After rolling out his many excellent Coverpop visualizations (but before getting tapped by Yahoo! to work on similar cool stuff for them), Flickr Hacks coauthor Jim Bumgardner created this amazingly fun kaleidoscope viewer for YouTube videos. Just plug in any YouTube URL (or choose one of the nine preset movies provided by Jim) to return […]
Bre Pettis, Make: Blog‘s resident Media Maker, adds this photo and description to the Hacks Flickr pool: If you wear glasses like me, you’ll forget them at some point or you won’t have them on and you’ll need to read a street sign. The magic of a pinhole can help. By looking through the hole […]
If you try to run an old DOS game on Vista, you’ll probably get an error “This system does not support fullscreen mode.” Fortunately, this isn’t a dead end. Download a copy of DOSBox, the greatest MS-DOS emulator for any platform (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and more), and try running your game under DOSBox. […]
Love Ubuntu but wish it sported the Aqua UI of Mac OS X? Lauri Taimila’s detailed tutorial shows you how to change themes and icons, wallpaper, desktop icons, fonts, and windows to make your favorite Linux distro look and feel like a Mac, as well as a few customizations for your applications to make them […]
Go-to Hacks author Paul Bausch shares another productivity problem he’s solved for himself with a bit of hacking: Windows doesn’t have a command line utility for compressing files (that I know of), and I had to come up with a way to automate some file transfers today. So I whipped up a tiny Perl script […]
A year ago, a reader with the handle of bigthistle posted one of our favorite hacks to hacks.oreilly.com, describing how to access restricted websites using the Google Translate feature. Acknowledging that our readers often have better ideas than we do, we recently asked Wei-Meng Lee to take a closer look at this technique, and he […]
One of the amazing things about the 8-bit Atari computers was how they could rewrite their display list on the fly, changing video modes every scan line. My favorite application of this was the rainbow effect. I’ve always wanted to know how to do this, and some searching led me to Alan Watson’s example in […]
