A paper cup, a sewing needle, and a simple LEGO Mindstorms robot make for a nice little record player. This might be a fun project to work on with the kids this 4th of July weekend. You know they've been wondering about the boxes of vinyl frisbees in the basement. Aside from anything else they might be learning, it's a good opportunity to slip in some information about how music used to be groovy.

NXT Record Player Instructions

Currently Firefox, Safari and Opera have reasonable support for the Canvas HTML element. With IE the only major remaining laggard, there are a lot of people starting to experiment with Javascript's new graphical capabilities. I mentioned John Resig's Processing.js library in May, and now Aza Raskin has released the ContextFree.js library, which brings another generative drawing language to web-standards software development.

Besides being pretty, why is ContextFree.js interesting? Because it shows the power of Open web technologies for making graphically-enabled, compelling interaction. The true power of the web revolves around anyone being able to dive in, see what someone else has done, and expand upon it. Canvas lowers the cost of entry to creating graphical mashups and other dynamic, graphical content. It also shows the progress the web has made: a year ago, this demo would not have been possible. Canvas wasn't ready, and Javascript interpreters weren't fast enough. Looking at the qualitative difference in speed from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 indicates the amazing and substantial progress made towards speeding up Javascript since the last major browser release cycle.

ContextFree.js is a Javascript port of the Context Free open source generative art application by Chris Coyne. It basically defines an extremely simple grammar that is designed to generate rule-based artwork with very few lines of code.

Aza has also released the Algorithm Ink website, which uses ContextFree.js to create an open source art gallery. Using Algorithm Ink, you can load, tweak, and share generative art through a web interface. When you see something you like, you can view the source for the artwork and use it in your own creations. Very cool.

ContextFree.js & Algorithm Ink: Making Art with Javascript
ContextFree.js at Google Code
Algorithm Ink
The original Context Free by Chris Coyne
Drawing Graphics with Canvas
Processing.js - visualization library for Javascript

Ryan Sit sent in a link to Swurl, a Web 2.0 application/startup he's been working on that attempts to collect all of the artifacts of your digital life and assemble them into a sensible whole. You could call it an aggregation tool—which, deep down, it is—but it does a little more than other things I've seen. Namely, it does a really nice job of taking in a wide range of relationship oriented services and turning the their inherent lock-in inside-out.

You just do your normal stuff online, Digg stuff, Delicious stuff, favorite Youtube videos, Twitter, rent videos on Netflix, bookmark songs on Last.fm, post photos on Flickr, etc. And Swurl brings it all together in a really deep way. We also enhance data, adding trailers to movies you rent and Lyrics to songs you bookmark.

All of these services get pulled together into a blog format and discussion and commenting can take place around any item. I think the idea is to help centralize the conversation instead of having it scattered about your different networks. Depending how busy your various online activities are, this may help you or it may just add yet another place to track comments.

What I like most, and the real hack from a Web 2.0 startup perspective, is that they programmed this to encourage you to maintain friends and use features across a number of social networks and easily traverse the relationships and data in all of them from a single location. Flikr is good for storing photos. Del.icio.us is great for bookmarking. Facebook is awesome for tracking friends. Swurl aggregates the relationships from all of the networks you inform it about and it recognizes when those users are also Swurl members. This encourages network growth, but isn't so greedy that it forces you to work only inside the Swurl fence.

Swurl [via Ryan]

Add-Art is an ad blocking extension for Firefox, but it's a bit different from other ad blocking hacks. Instead of simply removing ads, leaving a score of empty holes in ad-laden sites, Add-Art replaces all those nasty skyscrapers and leaderboards with a selection of images from a contemporary artist. The image above, for instance, is a cropped banner from Add-Art's current show, Hotel Vue des Alpes by Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg.

In addition to turning your browser into an art gallery, blocking ads might actually speed up your browsing experience a bit. The Add-Art images are distributed with the plugin and are loaded locally from your machine, so there's no download involved for any of the ad units. Just think of all those bytes you could be saving while viewing lovely mountain scenery instead of dancing mortgage dudes.

Add-Art Firefox Plugin
Hotel Vue des Alpes

Yay! Philipp Lenssen's Google Apps Hacks just got reviewed on Slashdot by JR Peck, who had some kind words for the book:

Well, this book is an excellent introduction to Google's many on-line applications. I use many already and still learned of a couple new ones when I read this book. It also does bring all that instruction into one place, and provides a very user-friendly style of instruction. There is also a very nice feature, 8 sections that take the reader "Beyond Google...". Each of these sections informs the reader about alternative software that provides similar functionality to the Google software described in the preceding chapter. This is really a great resource and an unexpected bonus for anyone who reads the book.

Slashdot | Google Apps Hacks

(In the review, JR raises a good point about the definition of a Hack. We use the definition "A non-obvious solution to an interesting problem", although JR leans toward some other definitions mentioned in the review).

From the Maker Shed:

Google Apps Hacks by Philipp Lenssen - all about Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Presentations, and more!
Price: $29.99
Buy it in the Maker Shed

There's a neat article over at Ars Technica that takes a look at 280 North's 3-person development team, their recent release of a keynote-like web application called 280 Slides, and the framework that they constructed to make the application. Some time before 280 Slides was developed, the team created an Objective-C-like superset of the Javascript language called Objective-J which implements message passing and a Smalltalk-style syntax. Building on that, they re-implemented much of the Cocoa framework in Objective-J, allowing Cocoa-style applications to be developed that will run natively in the browser.

With Objective-J and Cappuccino, you don't create applications with a mixture of HTML, CSS and Javascript. Instead, apps are written entirely in Objective-J, following a development model that's similar to creating desktop applications for OS X. From the article:

"Cappuccino is a re-implementation of Cocoa in Objective-J, which means we reimplemented AppKit, Foundation, CoreGraphics, and parts of CoreAnimation," Boucher told us. With it, developers familiar with desktop GUI applications can create a rich, desktop-like web app with the same relative ease Cocoa programmers can create a rich desktop app. "Coming from a background of desktop programming, and Cocoa in particular, we realized how much harder building a web application was. So we wanted to try to make things just a little bit easier."

280 Slides stands on its own as a powerful web-based presentation tool. It's simplified when compared to its desktop cousins, but it does exactly what most people need in a presentation tool, and it can export to PPT for fine tuning and end-presentation use. The fact that its development inspired the creation of a new language as well as bringing a desktop application development framework to the web just blows my mind.

Objective-J will be released to the public soon as an open source project. On the one hand, I'm not sure if I'm comfortable moving away from the web development technologies I've grown accustomed to. On the other, it would be cool to work in a language that allows you to seamlessly port your applications between the desktop and the web.

If you have experience with both Cocoa and AJAX development, please share your thoughts in the comment area.

Cocoa on the web: 280 North, Objective-J, and Cappuccino [via Slashdot]
280 North Blog
280 Slides
Objective-J.org

There are so many WYSIWYG editors for html forms, it's about time someone put together a decent web version of the Vi editor. JSVI is written in Javascript and seems to be fairly cross-browser compatible. With a few tweaks to your code, you can now make any textarea behave exactly like Vi. How cool is that?

To use it, download the GPLed vi.js file from the link below, include it in your html document, and then add an onfocus="editor(this);" to any textarea that you want vi enabled. If your textarea contains any preset information, the text will be loaded into the editor when the field is clicked. Saving the file with :wq will exit the editor and store the changes back in the input field.

Somewhere there must be a unix blog or forum that will adopt this for their submission and comment fields. Shame on them if they don't. That is, unless they are waiting for the emacs version.

JSVI - VI in JavaScript (demo)
Download vi.js

Sebastian Tomczak has been playing around with controlling VGA output from an Arduino. Using Max/MSP to process audio and send data to the Arduino and a standard VGA output to send sync data to the monitor, he's been able to put together some cool video effects.

In these examples, i am simply using three pins to control the RGB lines. However, the Arduino is not generating horizontal or vertical sync - this is generated by a computer.

You can grab the Max patch and Arduino code from Sebastian's post. I dig the effect - it reminds me of the cool C4 demos kids used to make.

Hacking VGA lines with Arduino

There are products available that will overlay flight data into a flight camera's video stream, but here's a clever and simple hack to do it on the cheap(er). To provide in-video flight data for a first person view aircraft, just build a mini flight instrument panel and position it in front of the camera.

One of the main problem with FPV is that you can get lost very, very easily. We are not really used to know our environment from a bird's eye view!

Here is one solution to find your way back home:
The device below includes a GPS receiver and a microcontroller (it's inside the blue heatshrink sleeve) grabs interesting data like latitude, longitude, altitude and speed from the NMEA sentences, calculates bearing to destination (the pilot) and displays relevant data to the "instruments" (micro servos with a needle!)

• On the left: speed, in km/h
• In the middle: bearing to destination - if the needle is vertical, you're on the way back home!
• On the right: altitude, in meters (divided by 10)

This is something you could easily build yourself and you'd be able to add any features you wish. I'm thinking a data logging feature would be cool. That, or a geo-targeted pingpong ball deployer.

Aircraft Panel For First Person View

Berlin hacker Julius von Bismarck invented and patented the Image Fulgurator, a device so awesome that it can remotely insert images into other people's photos.

You aim the device at the same subject that another person is photographing, and when they snap a photo the resulting image will be manipulated with a separate, overlayed photo. The person taking the photo will have no idea anything happened until they examine their photo.

The result is pure magic. Here's a clip of the first public "image fulguration".

The device uses a standard 35mm camera body and lens as a projector. Instead of undeveloped film, the camera is loaded with exposed, developed slide film. A flash is built into the back of the camera, sending light backwards through the body, past the the slide and out the telephoto lens. A light sensor is used to trigger the flash when another camera's flash goes off. Thus, when someone else takes a photo, the Fulgurator zaps its slide's image onto the object for a few milliseconds.

In you want to make something like this, you can use some of the techniques that folks typically use to photograph lightning. Below is a link to a simple Arduino project that will give your SLR a light activated shutter release.

While you're at it, take a crack at making your own Fulgurator with a bit more stealth factor. I'm pretty sure I'd get tazed walking around downtown waving this thing around.

It'd almost be worth it.

Image Fulgurator by Julius von Bismarck [via The Future is Awesome]
Lightning Trigger for a Camera

ShmooCon is an annual East coast hacker convention hell-bent on offering three days of an interesting atmosphere for demonstrating technology exploitation, inventive software & hardware solutions, and open discussions of critical infosec issues.

It's a while until the next conference comes up, but there have been some great presentations at past conferences, most of which are available online. Peteris Krumins recently assembled links to all of the videos and presentation files that are available at the Shmoocon site (including the 2008 conference), posting them to his blog as a single big index.

A quick search on YouTube also turned up a series of videos by Scott Moulton from Shmoocon 2007 and 2008 on the topic of data recovery for both traditional hard disks and flash drives. It's pretty fascinating stuff, whether you're interested in this from a forensics or security perspective, or if you've ever just wondered what exactly goes into recovering important data from a crashed disk when you send it out to a data recovery shop.

Hacking Videos from Shmoocon
Scott Moulton's videos on data recovery for SSD flash drives and hard disks
Shmoocon Infosec Conference

See also: Videos from past DEFCONs

I stumbled across a fourth option this afternoon: the Algorithm Geeks user group. It's an easy way to parallelize your problem, running it past the brains of hundreds of alphas from around the world. Even if you aren't seeking help, maybe there's a post or two in there that you can contribute to. My inner nerd is probably showing, but it's pretty fun just reading through the posts and weighing the different proposed solutions.

Hack on!

Algorithm Geeks Google Group

When Philipp Lenssen started writing Google Apps Hacks, we made up our minds that we'd develop the book in Google Docs. A while back, Philipp wrote up Part I of the story of how we made the book. From Writing a Book in Google Docs:

Currently, my editor Brian Jepson and I are collaboratively writing the book (tentatively titled) Google Office Hacks by O'Reilly using Google Docs. I wanted to outline the process we came up with, and maybe it's helpful for you too for certain needs.

I just wrote Part II of this story, and Philipp's posted it to the Google Blogoscoped blog. From From Google Docs to InDesign:

One of the tricky parts for us was getting the chapters into InDesign, the book layout program we use for our books and magazines. I know where we were coming from - Google Docs' HTML format - and where we were going to - InDesign's tagged text format.

From the Maker Shed:

Google Apps Hacks by Philipp Lenssen - all about Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Presentations, and more!
Price: $29.99
Buy it in the Maker Shed

To make it work, you just make a horizontally tile-able background image, and a horizontally tile-able alpha-transparent PNG for each foreground layer. These are each set as the background image of a separate div with the repeat-x attribute. The divs are absolutely positioned right on top of each other, and then a single line of jQuery code is used to set the animation speed for each layer.

It's a subtle and bandwidth friendly way to add a bit of visual polish to your site. Netherland is using this effect for his blog's masthead, and it looks pretty cool.

jQuery Parallax Scrolling (download)
jQuery
jQuery Easing library - you'll need this too

Changelog for this release:

• The Twilight Hack is now compatible with version 3.3 of the Wii System Menu.
• Improvements in video configuration. The entire console should now be visible in all video modes, and scrolling has been improved.
• For the USA version, the two variants of the hack have been packed into one save file. Just select the save slot that corresponds to your version of Twilight Pricess when you start the game.
• New savegame icons by drmr. The new icons now show which region that version of the hack is for.
• This version now tries to load boot.dol, and falls back to boot.elf if boot.dol is not found.
• ???????
• Many, many bug fixes.

I think the "???????" refers to a little rhyme that is now embedded in the loader file. Here's a snippet:

Now these quick hack fixes have some beautiful holes, So we found them fast and easily met our goals. And I'm glad we got burned. Think of all the things we learned. For the people whose Wiis want new life! Go ahead and patch it. I think I'd like to have some fun. Maybe you'll find an undisclosed bug. Maybe that huge one.

Sounds a bit like a burn.

Twilight Hack v0.1beta1 (download)
How Nintendo's patch was exploited