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November 29, 2007

Site Maintenance Today

We're performing some scheduled site maintenance today, so please pardon the saw dust as we move servers and add some new features! Commenting will be turned off for a while but will be available again soon!

Posted by Terrie Miller | Nov 29, 2007 10:12 AM
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November 28, 2007

Internal bluetooth hack for the Asus Eee PC

tnkgrl spent some time exploring the motherboard of her Eee PC. Looking for available USB ports, she was able to hijack the USB trace that goes to the mini PCIe slot used by the Atheros wireless card. Since the Atheros doesn't use the USB signal, the card will still function without it. This gives you a spare USB port, perfect for embedding a tiny USB Bluetooth module!

If you don't mind soldering a few traces, you can add a built-in bluetooth device to your Eee PC. You'll still have the external ports available for other devices, and your wireless card will still function. The only difference is that when you can't find a hotspot, you'll be able to get a cellphone uplink and jack in using your new bluetooth connection.

Modding the Asus 701 (Eee) - Bluetooth - Link

RC car controlled with the N95 acceleration sensor

Amazing! Andreas Jakl posted a cool N95 hack that uses the built-in accelerometer, Python, Bluetooth, and a microcontroller to control the movement of a remote control car:

Now we wanted to take the acceleration sensor of a mobile phone to the next level and use it to control something literally "bigger" than an application that is running on the phone itself.
The result is called "ShakerRacer" (thanks to Adam Montandon for this great name!). Stephan Selinger, one of our professors, bought a normal RC car for about €90 and "tuned" it. Not in the traditional way, but instead he replaced the standard remote control component with an own microcontroller and a Bluetooth-module.

Using the Python module aXYZ from cyke64, it was possible to write a small application that translates the movements of the N95 acceleration sensor to commands that can be understood by the car. This enables you to go as fast as 30 km/h by just tilting your phone!

ShakerRacer: Real RC car controlled with the N95 acceleration sensor - [via] Link

Ask the readers: the most hackish Facebook applications?

I've never been much of a Facebook application user, but I've got a backlog of requests from friends who use them... Scrabulous, IQ tests, vampires, etc. I poked around the Facebook application directory and I can sort by popular, active, and newest applications, but I got to wondering about the kinds of applications that would interest Hackszine readers: really neat hacks that use the platform in a freaky way, cool applications that a hacker put together in their free time, and interesting mashups that pull data from a variety of places.

Have you come across anything wild and hackish on Facebook? What can you tell me about the application and the author? What cool stuff is going on under the hood?

Hack #156 from Big Book of Windows Hacks: strip down your Windows installation

Preston Gralla's Big Book of Windows Hacks has hit the streets, and we're really excited about it. It's truly big: 600 pages and 188 hacks. You'll learn how to bend Vista and XP to your will, get the most out of gadgets like the Zune, your networking hardware, and Windows Home Servers. Here's some of the stuff you'll find in there:

Expanded tutorials, new background material, a series of "quick hacks," and informative sidebars
Security hacks, including protection at wireless hotspots, hacking Vista file permissions and user account protection, and more
Efficiency hacks, such as tweaking your PC hardware, troubleshooting hardware problems, and speeding up system performance
Fun hacks, like building a custom Media Center PC or turning a PC into a digital video recorder
"Beyond Windows" hacks for running Linux inside Vista, dual-booting Linux/Windows or XP/Vista, or emulating classic video games on your PC

We'll be running a few sample hacks, starting with "Strip the Crud Out of Your Windows Install", which explains how to slim down your Windows installation before installing Windows. Hack #156 - Link

Related:

Big Book of Windows Hacks @ the Maker Store - Link
Big Book of Windows Hacks--New from Make: Tips & Tricks for Unlocking the Power of Your Windows PC - Link

November 27, 2007

Using QoS to prioritize your bandwidth

You can use the Quality of Service (QoS) feature on many routers to optimize your internet connection for devices and services that are most important to you. Adam at Lifehacker put together a quick walkthrough for tuning the QoS settings on our favorite router firmware, the open-source DD-WRT.

Your internet connection is an indispensable part of your life, but between BitTorrent, Xbox Live, web browsing, and VoIP, sometimes there's not enough bandwidth to go around. But rather than running around the house shutting down all of your computers next time you're experiencing a little lag on Xbox Live or Skype is breaking up on you, you can set up Quality of Service (QoS) rules on your router to distribute bandwidth to your different gadgets and applications based on your priorities. Today I'll show you how.

The nice thing about setting up QoS on your router is that you can prioritize packets by application, IP and MAC address, or a specific router port, all to your own preferences. Everyone has different needs, so you may want to maximize the available bandwidth for VoIP or network gaming, guarantee a chunk of bandwidth for ssh connections or your web server, or throttle down P2P applications so that they don't affect other network services. There's nothing set in stone, so you can really make your router work for you to improve the way your internet connection is utilized.

Ensure a Fast Internet Connection When You Need It - Link

HOWTO run the XO laptop emulator on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon

Tom Hoffman has posted some quick and easy instructions for running Sugar ("essentially a virtual XO") on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. If you don't have a giant screen, check out these instructions for tips on using a lower resolution (you'll need to do something like vi `which sugar-emulator` to edit the startup script). This might hold you over while you wait for your GOGO order to arrive.

Running Sugar on Ubuntu Gutsy - Link

November 26, 2007

HOWTO - Install Ubuntu on the Asus Eee PC

Paul McGuinness sent us a howto for installing Ubuntu on the Asus Eee PC. For the most part, the install is fairly straightforward, but there are a few performance tweaks that are different from a typical desktop system. The big one is that you want to disable the access time feature (noatime parameter in fstab) of the filesystem to minimize disk writes.

There are also a number of non-standard drivers that you'll need to grab to get things like the wireless card, webcam and sleep features working. The eeeuser.com wiki has an page that describes in detail how to take care of all these issues. Credit to them for the above photo as well.

I peeked at one of these in a store the other day and the hardware seems really sweet. The included OS interface leaves a bit to be desired for someone who's comfortable and familiar with Linux, so it's good to see most everything (save for hibernation and a few function keys) is working on a stock Linux distro. I'll be asking Santa for one of these this year.

Installing Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsey Gibbon on an Asus Eee PC - Link
EeeUser.com Wiki: Ubuntu 7.10 on Eee PC - Link

November 25, 2007

Recovering a dead external hard drive

What do you do when good hard drives go bad? Tell me if this sounds familiar. You spend a year or two filling up an enormous external hard drive, and just as you start thinking it might be a good idea to buy another enormous drive to back up your data, you boot your computer and hear a heart-stopping sound from your disk: thuck... thuck... thuck... thuck... @#$%!!!!

I had a huge amount of data go dark on me two weeks ago. I suppose I reached the end of the grieving process this weekend, because my mind started to clear up and it occurred to me that maybe all was not lost. After all, there are a lot of electronics in those external hard drives, separate from the drive itself. Inside your typical external hard drive is just a normal 3.5 inch internal hard drive plus the electronics necessary to power everything, control the drive, and provide USB or Firewire connectivity to the host computer.

So, voiding the warrantee, I pulled the enclosure apart and replaced the suspect drive with a working EIDE drive I had lying about. Sure enough, when I turned things on, the drive I knew to be good started clacking away. At this point, I was pretty sure my data was still safe and sound, but being that I didn't have a machine handy that could mount an XFS formatted disk, I couldn't verify things for sure until I could get the disk connected back to my iMac.

Most computer stores sell really cheap (approx. $30) hard disk enclosures which you can just slap an EIDE disk into to create an external Firewire or USB drive. I ran to my local store, picked one up, and I'm happy to say that I just recovered 320GB of data that I had just about given up on.

If you own an external drive that's failed on you, make sure to test the drive and enclosure before you throw it out. It's quite possible that your data is still intact and you can save yourself a couple hundred bucks and a lot of trauma by just replacing the enclosure.

At the very least, you might have a bad disk but a working enclosure that you can use to make a new external disk.

On a side note, until today I only owned a single external drive. Being that there's only one data point, I can't say a whole lot for sure, but I keep thinking that I'm just a random person with a 100% enclosure failure rate. Until I hear otherwise, I remain suspicious that this might be a fairly common failure point.

November 24, 2007

Turn your soundcard into an oscilloscope

There are a couple decent software packages available for using your soundcard as an oscilloscope. Using the line-in or mic-in will allow you to sample signals below 44.1kHz with 16-bit resolution (depending on your soundcard). For Linux, there's an open source GTK package called xoscope that is pretty well maintained. On the PC side, you can try a package (not open source, unfortunately) called Soundcard Oscilloscope, which was written using LabView. Both programs will allow you to instantly transform your computer into a really affordable oscilloscope. Does anyone know of a good package for OS X?

Before you go probing any circuits, keep in mind that the peak voltage on your soundcard is probably less than 1 volt. For real world use, xoscope's creator put together a buffer circuit that will take care of high voltage protection as well as a level trim that will allow you to adjust the line level to something your card can deal with. You'll want to use this with either software package you end up using.

xoscope for Linux - Link
Buffer Cicuit for xoscope - Link
Soundcard Oscilloscope for Windows 2000/XP - Link

November 23, 2007

Wifi range extender: 5 bars for 50 cents

With just a wire, a wood screw, and a drinking straw you can go MacGyver on your PC's WiFi and make yourself an omnidirectional "range extender" antenna, similar to what you'd find in the store for $30. There isn't a lot of talk about the reasoning behind the antenna design... it's just a straight duplicate of what's in the commercial product.

WIFI Range Extender Antenna - Link

November 22, 2007

Wiimote controlled Aibo

What works well for a gaming input device also appears to be a useful tool for human robot interaction. University of Calgary students Cheng Guo and Ehud Sharlin performed a study in which participants tried to pose Aibos and navigate them through obstacles using both keyboards and a Wiimote-based gesture interface:

For the navigation tasks we did not expect that there would be a significant difference between the numbers of errors participants made using the different techniques. However, the data showed the opposite. Participants made 43% more errors with the keypad interface than with the Wiimote interface in the navigation tasks. Many participants felt that this was due to the small key size and the unintuitive mapping between buttons and robot actions.
...

Moreover, gesture input tends to support simultaneous input
compared to button input. As one of the participants
commented, "I could do both hands (both arm movements)
at the same time without a lot of logical thinking (with the
Wiimote/Nunchuk interface), where with the keyboard I
had to press one (button) and the other (button) if I was
doing two hand movements at the same time. Although they
would be intime."

I wonder if the same holds true as the gestures become more complex to support a larger command set. For a reduced set of instructions, however, this really makes a lot of sense. Knowing the spatial position of your hands is completely second-nature, making simple gestures much more intuitive than pressing keys on a keyboard.

Wiimote controlled Aibo - Link, Paper (PDF)

November 21, 2007

Peephole fisheye lens

Dave Nance used an ordinary door peephole fitted to a lens cap to produce some whimsical looking images like the one above. Depending on the optics used in the peephole (many are made of plastic) and whether you choose to use a tripod to compensate for the decreased amount of light, you can really end up with a lot of strange aberrations and large regions of the photo that are quite out of focus. Then again, that's sort of the point:

Still, there is something about the way these images look that speaks to me. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that my eyes are slowly going to hell. Without my glasses, the world that I see is no longer as sharp as it was when I was younger. Beyond that, the blurring, streaks, flares, and distorted textures, all create a kind of surreal feeling. When combined with the linear distortion caused by the "fisheye" effect of the lens, it can make these images seem like snapshots out of a dream.

You can experiment with this or other lens-glued-to-lenscap arrangements and see what you like. You'll just need to focus your camera as close as possible ("macro" mode), and then use the adjustments on the external lens to bring things into focus. Most of these setups are pretty touchy and let in very little light, so for best results you'll really want to use a tripod and a remote shutter.

Faux Fisheye With a Door Peephole - Link

November 20, 2007

Ask the readers: what's the best hackable web phone?

It's not a simple decision, choosing on your next mobile device. There are a lot of different models with various features, built on several software platforms, and with hardware that works well for some carriers, but not well for others. It's a total mess.

One Hackszine reader wrote in on the subject, specifically asking about devices with a solid web browsing platform. He writes:

With all the reviews and nonsense out there. Its making it hard for me to decide on a new phone. I love the look and the screen of the iphone. But I've heard to many bad things about the software. I want a phone that has great web browsing. All I do is talk, text and hopefully browse. I have AT&T and will stay with them for a while. What do you think of the Blackjack? Would you recommend another phone for my needs?

I've messed around with a number of devices, and based strictly on browsing interface, I think the iPhone is at the top of the list except--and for some this is a big exception--for it's lack of Flash support. This being Hackszine, however, I need to also note that while the iPhone can be hacked to run end-user code, the manufacturer has been motivated to make this as difficult as possible, and it won't always be a sure bet going forward into new revisions.

So what other devices are available, and how do you choose a good one? What do Hackszine readers prefer?

I can't possibly list every device, but here's my personal evaluation cirteria.

Connectivity
This is the single most important factor to consider when you're deciding on a web-enabled device. What technologies does your network support? Are you often in range of an 802.11 network?

Find a device that works best with the network you plan to be using. For T-mobile and AT&T, this means the device should support EDGE. For Verison, you'll want a CDMA capable device.

For me, WiFi support is a huge must as well. In the city, you're often in range of free wireless and it's a drag to be sitting on a mobile network when real broadband is available.

Browser Technology
Mobile Safari and recent versions of Pocket IE are both really capable browsers that render web pages true to form, including fairly robust Javascript support.

There's also a mobile version of Firefox, called Minimo, that's available for Windows Mobile Pocket PC (touchscreen) devices, but not the Smartphones.

Navigating the web with a direction pad is a nasty experience. While the touchscreen devices like the iPhone and Pocket PCs are larger, if you're looking for a good mobile browser, you really should stick to a touchscreen platform.

Hackability
If you ignore the manufacturer's attempts to keep it a closed platform (can you ignore this??), the iPhone's unix core, open source development tools, and strong developer community make it a really attractive device. As I mentioned, there's currently no Flash support, though this is rumored to come soon in another update.

Both the Windows Mobile and Series 60 devices have more open development platforms and free development environments available. I've written code for both operating systems, and I have to say that writing anything but Flash Lite for the Series 60 devices is horrendous. The Windows mobile devices, on the other hand, are, for the most part, a pleasure to write software for. This is true even for native application code, which can be developed in a number of languages that are supported in Embedded Visual Studio.

Ask the Readers
I've only used a few devices on a day to day basis, and there are so many new ones available that I haven't tried, so I'm hoping you folks can help out with determining the best available, hackable mobile web device.

What do you look for in a web-enabled device? Which device has the best web browsing experience? What should be avoided? Give us a shout in the comments.

November 19, 2007

Hamster-powered night light

Here's a little howto on building a low-RPM generator from scratch. I assume that not all of you have extra hamsters lying around to power your night lights, but a similar design could be used for creating a small generator for wind or other energy sources.

Though it's hard for the hamster to make higher voltages with his low-rpm wheel, he has torque to spare. 2 LEDs are barely taxing him......we are drawing only about 30 milliamps into the LEDs at Skippy's top speed. If we add more electrical load to the circuit, he could make more power, with a resulting increase in physical resistance on the wheel---like running uphill. We have yet to try small incandescent flashlight bulbs in the circuit--something that draws more power and makes more physical resistance against the wheel spinning. We did try more LEDs -- he had no trouble lighting up 6 of them. Next we plan to try an array of low-voltage incandescent flashlight bulbs to get optimum power output without tiring Skippy out too much. DanF is guessing that Skippy is good for 200 milliamps without tiring...

One cool thing is that the author uses a bicycle computer to track the hamster wheel's average and top speeds over time. This is a nice tool to have if you're trying to monitor and optimize the environment for your generator setup.

Hamster-Powered Night Light - Link

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