Hasta La Gadget!

You can do a lot in seven hours — fly coast-to-coast, slow-cook a pot roast, create a Google Maps-navigating, Wii Fit-controlled virtual Segway. Wait, what? Yes, that Nintendo-branded, dust-collecting relic of holidays past has been given a new lease on life thanks to an intrepid troop of Ivy-educated geeks, and a seven-hour hackathon. The marathon modding session, held by Stanford University’s SVI Hackspace, banded together a like-minded set of overachieving modders to produce a balance board-guided Street View romp through Google Maps. The students’ hack connects the Wii Fit board to OS X via the Osculator app, with a Node.js server processing the data and Socket.io handling board-to-browser communication. A Google Earth plug-in and pre-rendered Segway were all that was left to complete this foot-mapped joy ride through our digitized world. Video demo awaits you after the break.

Continue reading Wii Fit balance board hack takes a virtual Segway ride around Google’s mapped world (video)

Wii Fit balance board hack takes a virtual Segway ride around Google’s mapped world (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Aug 2011 10:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you own or operate a website then it’s likely you’ve come into contact with the popular blogging tool and publishing platform WordPress. It’s free to use, employed by millions of sites around the world, and has a healthy community of developers producing themes and plug-ins for it. It also has a zero-day vulnerability rendering […]

This fearsome contraption is the handiwork of a couple of amateur DEFCON-types who reckoned that any self-respecting spy plane ought to be able to impersonate cellphone towers. And that’s exactly what the Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform does — it tricks AT&T and T-Mobile handsets into connecting to it, then re-routes the incoming calls via VOIP so they don’t drop, while simultaneously recording all conversations to 32GB of onboard storage. It can also handle a bit of WiFi snooping on the side, thanks to a Linux-based hacking toolkit and a 340 million word dictionary for guessing passwords. What’s more, the WASP apparently achieves all of this without breaking a single FCC regulation. So, er, that’s fine then. Oh yeah, and we don’t want any of that stuffed crust nonsense, you hear?

Wireless snooping WASP drone knows you want extra jalapeños, no sliced tomato originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Aug 2011 05:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Does it hurt your brain to look at the picture above? That’d be Chromium OS — running on a MacBook Air! Pretty much the definition of “worlds colliding,” this feat is brought to you by Hexxeh, whose most recent mind-warping project put Chrome on an iPad. The platform-mixing maestro says in this case everything works except Bluetooth, owing to a lack of support. But hearty souls who seek to follow in his footsteps, take heed: there’s no dual-boot option, and you will lose OS X — so perhaps this is a job for your now outdated model. Click the source link for 14 easy steps to turning your svelte laptop into Frankenstein’s monster, but sadly, there’s no mention of where to buy that hopelessly cute Chrome pillow.

[Updated: Diligent researchers found the Chrome pillow. Peep it in the second source link. Thanks, Matthew.]

Chromium OS running on a MacBook Air: somewhere, a mad scientist cackles in the night originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jul 2011 11:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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After a long, slogging series of non-answers and dissembling, Murdoch’s parliamentary denial party has taken a sudden, bizarre turn: he’s been physically attacked. More »