Category: To be used for Evil

Helium Movies

up up and away

What do you get when you cross a digital camera, some rubber, and a few cubic feet of helium? No, not a presidential press corps junket, you get ‘Helium Movies’!
This guy attached his digital camera to a few large balloons, put it into movie mode and hit the timer. When it went off he let go. The result is a rather nauseating down shot of the launch site. Pretty cool if you think about it. One of the (now) hacker friendly CVS video cameras would be perfect for this sort of thing. What a cool way to grab a unique shot of a family picnic or a camping trip. Just remember to use a nice light weight strong tether or your never going to see your results!

[via MAKE]
Helium Movies

WAR!

Google War

I just saw this on Tech Drool tonight.

GEwar is the first truly interactive game built using Google Earth. The game itself is fairly simple, but should provide some fun entertainment for you.

The basic idea of the game is this: You build armies to go around the world and capture cities. The cities all have a “value”, which is based on their population. The total value of all of the cities in your control is called your “total value”. The person with the highest “total value” is the one that is currently winning the game (and on top of the top players list). You can attack (and capture) cities using your armies. Armies (and other items) can be purchased using “Geos” that you can earn.

Once I get my PC that runs Google Earth up I’m so playing this.
Google War

OS X on x86

Apple

I’ve founds a bunch of links on how to install the Apple OS X opperating system on a regular PC from from the MAKE blog and from Hackaday. I’m sure there are others out there but if your wondering what all the ruckus is about you can all the details there. Pretty much with some files downloaded from the ‘Net you can cajole a PC into running the developer version of Apple’s OS. Sounds pretty cool to me, except that I don’t think I own any hardware that would run it. I have mostly older Intel chips and what I have that is newer are AMD. I’ll have to do some reading and see if any would have a chance. Not that I’ll act on it, I simply don’t have time these days. Still, it is a cool idea. I have an Apple logo on my laptop’s cover and it would be pretty nifty to have the OS on it too.

Mac OSX x86 on PC
Build Your Own Mac for $199
How-to: Install OS X x86 natively on your PC!
OS X PROVEN hacked and running on an ordinary PC

DIY, mod, hack

EckBox

Hacker
This is a future project for me. After hearing about Van Eck phreaking in high school (I think it was that far back) I have wanted to give it a try. I don’t have a real reason to do it other than to say that I did. Good enough. I just want to be able to see what my PC is displaying. I’ll have to get Linux up a running on a box first but that shouldn’t be a problem. Oh wait, my work bench is no more, a move to a tiny apartment took care of that for me. Hey, I have an idea, just click on the ‘donate’ button and send the TeamDroid site $5. All of it will go towards a new research center (bigger apartment). Once I have that I’ll have a place to build and review all sorts of cool stuff.
But I bet your still wondering what the hell this ‘Van Eck Phreaking’ thing is aren’t you? Well, think of your computer as a series of radio transmitters. You can pretty much think of all electronic devices as transmitters and receivers in some way or another actually. What a Van Eck rig lets you do is tune into the radio station in your computer that is coming from your video card. I think your seeing the idea here. Once you have all the timing right you should be able to see what is one someone else’s computer screen. Cool, eh? Sounds like a dandy cloak-and-dagger sort of thing that would be happening all over the place don’t it? Well, as will most things, the truth is that it’s hard to get it to work and when it does the results are sometimes not all that good. Van Eck Phreaking is also known my another name, TEMPEST – that was an old code word for a general electronic surveillance project back in the ’50’s and the name stuck.
Things like this are pretty much the reign of the NSA and cyberpunk authors, but if you have the time and will you can play with it yourself and if I get a larger work bench I’ll do the same.

EckBox – an Open Source van Eck Phreaker
AllYouEverWantedToKnowAboutTempest

hack, phreaking, Van Eck, project

Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator

Underground Atomic Explosion

A few weeks ago I was listening to the radio in my car, I forget what station it was but it might have been the local National Public Radio station, and I heard someone mention ‘REHP’ and that there was going to be funding for this new program. The announcer seemed kind of upset about this so I figured that I should look into it – anything that twists the shorts of the radio nuts should be worth reading about.
Turn out I was right, RNEP stands for ‘Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator’ ( I can see why they used ‘Earth’ and not ‘Ground’ – Who wants a bomb called a ‘RNGP’? The other nations would smirk and point their fingers at us while we were not looking.) If you ask me, ‘Nuclear Earth Penetrator’ sounds like a real good brand of gopher killer or a bad guy in a low budget Japanese horror porn movie. But I digress, the device is the latest in the anti terrorism bunker busting ordinance. The idea is that a thin very pointed bomb will be dropped from an aircraft and upon impacting the ground it is supposed to dig itself down like 30 feet and then detonate it’s atomic payload. Once that is done, the bunker (hidden 1000 feet below the surface) with the bad guys de jour will be destroyed and the flyboys can go back to the base and catch up on some missed beer time.
Well, that might be nice on paper but the million cubic feet of radioactive dirt that will be thrown up as a result of the nuclear explosion is going to cause some serious issues. You can’t just go around irradiating the country side like that and not expect to piss everyone off. Thankfully, it looks like congress is not going to be funding much research into this weapon. I guess even in this day of ‘there’s a terrorist under every rock’ cooler heads still prevail. Or not. The Air Force was just given $4 million (from the energy bill!) into non-nuclear bunker busting devices. Anyone want to bet that the warhead is the same size and mass as a nuclear one? Yeah, I’d say thats even money there. The future looks dark folks… Nuclear winter dark…

Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator
What’s a “bunker buster” nuke?
Background: The Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator

RNEP, nuclear, weapon, war, busting