Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category

Elektor USA

Soon versions of the British electronics enthusiast magazine will be hitting American book store shelves.

Elektor Electronics is a British magazine that aims to inspire people to master electronics at any level by presenting construction projects and spotting developments in electronics and information technology. Every issue is packed with innovative articles, simple and complex construction projects, news, reviews, columns, and more.

I’m looking forward to reading it, hard to find good electronics projects magazines these days.

Elektor USA

Now You’re Cooking With … USB?

Remembering that your typical USB port delivers 2.5 W doing anything other than lighting up a novelty hub or a clever little tree is about all you can do. Not quite. A clever fellow in Japan set out to prove this wrong. By using six five port USB expansion cards he has upped the thermal output from a wimpy 2.5 W to a respectable 75W! Oh yes, you can see where this is going. This looks like this is his second attempt at computer assisted gastronomy, he tried to cook an egg before. This time he succeeded in frying some beef rib meat (Sukiyaki anyone?) Good thing he has improved his design so we can all follow in his footsteps and … er, well we can imagine that we will follow in his footsteps, and be cooking a tasty dinner while leveling up in WoW.

動く！改造アホ一台
(Japanese version translated by the never sleeping giants at Google)

How to Hack Humans, Epilepsy Sufferers Targeted

Not that I think that doing this with the intent to harm people is very nice at all, I have to admit that figuring out what in essence causes a ‘BSoD‘ in humans is impressive. Reminds me of ICE in the William Gibson books.

This incident is quite possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on the victims: hackers uploaded a flashing computer animation to an epilepsy support forum to trigger epileptic attacks!

RyAnne Fultz, a 33-year-old woman who suffers from pattern-sensitive epilepsy, says she clicked on a forum post with a legitimate-sounding title on Sunday. Her browser window resized to fill her screen, which was then taken over by a pattern of squares rapidly flashing in different colors.

Fultz says she "locked up."

"I don’t fall over and convulse, but it hurts," says Fultz, an IT worker in Coeur d’Alene, Ohio. "I was on the phone when it happened, and I couldn’t move and couldn’t speak."

After about 10 seconds, Fultz’s 11-year-old son came over and drew her gaze away from the computer, then killed the browser process, she says.

Neatorama » Blog Archive » Hackers “Seize-rolled” Epilepsy Sufferers in a Support Forum

You Too Can Be Daredevil With Haptic RADAR

Well, its not quite the super sensory perception you see in comic books, a group of researchers utilizing  Sharp IR sensors created what could be called a ‘second skin’. Think of how something gently touching the fine hairs on your arm instantly tells you that something is going on. Very handy if your moving around in the dark, you get a millisecond warning before you run into the wall. It might be enough warning to make you start slowing down before maximum damage can be done. Now imagine that you can do the same thing but with objects that are inches or even feet away from you. With enough sensors you could navigate through a room in the dark and not bump into anything. The possibilities here are almost endless.
[via Hack a Day]
The Haptic Radar / Extended Skin Project

Live Linux Game DVD Distro!

I have been trying this out and I can genuinely say that I’m impressed.

The project live.linuX-gamers.net was founded with the idea to present Linux games at the Linuxtag exhibition in a novel way. A collection of games should be shown to directly run from DVD without the user in need to know about Linux or care about his system. After some intense brainstorming sessions the team decided to create and publish this DVD as a live distribution project. Thus an additional and very difficult problem had to be solved: The dvd should run on every x86 PC out there.

[via hackerzen]
live.linux-gamers.net

Chumby Launching Soon

The hipster hacker friendly micro platform known at the Chumby should be relaesed upon the public soon. Any day now. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe. I don’t code but I’d be willing to learn if I had one of these.

Chumby launch plans and product features

What Wikipedia has to say about the Chumby.

« Older Entries    Newer Entries »