically referred to as “Robertson,” and I had no idea what these were for. But, what I did need, desperately, was a spoon attachment for my Leatherman. Thinking quickly, I gathered the raw materials and headed to the machine shop with Greg Snyder, my trusty side-kick and budding photojournalist… Here’s what happened.
Here’s a great project if you’re interested in turning an EVDO card in to a portable WiFi access point. The best part about this project is it uses Google Maps (Satellite photos) to do live vehicle tracking as well as uploading pictures from an onboard web camera as the car is driven around. How-to via /.
This ring is made out of a quarter by flattening the edge with a spoon or machinist hammer, then after drilling a hole and polishing the center is dremmeled out. A sanding disc is used to smooth out the inside and sized it to fit. After it’s a complete you have a pretty neat looking ring. It would be cool to make ones from different countries you visited and give them to friends.
This isn’t a new unlock code, but I wanted to post up -why- people unlock phones. “So I’m off to Thailand for 2 weeks tomorrow (more on this later). Here’s the code and a post from Rojo’s Kevin Burton. “I wanted to unlock my phone so that I could buy a prepaid GSM SIM chip to use my phone in Thailand for cheap. The only problem is that stupid Cingular locks the phone but you can just buy a new SIM chip”.
We covered the cell phone hacking for GI’s- here’s more about installing at satellite…This is how I spent my day today. It took around 6 hours round trip to drive to Sulimaniya, Iraq. This in Kurdistan where we did the install. I learned some stuff, it’s mostly simple labor but it raised some interesting questions in my mind about interception. This is an example of a installing a 1.2 meter dish for uplink with a given satellite using an ODU (OutDoor Unit) and an IDU (InDoor Unit) connected by two approximately 15 meter coax cables (one for TX and one for RX). Cnet has an article about the “geek” trip to Iraq too.
