I was just reading our post about the “hollow spy bolt” and ran across the government group with RSS feed that looks for stuff like this (cool job) – so it turns out mailing yourself money hidden inside brochures to get out of paying taxes hack doesn’t work via ANIMAL. [he]… withdrew cash from his […]
Laserpointerforums member FireMyLaser built this most excellent Spinning RGB LED Ball II, using a bit of junk from his scrap pile and lots of ingenuity.
Polish maker Michal Zalewski created this very detailed how-to on using a laser to 3D scan objects with the help of a nicely executed custom gearbox, then capturing the result using a digital camera. More: Handheld 3D scanner Homemade 3D Scanner 3D scanner using standard webcam LEGO NXT 3D scanner How-To: Structured light 3D scanning
From the folks who brought us Linux on iPhone comes Android OS booting on iPhone. Master iPhone hacker planetbeing and crew have managed to dual-boot a 2G iPhone into what appears to be a mostly functional Android 1.6.
Instructables has a good thing going with their regular “theme” contests. They just finished up with paracord; now they’re starting in on coffee cups. Reminds me of the “MacGyver Challenge” that ReadyMade magazine used to run back before their facelift. Shown above is user bertus52x11’s simple hack for catching the plaster that would otherwise fall everywhere when you drill into the ceiling.
Check out this handy DTMF remote control interface from EmilioFicara. Turn relays on and off with sound.
Newer models of laptops manufactured by companies like Apple and Lenovo contain accelerometers — motion sensors meant to detect whether the computer has been dropped. If the computer falls, the hard drive will automatically switch off to protect the user’s data.
“As soon as I knew there were these low-cost sensors inside these accelerometers, I thought it would be perfect to use them to network together and actually record earthquakes,” says geoscientist Elizabeth Cochran of the University of California, Riverside.
So a few years ago, Cochran got in touch with Jesse Lawrence, a colleague at Stanford. They whipped up a program called the Quake-Catcher Network. It’s a free download that runs silently in the background, collecting data from the computer’s accelerometer and waiting to detect an earthquake.
Laptop accelerometers aren’t as sensitive as professional-grade seismometers, so they can only pick up tremors of about magnitude 4.0 and above. But when a laptop does sense a tremor, it’ll ping the researchers’ server. “And when our server receives a bunch of those, we then say, ‘This is a likely earthquake,’ ” Lawrence says.
