Great resource of pinouts. This is a collection of pinouts that I’ve gathered over the years and umpteen hours of buzzing out cables. Since others are bound to find some of this information useful, I’ve cleaned it up and html-ized it, but hopefully in a non-obtrusive way so that it is still useable from an 80-column dumb terminal. Link.
Here’s another way to peek under the cap to see if you could win as opposed to the tilt method. What’s the trick? REFLECTION. Get a flashlight, tilt the bottle slightly, and use the surface of the soda as a mirror! If and when the soda folks give away a trip to space via a bottle cap promotion, I’m going to have to do this. [via] Link.
Crude oil and gasoline prices are near an all-time high. But don’t despair. One scientist has found an alternative source of energy: pig manure. Yuanhui Zhang, an agricultural engineering professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, has succeeded in turning small batches of hog waste into oil. Seems like people waste could work too. Link.
Buffed up with US $100 in replacement parts, a $150 disc player can challenge players that cost ten times as much. The IEEE has a story showing how you can turn a cheap DVD player into something that sounds a whole lot more exotic. All you need is a small budget, a soldering iron and a desire to void your warranty. [via] Link.
Here are instructions to turn such a tester into a not-so-precise analog display to monitor the CPU load on a Linux system, controlled by a serial port. You can build two variants of the display: a simple display, with the battery tester on the control circuit, or a more precise and less finicky display, with the battery tester mounted on a heatsink. Link.
Doug’s new project is awesome. Every day there are scores, or even hundreds, of fascinating and important conference sessions, lectures or other presentations that are lost. They simply evaporate because no one captures or records them. Some of these presentations are given by the greatest and most inspiring minds of our time, and many could be important to people in the far reaches of the planet, if only they could hear them. Link.
Ever wish you could dispatch a robot to grab you a beer? That day might soon be here, thanks to an as-yet-unannounced decision by iRobot. In early July the company will post instructions for controlling its Roomba vacuum cleaner via the built-in serial port, so programmers can modify it however they want – from equipping it with a camera to, yes, adding an arm and training it to retrieve brewskis. iRobot hopes the move will foster the development of Roomba accessories – like the ecosystem of add-ons that has sprung up around the iPod – thus driving sales. Link.
