Hacks

“Some guy who’s never met Mike” wrote in to tell us about Mike’s Flying Bike, a completely unconventional flight-sim interface created from a bicycle, a Sun SPOT sensor/microcontroller, and Google Earth. So, you pedal this stationary bike to pick up speed and take off. Then you manipulate various hand levers and the handlebars to affect […]

Paul from the Compiler blog pointed out a cool flash application called FontStruct. It’s basically a WYSIWYG editor for fonts, allowing you to easily create a TrueType font of your own design without having to learn your way through all the intricacies and difficulties of professional fontography. The site includes a big gallery of Creative […]

I can’t say how realistic this is, and I probably won’t be using the advice myself, but Jon Udell wrote about a plausible strategy for subverting the TSA rules into protecting your check-in luggage. The trick is to declare a firearm (in this case a starter pistol) which, by policy, forces your bag to be […]

Nothing goes better with some Python hacking than a little pizza. Nick Jensen couldn’t wait for his pizza to arrive to begin hacking, so he spent the 30 minute wait-time writing a Python script to track the pie’s progress: I discovered an interesting XML feed the other day when I ordered a pizza from dominos. […]

Jamie Matthews created a nifty notification cube that glows when his Gmail inbox has a message. I was given a lovely glowing cube by the generous people at Linden Labs as a freebie at a job fair yesterday, and I decided that it was far too attractive to simply sit there on a shelf, pulsating […]

It was announced yesterday that sometime back in September 2006 a line of code was removed from the Debian distributed OpenSSL package. That one line of code was responsible for causing an uninitialized data warning in Valgrind. It also seeded the random number generator used by OpenSSL. Without it, the error went away, but the […]