I’ve become so familiar with using standard DC and servo motors for my electronics projects that I’ve been neglecting a resource that I seem to have an unlimited supply of. There is a mountain of old floppy drives growing in the basement chock full of stepper motors waiting to do a robot’s bidding. The benefit […]
Shantanu Goel created a cool home security tool using Twitter and a linux application called Motion, a program that will monitor a webcam looking for differences between frames. When Motion detects movement, it archives a photo of the event and has the option of triggering an external script. Shantanu combined this with a simple curl […]
I really don’t drive that much, so when I fill up every month or two, the experience is normally accompanied by equal parts shock and foul language. The strange thing is that the price of gas is always significantly more expensive in the city, and every once in a while, you can happen across a […]
Casein, a protein found in milk, can be easily precipitated from standard moo juice with vinegar and turned into a malleable homemade plastic. Coffeebot wrote an Instructable that shows you how: The final product is quite rigid when it’s thick (1/8 inch or thicker), moderately pliable when it’s a little thinner, and brittle if it’s […]
Jonathan Zdziarski, author of iPhone Open Application Development, has been working on a forensics toolkit for law enforcement that allows the recovery of personal data from the iPhone. Apparently, the inspiration for this came from a discovery that refurbished iPhones, straight from the Apple store, often times contained personal information on the reformatted filesystem. This […]
The original YBox was a nifty little electronic gewgaw that made it easy to make a network appliance that displayed itself on a TV, all fit into an Altoids tin. The kits have been sold out for quite a while, but I’m excited to hear that it’s been given a second life in the YBox2 […]
If you have an iPhone, or the handy User Agent Switcher for Firefox, there are a couple of sites that offer free digital versions of several popular magazines. I guess the idea is to try and capture email addresses, but you can cancel through the input boxes and get straight to the content fairly easily. […]
