BuffaloFeeds » Hack A Day » October 8, 2009

Hack A Day (10 unread)

Maggy, locked and loaded

Posted: October 8th, 2009, 5:00pm MDT by Jakob Griffith

Some readers may remember [Paul] from his project Jak, the blackjack robot; but his interests have moved toward coil gun creation. Maggy, his latest weapon, may not be the prettiest of coil gun we’ve seen, or the most environmentally friendly, but does look to be promising. Featuring a triple stage, logic based accelerator instead of [...]
Giants roam Berlin

Posted: October 8th, 2009, 4:00pm MDT by Jakob Griffith

I can hear the comments now: “Not a hack.” Yeah that might be true, but it’s still enormous puppets running around Berlin – that in its own right is pretty cool. The show, put on by the street theater group Royal De Luxe, is part of the 20th anniversary for the fall of the Berlin [...]
A Stirring Hack

Posted: October 8th, 2009, 3:00pm MDT by Devlin Thyne

[Oleg] of Circuits@Home and maker of the USB Isolation Board and the USB Host Shield has a new, two-part hack for his chemistry set. In Part 1 of this hack, [Oleg] discusses the method he uses to make a stir bar spin and what types of stir bars work the best. Part 2 discusses the [...]
A modular Halloween with grid beam

Posted: October 8th, 2009, 1:41pm MDT by Phil Burgess

The fantastic Creatrope blog has a great article on quickly assembling animatronic Halloween gags using salvaged electric motors, pvc pipe, and “grid beam” construction. Grid beam is a prototyping and building medium that’s like a giant hippie Erector set. You can’t buy grid beam, but with a drill press, a jig, and some square stock you [...]
Installing a starscape ceiling

Posted: October 8th, 2009, 12:00pm MDT by Mike Szczys

[Mike Galloway] set out to install a lighted starscape in the ceiling of the baby room. We remember first coming across this type of thing at a Planet Hollywood restaurant at least 10 years ago. We’ve always wondered how difficult this type of thing is to install. This setup involves an LED based illuminator and bundles [...]
ik-a-sketch collaborative scribbling

Posted: October 8th, 2009, 11:35am MDT by Mike Szczys

At this year’s PICNIC conference [Neil Mendoza] and [Edwin Dertien] built a giant Etch-a-Sketch to help bring attendees together. The drawing area is a rear-projection screen, rather than a physical powder based setup, and is surrounded by the familiar red frame with vertical and horizontal control knob. Because the two knobs are too far apart [...]
Barcode Challenge – Part 2

Posted: October 8th, 2009, 10:00am MDT by Mike Szczys

Yesterday we issued a barcode challenge in honor of the Barcode’s birthday. Congratulations to [The Moogle] for winning this challenge. His submission offers a very detailed explanation of how he solved the puzzle using Photoshop, OpenOffice Calc, and some web resources. We’ve got a detailed writeup on it after the break. Honorable mentions go to [nex] [...]
William Kamkwamba talks windmills with Jon Stewart

Posted: October 8th, 2009, 9:00am MDT by Mike Szczys

Last night [Jon Stewart] interviewed [William Kamkwamba] on The Daily Show. [William] is the young man from Malawi who at the age of 14 built a windmill generator out of discarded items. Now at 22 years old, [William] is working on his SAT scores in hopes that he can attend college in the US. We [...]
Nokia: destroying phones for fun and profit

Posted: October 8th, 2009, 8:00am MDT by Caleb Kraft

No matter how grumpy you are in the morning, this video should make you smile. This is one of the jobs many of us dream of. Take a tour around Nokia’s product testing facility with Engadget. Watch in the video as phones are squashed, pinched, smacked, baked, shaken, dialed, slid, opened, and closed repeatedly. Sure, [...]
Software Auralization

Posted: October 8th, 2009, 7:20am MDT by Phil Burgess

Have you heard the latest track by gzip? Maybe it’ll end up on a “Greatest Hits” album alongside Philip Glass. Visualization techniques such as animated algorithms can help programmers better grasp the abstract theories that make software work. Could auralization, the sound equivalent of visualization, provide similar insights? Postgrad student (and J. S. Bach fan) [Cessu] developed a [...]