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 /.

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.