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October 10, 2008

Speaking UNIX: !$#@*%

Mac OS X Terminal
IBM developerWorks has an article that goes over many of the symbols you'll encounter at a Unix/Linux/Mac OS X/Cygwin command line:

You've learned a few of the basic commands to help you maneuver through a directory structure, create and modify files, see what processes are running, and maybe even administer users and the system. That's great, but you want to understand what the UNIX® administrators next to you are typing. It looks like a lot of commands interspersed with strange symbols. Learn what |, >, >>, <, <<, [[ and ]], and many more symbols mean in UNIX and Linux® as well as how to get the most out of operators such as &&, ||, <, <=, and !=.

Speaking UNIX: !$#@*%: Learn even more command-line tricks and operators [via LinuxDevices.com]

October 9, 2008

Repairing a Vectrex using CPLDs

Para JVE

This is amazing; it's an article from Programmable Logic DesignLine that describes how you can repair an old gaming system by using programmable logic (in the form of a Xilinx CPLD) to emulate ~~a hard-to-replace~~an obsolete (actually 35 cents each as Kyoorius points out in the comments, but assumed obsolete "for the sake of this project") chip. The author, In Choi, has a great justification for doing this project:

You may be wondering why I did this exercise. Wouldn't it have been easier to buy a video game console from this or even the last decade? I didn't do the design simply to restore the video game - I did it for a number of reasons.
First off, I think logic design is fun (and I'm lucky enough to get paid to do it). Second, I wanted to show that I could create the RLD [retro logic device] to directly replace a failed part. But my main reason for doing the project was to create a methodology with an FPGA to show that there are indeed practical ways to overcome chip obsolescence.

Replacing obsolete video game circuits with Xilinx CPLDs [via Andrew Plumb on twitter]

(Pictured above, a screenshot from the cross-platform ParaJVE Vectrex emulator)

October 8, 2008

HOW-TO Request Microsoft hotfixes quickly

Getting a Hot Fix

Hotfixes are patches that Microsoft makes available before they've been fully tested and integrated into a service pack or official patch. But if you're one of those people who's been affected by a bug, you might not hesitate to give the hotfix a try. However, getting a hotfix can be tricky: in some cases, you'll see an option to request it online, in other cases, you'll have to contact support directly.

Aaron Tiensivu has posted information about a technique that generates the online request even when it doesn't appear by default:

I don't know if this is considered a 'backdoor' or not, but it has worked with every KB article I have tried it on so far.

Most of the time, if a KB article is available to the public, there will be a "Hotfix Download Available - View and request hotfix downloads" message on the top of the screen like this:

If you have a particular KB article that you want to download, and the image above seems to be missing, try this link in your web browser:

http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=[KBnumber]&kbln=[KB language]

Requesting MS hotfixes online has changed slightly - new way of generating a request

Also, the How-To Geek has an article up about Hotfixr, which will generate URLs of this format for you.

October 7, 2008

Photographing the night sky

Rosette Nebula

The Wired How-To-Wiki has a page up on how to photograph the stars with a digital camera, tripod, camera mount, and telescope. If you want to compensate for the Earth's rotation (so you don't get trails in the image), you'll also need to pick up motor drive for your scope:

It sounds like something you'd have to be a pro to attempt, but taking pictures of the heavens is easy to do with the even the simplest of set-ups.

Here are some tips for getting the best results when you tilt your camera towards the heavens.

...

Stars are very dim, so to photograph the night sky, you're going to have to keep your camera's shutter open for several minutes. Of course, the rotation of the Earth causes the stars to appear to move in the sky. Leaving the shutter open on a stationary camera is going to result in each star leaving a trail behind it.

Photograph the Stars - Wired How-To Wiki [via lifehacker]

The photograph of the Rosette Nebula at the top of this post is taken by amateur astronomer Steven Childers. His photo is also featured on the cover of:

Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders: Get it now at the Maker Shed

October 6, 2008

HOWTO get Microsoft to subsidize that netbook purchase you've been putting off

Things I learned today:

Microsoft is encouraging people to use Live Search by running a generous rebate program. At times (such as this morning when I bought an MSI Wind), the rebate can reach 30% or higher.
eBay sellers techtreasure and multiwavevideo are also known as Mwave.com, a reputable seller of computers, such as the MSI Wind I bought from them this morning.

To be clear: yes, Microsoft is paying you to search. Here's how it worked for me this morning:

I started my search at Live.com and searched for "cheap" along with some product name; I tried a few variations such as "cheap wii" and "cheap laptop" and both worked. (Nick pointed out in the comments that you should sign into Live before you search; I'd forgotten that I was signed into Live when I started. Thanks, Nick!)
Looked for the link titled "Buy A Cheap Laptop. You may get XX% off with PayPal if eligible." (This morning, it was 30%. As I type this, it's 20%)
Searched for the MSI Wind (Buy it Now items only), and purchased it using Paypal.
Made sure that at every step of the way, I saw the icon for "Microsoft cashback" at the top of the screen.

eBay has a page with terms and conditions, and Microsoft has a FAQ about the program. See a list of other stores that participate in this cashback program.

So, how did I make out? I paid $479 for the laptop, and qualified for $144 cash back. On top of that, there's a $50 manufacturer's rebate on the MSI Wind, so all told, $285. Get while the getting's good, and let us know how you fared!

FatWallet.com: eeePC 1000H for $330 shipped with live.com and ebay
FatWallet.com: *EDITED again* 20% off at eBay through MSFT cashback program

October 5, 2008

Electronics hacking lab in a cigar box

Raphael Abrams just posted a peek inside his portable hacking lab to the NYC Resistor blog :

I like to hack on the go. So I made a charming little mini lab out of a cigar box and some electronic parts. It's got a breadboard, a built-in Arduino, a couple of places to put loose parts and a control panel on one side. The control panel is the best part with LEDs, potentiometers, a switch and a button all mounted on the side of the box. I love it so!

Hand made since 2008, Raphael Abrams' Cigar Box Lab

October 4, 2008

Making Windows XP play a little better with solid state drives

disable prefetcher

I tried getting Windows XP running on my 20GB EEE PC 900, but out of the box, it's pretty sluggish. The problem may be that Windows XP is not being optimized for solid state drives (SSDs). Posting on the OCZ (maker of SATA SSD drives) forums, Tony has written up a HOWTO on making Windows XP play quite a bit better with SSD drives:

Cheaper SSD drives like our Core V1 and Core V2 series have limitations with random writes filling up the write buffer on the drive and causing the SATA controller to pause while this is flushed. The reason for this is Nand MLC drives at present have to erase before they write...hence you get added latency. So every bit written to the drive has to be preceded by a bit erased, the drive can not write over the top of pre written data.
What we are trying to do here is limit how much XP writes to cache/database. many apps within XP do this, apps you add also do this (such as outlook)
The tweaks you will see listed may help with this, SSD's do not take well to lots of tiny random writes.

I gave these a try on my EEE PC today, and they made things quite a bit faster. I'm still getting the occasional freeze, but that only started happening after I put some files on the 16GB secondary drive in my EEE PC. As long as I stuck with the faster 4GB C: drive, these tips made a world of difference in performance. My next step is to try formatting the D: drive as FAT32 to see if that makes any difference at all.

Making XP pro SSD friendly

October 3, 2008

Cooking a meal on one 10" grill

Grilling with the Cobb

Pinball hacker extraordinaire Bill Bumgarner has had great success with the Cobb compact Grill: four cheeseburgers, five potatoes, two heads of garlic. All with just seven pieces of charcoal:

Altogether a delicious meal. And I have to admit a bit of amazement at the Cobb. I was expected a grill that made significant sacrifices in the quality of the cooking experience to yield a portable and versatile grill.

Not so. The thing is dead simple to use. The only temperature control is the number of bits of charcoal you put in at the beginning. Beyond that, it is pretty much just a matter of planning the cook around the cooking times of the various ingredients' cooking times with a goal of opening the Cobb the minimum number of times.

At $120, It's not super cheap, but it's the most compact grill I've ever seen. And think of all the money you'll save on charcoal.

All On One Grill: Cheeseburgers & Grilled Whole Potatoes

October 2, 2008

2008 Interactive Fiction competition entries available

Absolute Worst

The 2008 Interactive Fiction competition is up and running, and you can download the games and vote:

For the last fourteen years, the readers of the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction have held a yearly interactive fiction competition. For fans of the old Infocom games as well as for newcomers to the genre, the competition is a chance to enjoy some of the best short adventure games available anywhere.

The 14th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition
via Grand Text Auto

Gaming Hacks
It doesn't take long for an avid or just wickedly clever gamer to be chafed by the limitations of videogame software or hardware. If you want to go far beyond the obvious, there's an awful lot of free fun you can have, using the creative exploits of the gaming gurus. Gaming Hacks is the indispensable guide to cool things gamers can do to create, modify, and hack videogame hardware and software.

Retro Gaming Hacks
Whether you're just discovering Tetris or you've been a Pong junkie since puberty, Chris Kohler's Retro Gaming Hacks is your indispensable new guide to classic games. Kohler has compiled the how-to information that used to take weeks of web surfing to find and presents it in highly readable Hacks style.

October 1, 2008

iPhone Hacks: tips & tools for unlocking the power of your iPhone and iPod Touch

iPhone Hacks Cover

What better way to celebrate the lifting of the NDA than to hack your iPhone?

iPhone Hackers David Jurick, Adam Stolarz, and Damien Stolarz have been hard at work on the upcoming iPhone Hacks. Because it's such a moving target, we decided to do an experiment with the folks at Near-Time. The authors are developing the book in a Near-Time space, which is a lot like a Wiki. It won't be long before we turn this into a print book, but with everything changing constantly, we wanted to get the information out as soon as possible.

The first chapter is available for free viewing, and we have a subscription option in case you want to subscribe to the whole book. On top of that, there's a forum where you can post your own hacks, and you can post comments at the bottom of every hack.

Collaborate. Contribute. Develop.
Join iPhone Hacks and gain advanced access to hacks, tips, and tricks to make your iPhone experience even better. You'll learn how to do things to your iPhone that would surprise even Apple engineers! Members of this community site can make comments, participate in the forums, and help author the book by submitting their own hacks. Start your 30-day free trial now!

iPhone Hacks

September 30, 2008

Today is the last day of the 10% off everything sale at the Maker Shed store, order something now

Today is the last day of the 10% off everything sale at the Maker Shed store, order something now and save some cash - if your order is over $25 you also get a free Maker's notebook. Halloween is coming up soon, here are a few scary/related items to pick up while the sale is still going on.

Bonus: If you're shopping for Make or Hacks books, you can take advantage of our back to school special: 35% off Make & Hacks Books. (Enter in the following code at checkout "BOOK4ME" and get 35% off at checkout! Offer good for the Make books & Hacks books only, magazines & box sets excluded.)

Mkvn1-2
Mkvn1-3
Animated Ghost Kit
Grab this cool kit for Halloween. Sound activated, the ghost flashes his little red LED eyes, vibrates and makes scary sounds! Easy and fun to build. Hack it!

Hallow07-2
MAKE: Halloween Special Edition
DIY HALLOWEEN from the editors of MAKE and CRAFT brings you 40-plus DIY projects for the holiday that's made for makers. From the craftiest costumes to amazing animated props and the latest in computer-controlled haunted house effects.

Mktet2-2
Mktet2-3
Twitchie Robot Kit
Twitchie is an open source multi-purpose robot kit. It has the capacity to frighten and scare, but also the power to love and care! It's a regular pathos-o-matic! Grown men scream! Maternal instincts long dormant, suddenly activated! It's a robot unlike any other, and you can make one with this kit. Cover your Twitchie any way you'd like to make it truly unique.

Msak-2
Arduino Starter Kit
Arduino is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer. It's an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board. Arduino is open source!
We've put together our own Arduino Starter Kit, tossed in our bestselling Making Things Talk book, wrapped it up in some cool packaging so you can get started quickly without having to do a lot of shopping first. Check out the "How To" for some helpful links to provide support and contact with the growing Arduino community. Happy Hacking!

September 29, 2008

Make Dragon's Lair-style games on YouTube

A Car's Life

Philipp Lenssen, author of Google Apps Hacks mentioned a really cool YouTube hack on Google Blogoscoped:

A Car's Life is an interactive Arcade-style game using YouTube. To make it through a given level, all you need to do is click a button which appears. The video makes use of YouTube annotations, which can be linked to other YouTube videos. It's a bit like the 1980s Dragon's Lair in some respects: it has animations and somewhat stretches the limits of its medium, but it also has rather low playability. Choose-Your-Own-Adventure games - perhaps like Tube Adventures - might be more interesting in YouTube (anyone wants to write a YouTube-API-based video adventure export functionality for QML, the XML-based CYOA language?)

A Car's Life

September 28, 2008

Controlling a Nikon or Canon camera with a Nintendo DS

Louise - Paisley wrote in to tell us about a very cool project from Steve of PanoCamera:

In my day-to-day routine I often find myself having to do extensive photographic documentation of objects or locations, only there is often someone waiting to turn off the lights, or move objects, or any myriad of possible interruptions. This is one reason why using a camera tethered to a laptop can be a pain. The computer is a burden to travel with, takes five minutes to boot, the batteries run low, the ten minutes you had to get the job done just became five... It occurred to me that if I could somehow tether a DSLR to an instant-on device like an Arduino microcontroller I would have less weight to carry around and could get more work done. After mentally spec'ing out what I would need, I realized the solution was right in front of me - because I bring it with me for Mario Kart wireless races on long night jobs - (In the manner of John Lasseter's slow epiphany voice): "Use-the-Nintendo-D-S." Duh.

Check out the author's blog for more information: this will be available soon as a combined hardware/software package for about $100. Panocamera DSLR Control

September 26, 2008

Zoom H2 microphone modification

Berto Aussems wrote in again with another modification to the Zoom H2 recorder:

Listening to soundrecordings made in the 360 degree surround pattern mode of the Zoom H2, I found out that the directional sensitivity is bad. Even the stereo recording sounds mono. The front/back channel separation is the same story. So I had to turn the microphones in 4 times 90 degree. With 2 crossed disk's on top of the H2, the directional resolution is now much better. Maybe there are other ways to get better results; this is one. I hope to have some discussion with other H2 owners about this theme.

I'm not sure how much further you can push the recording quality of this little field recorder, but it's promising to see the results of warrantee voiding efforts like these.

Zoom H2 Microphone's Modification

Previously:
Zoom H2 line input hack - make a 4 channel field recorder

September 25, 2008

Sweetcron - open source lifestream

There have been a lot of "lifestream" services popping up lately that aim to collect all of your Web 2.0 meanderings and assemble them into a slightly less schizophrenic view of your online life. It's a great idea, but the downside is that most of these are closed source and externally hosted, so you are essentially pumping all of your data into yet another system that you have no control over.

I was excited to learn about Sweetcron today. Created by Tokyo-based web developer Yongfook, it's a completely open-source, self-hosted take on the lifestream idea. Like most of the services, it's essentially a blog that also pulls your realtime participation data from sites like Twitter, Flickr, Digg, and Youtube. Unlike the service model, however, you can download it, skin it, and modify it however you like to suit your needs. You'll need a server to run it on, of course, but perhaps that's a small price to pay to take ownership of your digital life.

Sweetcron - Automated Lifestream Blog Software [via Brian]
Yongfook's Blog (and Sweetcron demo)
Sweetcron Downloads and Information at Google Code

September 24, 2008

Google Gadget that monitors Arduino sensor data

Matthew Karas sent us a hack for creating an iGoogle homepage interface for physical measurement devices. Using an Arduino and a python script, he found a clever way to send real-time sensor data to a Google Gadget, and it doesn't even require having a web server.

I managed to hack up an arduino to upload data to google docs in real time. I then created a real time data gadget and sent that to google home page. That way I can monitor a sensor network from anywhere, with minimal cash outlay. I don't need to have a web host. I did it in two evenings.

The python code can run on a laptop connected the the Arduino. This script reads sensor data from the device and then posts it to a Google Spreadsheet using the python gdata API. From there, you can easily use the spreadsheet as a datasource for a Google Gadget which is then embedded in iGoogle or wherever you want to view your sensor data.

He's posted the necessary code and instructions for making this work. You should be able to customize it for your own projects and get something like this up and running in no time flat.

Real Time Arduino Data To iGoogle Homepage
gdata - Google Data Python API

September 23, 2008

PhoneGap - develop native iPhone applications in HTML/Javascript

PhoneGap is one of the best projects to come out of iPhoneDevCamp II. It seems absolutely perfect for web developers who haven't yet gotten comfortable with writing iPhone applications in Objective-C:

PhoneGap is a free open source development tool and framework that allows web developers to take advantage of the powerful features in the iPhone SDK from HTML and JavaScript. We're trying to make iPhone app development easy and open. For many applications a web application is the way to but in Safari you don't get access to the native iPhone APIs, and the that's the problem we're trying to solve.

It is written in Objective-C and allows developers to embed their web app (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) in Webkit within a native iPhone app. We're big advocates of the Open Web and want JavaScript developers to be able to get access iPhone features such as a spring board icon, background processing, push, geo location, camera, local sqlLite and accelerometers without the burden of learning Objective-C and Cocoa.

Wrapping the WebKit library in a pre-built Cocoa shell enables two big things:

Web developers can create a native, network-aware application that can be distributed and installed on the iPhone
The javascript in these applications can access special iPhone features (Ie. location and accellerometer data) that normal web apps cannot

Here's some of the iPhone API that's exposed in Javascript by PhoneGap:

Geo Location
//request location - this triggers a subsequent method call to gotLocation(lat,lon)
getLocation();

//GAP will invoke this function once it has the location
function gotLocation(lat,lon){
   $('lat').innerHTML = "latitude: " + lat;
   $('lon').innerHTML = "longitude: " + lon;
}

Accelerometer
//You have instant access to the accellerometer data via the accelX, accelY, and accelZ variables
function updateAccel(){
   $('accel').innerHTML = "accel: " + accelX + " " + accelY + " " + accelZ;
   setTimeout(updateAccel,100);
}

Of course, this is open source. So in addition to the pre-built functionality, folks who can swing a little bit of Objective C can build on the PhoneGap codebase and provide Javascript access to other embedded features on the device.

PhoneGap [via Ajaxian]
Download PhoneGap at GitHub

September 22, 2008

Plotting streaming data in real-time with Gnuplot

Our friend Thanassis Tsiodras, who you may remember as the creator of the offline Wikipedia reader, wrote in to tell us about a handy way to plot real-time data using standard unix tools.

For the last couple of years, I've been working on European Space Agency (ESA) projects - writing rather complex code generators. In the ESA project I am currently working on, I am also the technical lead; and I recently faced the need to provide real-time plotting of streaming data. Being a firm believer in open-source, after a little Googling I found Gnuplot; and quickly hacked a Perl script that spawns instances of Gnuplot and plots streaming data in real-time. Googling doesn't reveal anything similar, so I published it here.

You can easily pipe any data stream into his druveGnuPlots.pl script, choose the zoom and y-range and it will take care of reading in the data and passing it to Gnuplot with your specifications. This is pretty neat, since it means you can easily plot just about anything and all you need to do is get your measurements into a newline-delimited output format.

Visualize real-time data streams with Gnuplot

September 21, 2008

Arduway: LEGO and Arduino make a Segway

Trive wrote in about the robochild of a quite unorthodox LEGO/Arduino marriage:

It's a self-balacing robot inspired to the well-known Segway. Its brain is Arduino and that's why it's called "Arduway". Arduino is mounted on a hand-soldered board which connects it to two LEGO NXT motors and an Epson gyroscope.

Aduino Poet, the robot's creator and a student at the Politecnico of Milan, started a library called Arduino2Lego which aims to provide a simple API for the Arduino to talk to standard NXT sensors and motors. Currently, it looks like it only has an interface for motor control, but the project is open source and with any luck, others will chip in and add more features.

Arduino2Lego
Arduway discussion at arduino.cc

September 20, 2008

WiFi robot

Jon Bennett created a nifty wireless telepresence bot out of a thrift store RC car, a Linksys WRT54GL router running the Open-WRT Linux firmware, a network camera, and a microcontroller. He's built two variations: one controlled by a PIC microprocessor, and the other controlled by an Arduino. You can use whichever processor you are more comfortable with, and make one of your own for very little cost using this guide.

The goal of this article is to give a high-level overview of the project and provide some implementation details of the software and electronics. It is not meant to be a step-by-step how-to guide, but there should be enough information for someone with motivation and some background knowledge in electronics and software to be able to make their own Wifi Robot. All of the source code is being released under the terms of the GNU GPL v2, so by all means, use the code, and improve it!

This is one of those basic projects that you can take in a number of directions. Jon's guide will get you through interfacing with your typical RC car electronics and controlling it remotely. From here, it's all software. Someone should take a stab at adding an image processing routine on the remote end to create an autonomous sidewalk cruiser.

Wifi Robot