Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
Need a little something to get you through the week before starting on your next big project? The Canon paper craft site might have a quick (or not so quick) project for you. Everything from planes to spaceships to scale model insects and all are made from simple paper. BTW, if your in a pinch for a quick gift for the uber geek in your life a few of these will definitely make their day.
[via paper forest]
I was reading Hack-a-day this morning and saw that there is a new ultra cool hacker friendly device called a Chumby. The Chumby is a wifi enabled iPod’ish PDA like appliance that
Hardware:
266 MHz ARM controller (the MX21 by Freescale)
32 MB SDRAM running at 133 MHz bus speed
64 MB NAND FLASH ROM
320×240 3.5″ TFT LCD with PWM-controlled LED backlighting
Stereo 2W speakers
Headphone output
Ambient light sensor
Bend sensor (to pick up when you squeeze the chumby)
Two USB 2.0 ports, one on the main board and one on the outerware electronics
WiFi connectivity via a USB dongle plugged into the main board
Circuitry to detect the presence of wall adapter power and auto-fallback to backup battery power
Switching power supply network that can eat between 6V and 14V
Available microphone input on the chumbilical bus
Available SPI bus on the chumbilical bus
Serial debug port set to 115200 8N1
[via Christine.net, Scottjanousek ,hack a day]
I love this site, mostly because it give you ideas. Yeah, those can be dangerous can’t they? You just can’t let your toaster toast toast, it has to tell time, read the news for you and suggest what tie to wear to work. Ok, that’s a bit extreme but its not beyond what you can find on this information packed site
If your like me you have way too many files on way too many hard drives. One way to help this is to have a network attached storage (NAS). Yeah, you could just stuff a bunch of hard drives in a beige box of death and load up XP. A few network shares later and you have a NAS. You could do that, sure, if you wanted to take the easy way out. But I can tell you want to live a little, be on the edge. Yeah… The Edge. It’s where the alpha nerds meet for a midnight snack of Jolt Cola and double stuffed pizza before going back to their tricked out 733t hax0r boxes. It’s where you want to be. Building your own NAS out of the cast offs from the junk bin of a local thrift store will get you closer to that edge.
So gather up your hard drives, your mother boards, your USB key drives (you want all the IDE channels open for drives man!) and grab a copy of FreeNAS (just about the coolest software for this sort of thing) and go to town. I’m working on consolidating my collection of hard drives (everything from 20GB to 120GB) into a big pile of storage that is at least running in RAID 1. RAID 5 is my goal but that’s only if the hardware gods smile upon me.
Like me, soon you will be on the Edge.
After you’ve gorged yourself on a fast food breakfast grab a hobby knife and get cutting! Go build this glider and run off your breakfast in the park. It’s easy, fun, and it recycles something that would normally be chucked in the trash.
