Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
Now this is a beautiful example of craftsmanship. Most case mods end up looking like, well computers – except maybe the ones crammed into toasters, those look like toasters. Anyway, this just looks beautiful, its as if the computer was re-envisioned by tree dwelling elves. I’d be happy to own a system that looked like this.
I was reading Ektopia a few days ago and ran across a entry on the Vectrex game system. I remember playing one in the waiting room of my orthodontists back in 1984, many times it was the only reason I’d go to the appointments (that and the cute assistants that he would hire). Years later I found one at a second hand store and bought it in a flash. It was a fantastic game system, the games were fun and looked pretty good even if they were all vector based.
Augmented reality and virtual spaces are going to become more and more common simply because the hardware is dropping in price. Nowadays a video projector and good graphics card will only set you back a few hundred bucks and sensor technology is getting real cheap too. The Augmented Coliseum is a fine example of how this technology can enhance a real world application.
The University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo has developed Augmented Coliseum, an amazing (just have a look at the video) augmented reality game environment that enables virtual functions for playing a game using small robots and vehicles, superimposing computer graphics onto toys in the real world.
The remote-controlled vehicles scurry around, while status circles and other data are projected on the surface. As the vehicle moves, cameras and photo-detectors relay the movement to tracking software.
Images are projected to the areas corresponding to the actual positions and directions of the toys: virtual laser beams and missiles appear to fly out of the real vehicles; explosions are overlayed on the screen as they connect with their targets.
This looks downright handy to have. Every person that fancies themselves a computer expert should have one of these and know how to use it. I’d love it if you could use it to fix the boot sector of an XP install without having to dig up the original CD.
I recently bought a Linksys WRT54G wifi router and I am so darned happy to discover that it can be flashed and modded!
Here are a few of the cooler ones I’ve found:
A Wikipedia entry with links for firmware upgrades and what the different hardware revisions are. The new firmware loads are cool, lets you use RADIUS and loads of other stuff.
This one is sweet, how to add an SD card reader to a WRT54G
This project is for people who would like to add a little storage to their Linksys WRT54G router besides the builtin 4MB flash ram. What we will do is connect an SD card reader to some of the GPIO pins of the CPU found inside the Linksys and with the help of a little driver we can use as a block device from Linux. This means that if you compile your kernel for the Linksys with e.g. support for MSDOS partitions and VFAT you will be able to mount, read, write, partition and so on your normal SD cards. The speed obtainable for reading and writing seems to be about 200 KB/s.
Some more information on the GPIO ports.
And if all that wasn’t enough, you can even make a robot out of it
[inspired by HackerMonkey]
I got home tonight and noticed that the hard drive light on my main system was looking… weird. like it was blinking at but at an odd duty cycle so that is looked dim.
I powered up the monitor and instead of the screen saver it simply said ‘PRESS ANY KEY TO REBOOT’. There goes my evening.
I tried a number of different boot configurations but nothing worked. It would power up, ask if I wanted to boot into XPpro or 2000 and then prompt me with the usual apologies about not shutting down correctly and would you like to boot into safe mode. Most of the computer I see at this point won’t even boot into safe mode, mine was no different.
I set it to not reboot on an error in hope that I’d spot something useful. I was rewarded by a nice BSOD stating that the boot drive was unmountable. Well what the hell had I been working off from so far?
Time for the recovery CD. It would have been nice to have had this happen to a system with a CD drive in it but that went away long ago in order to hold more hard drives.
Good thing my Debian Linux box is sitting on a shelf not doing anything. After a bit of surgery I had a working CD drive on my XP box and was ready to get back to work. I booted off the CD and went int orecivery mode, a little touch and go there too. I had to boot twice because the first time the install script blew up on line 5400 (!). I thought that my CD drive was screwed up or heaven forbid, my XP CD was damaged! I don’t think that Microsoft will replace one if you send it back. I suspect that having their customers pay $200 for media makes them smile quite a bit.
Anyway, I think I got off lucky because it just took a CHKDSK and a FIXBOOT to solve the problem.
Sounds like its about time that I get rid of some of my older smaller drives, I need to free up some space and do some migration soon.