Month: March 2005

The Playstation portable has only been out a few days here in the states and there is already a really cool hack for it- using it as a web browser. There are a few ways to do this and here are a couple- all require (for now) the game “Wipeout Pure” and redirecting the traffic via a proxy. Wombat Mobile has a great how-to here for Windows users… and here’s one if you have a FreeBSD machine- roto/moxy have some info. While I don’t think this is any scientific indicator of success- the portable gaming console that has the most hackers will “win”.

Makezine.com is easy to remember, but sound.sky.walk.car.mysteryrobot.com sounds cooler when you use Nambers. A namber is part name and part number. Each number between 0 and 255 has a namber. For example, 1 is fun and 213 is star. I really like this idea, the nambers are simple words that represent the DNS of your site. It would be neat to make little hieroglyphics Stargate style so you could get to a site with a big pictogram dialer. Or for kids, a “see and say” web browser.

Flash superstar Brendan Dawes made a flash (memory flash) USB drive out of an old Atari cartridge. “…occassionaly I yearn for stuff that was oversized and just made you want to reach out and touch it. So I took an old Atari 2600 cartridge and put inside a 128MB Flash drive! It’s incredibly stupid, and is the polar opposite of what Flash drives were invented for, but I love it!”.

Here’s a great article about turning that old PC in to an internet-enabled CD player, DVD burner, and MP3 jukebox using Knoppix. I get asked about this a lot “What can I do with an old PC” and this is a pretty good use and Knoppix is a great way to get started. We interviewed Kyle Rankin who wrote “Knoppix Hacks” and hopefully in the next week or so we’ll be releasing the interview(s) with him and others for our Make:Audio series.

I’m not sure it’s worth $17.99, but I really love this application because, well, it’s uselessly dangerous. Russian Roulette is an application for the Pocket PC that will soft reset or hard reset the device when you take your chances by betting your device’s data.

A lot of people have been taking photos of their laptops and/or computers with the background “showing” through. This collection of transparent screens now have a home on Flickr. Here they are, this one is my favorite. The really cool thing to do would be to auto-set an iSight or Webcam to take photos from behind the laptop and replace the background. A little update: More here, and a little how-to here.

I’ll be on KUSP radio’s “Geek Speak” via telephone as a guest this Friday (3/25) at 10am talking about Make and other techy stuff. KUSP is an NPR station in the Silicon Valley/Santa Cruz area. You can read more about the show here, and listen live here. Update: The show is posted! It was a lot of fun, thanks Lyle!