Technology

Hacking Coffee Machines

Hacking Coffee Machines

Fb7100 Some coffee maker hacking…At work we got new coffee machines. The supplier is the Dutch company Douwe Etters. It immediately became apparent that the coffee was not up to spec compared with our former supplier. Complaints did not result in better coffee, so I decided to try to do something about the weak coffee with froth (foam) on top of it. After all, everybody knows that foam should be on top of beer, not on coffee! On the plus side, the coffee is free… Link.

Control Stuff With Your Mac

Control Stuff With Your Mac

K8055 Andy writes “I picked up a Velleman K8055 USB I/O card the other day and was a bit disappointed that the only software that came with it was a closed source Win32 DLL and a simple control panel for the board. So I don’t have to boot into Windows to play with it I’ve produced a Mac OS X application that talks to the board. It’s open source too so you can write your own control applications”. Link.

Video with sound on iPods with Linux

Video with sound on iPods with Linux

Wiki-1-1-1 I finally got around to checking this out…“we’re going to do something pretty bold… we’re going to release the iPod Video.” Finally, I got sound and video to work together on the iPod Photo (thanks to a new audio driver by Bernard). It should show up in CVS soon (within the next few hours). It’ll be in the next nightly kernel+podzilla.” [via] Link. HOW TO and downloads here. I’ll post a video soon, so far it worked great.

TOOLBOX: PowerSquid Outlet Multiplier

TOOLBOX: PowerSquid Outlet Multiplier

Power Squid-Inuse Most of us electronics obsessed folks know that the everyday power strip just doesn’t cut it. A typical 5-outlet strip might be able to accommodate two bulky power converters, so you end up needing three of them to connect your five devices. Definitely not a pretty picture. To solve this problem some brilliant person eliminated the actual strip and simply connected together five flexible outlets. Now your big square power converters can exist in peaceful harmony, all of them humming along in unison to the same lovely tune. [via] Link.