Make Flickr pool member apbeatty is making a magnetic stripe card reader and documenting it as he puts it together. Here’s a bit about the project from issue 01. If you have a project you’re making from the magazine, or any project join the photo group and post on up!
WOW. This news just broke at midnight! The tools that most of us use in one way or another to make stuff are about to be from one company. Adobe announced they’re going to buy up Macromedia. I’m excited and curious about what’s going to happen, the little vector hamsters in my head are thinking of all the interesting things that this means for content creation, mobile devices and publishing! Make friend Mike Chambers from Macromedia has a post on this too.
Finally some DS hacking…“Most of us will remember Wednesday, April 13th 2005. On that day, Tim Schuerewegen released the driver and application necessary to allow anyone with a Nintendo DS, a GBA flash cart, and a supported wireless network card to load any homebrew demo/app on their DS. You already had the ability to do this with a PassMe device, but now can do it wirelessly!”. Here’s how!
Because you can… here’s a site devoted to overclocking Texas Instruments graphing calculators. The TI-81, TI-82, TI-83, TI-85, TI-86, TI-89, TI-92,a nd TI-92 Plus can be “accelerated”. The 81, 85 and 86 can be accelerated to approximately 2-3x their normal speed, about 18 MHz. The TI-82 and TI-83 can also be accelerated to about 1.5-2x normal speed. They only about double their speed to around 12 MHz. The TI-89 and 92 can be accelerated to around 20 MHz! Thanks Jeremy!
Todd Ogasawara has a great article from Digital Photography Hacks on making panoramic images from your cell phone. I really like how-tos like this, we all have digital cameras, camera phones and little projects like these make your technology investments a lot more fun. Besides the open source Panotools, anyone know of other free photo stitching tools?
Here’s a great cell phone mod from bernardroth’s Flickr page. It’s a standard looking payphone headset with metal cable converted to be a headset for a cell phone. I’m going to see where and if you can buy these…ya know, I had heard that many phone companies are removing pay phones, I wonder what they do with them. If I can score a phone handset, I think I could make an app for my Pocket PC phone to only dial phone numbers if I use my old redbox.
I have a hard time exercising unless there’s some type of cool technology involved. jnielsen posted his heart rate and GPS info from the Ironman Arizona triathlon race. “I used my Garim 301 for the entire race and loaded it up to motionbased.com. The GPS has the distance almost dead on. Check it out – but no cracking on my time:) It’s a pretty cool tool – I actually swam a pretty straight line!”. Links to the individual maps and data here.
