Hasta La Gadget!

Digital Inspiration’s Amit Agarwal has a clever Dropbox-based solution for printing documents from a smartphone or tablet, whether your printer’s down the hall or thousands of miles away. The idea is so simple, you’ll be amazed you haven’t thought to try it yourself.

Dropbox is a popular utility that allows users to sync and share files on different computers. Native Dropbox applications are available for most smartphone platforms, giving you mobile access to all your files, and many mobile applications are now integrating Dropbox for remote syncing and storage. You can also add files to your Dropbox account via e-mail or the web.

In this solution, use any of those means to get the file you want printed into a shared Dropbox folder — call it “PrintQueue” — that you’ve set up for this purpose. Your print-capable computer uses a script to monitor “PrintQueue,” automatically print its documents and then move them to a different folder. (Agarwal calls this second folder “logs”; I’d call it “Completed Jobs”). If you’re a clever hacker, you could even add scripts to send a remote notification that the print job has been completed.

For Windows, Agarwal has a downloadable VBS script that will set this up for you; as he notes, there are different scripting solutions for Mac OS X or Linux too.

Once you’ve got this rigged, the immediate use case is to send a document wirelessly from a smartphone or tablet to a local printer. And it is kind of magical to stand there and watch the whole process unfold, as in the video above.

But think beyond that. Suddenly, your printer is capable of networking with any computer, anywhere — with any phone, anywhere — that you approve and authorize. This is potentially so much better than hooking up a computer to a wireless router or navigating the virtual bureaucracy of an office printer network. It’s way better than a fax machine.

This could be one future of social networking and file sharing: Instead of big, ad-cluttered feeds that push photos, status updates and Farmville notifications or anonymous networks that chop files into bits and reassemble them, imagine friends and acquaintances broadcasting to each other, wheels within wheels, each with different levels and fields of access. Designating someone a “friend” might not be worth very much in this cockeyed world, but automatic remote access to someone’s printer still means something.

Print Files from any Mobile Phone using Dropbox [Digital Inspiration] via Gizmodo

Sometimes hailed as the poor man’s iPhone, the iPod Touch has been a popular device for Apple geeks craving the iOS experience sans the hefty monthly fees. However, a new accessory promises to give the Touch the whole she-bang without the contract.

The Peel, a protective case packed with a SIM card, dock connector and battery, is designed to expand the iPod Touch into a device capable of placing phone calls and sending text messages. Chinese company Yoison Technology developed the gadget, and U.S. company GoSolar announced this month is has signed an agreement to bring the Peel to the states.

“As soon as they arrive, we’ll begin distributing demonstration models to retail buyers across the country,” said GoSolarUSA CEO Tyson Rohde, in a statement. “The amount of interest in this product that we’ve received from distributors has been staggering.”

GoSolar did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but its website suggests that the iPod Touch must be hacked (i.e. jailbroken) in order for it to operate as a phone. And any iOS user is familiar with the fact that Apple regularly wipes out jailbreak hacks with every new iOS update. So in short, as cool as this solution sounds, it sounds less practical than simply using the iPod Touch as a VOIP web phone with third-party apps available through the App Store.

GoSolar did not list a price for the Peel. However, Yoison was selling the gadget for $388 RMB in China, or around $57.

Via IDG News

See Also:

• Case Turns iPod Touch into iPhone. Kinda

Photo: Yolson Technology

Soon, thanks to the tireless efforts of the iPhone Dev Team, you will be able to install apps on your AppleTV. An upcoming Jailbreak tool, called SHAtter, has already been used to unlock the new Apple TV’s firmware.

SHAtter was used to jailbreak the newest iPod Touch shortly after its launch, and thanks to its iOS roots, the AppleTV is also susceptible to its power. The hack was carried out on the firmware restore download just been posted by Apple. This file, which contains the entire OS of the Apple TV, is an IPSW file, the file-extension for iPhone and iPad OS files.

So what’s inside? According to the Dev Team member Will Strafach, “the new AppleTV OS seems to be a mashup of the old AppleTV OS and iOS.” This, he says, means that existing AppleTV hacks (or “frappliances”) may already work. Frappliances are the plugins that add functionality to the original AppleTV. Also, all of the iOS software frameworks are present, which could allow hacks to enable video-conferencing, for example (if you could figure out how to hook up a camera) or even let you install the iPad Hulu app.

I suspect that Apple will add apps to the AppleTV in the form of channels, just like the Netflix “channel” that is there already. A jailbroken AppleTV, though, could theoretically run anything that will run on the iPhone or iPad. A final word from Strafach: “The most interesting thing about the new AppleTV OS is that all binaries are marked iPad-compatible. I do wonder what Apple is planning…”

SHAttered iPod touch 4G (and Apple TV) [Dev Team Blog]

@willstraf [Twitter]

Illustration: Charlie Sorrel

See Also:

• JailbreakMe Unlocks iPhone 4, iPad With Your Browser
• Apple TV Runs iOS, Opening Door to Apps, Jailbreaking

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

You’re a kid, and therefore you like to shoot things. But what if the catapult and the air-rifle just aren’t cutting it anymore? Then you, like Jason (aka Larsplatoon) make your own coil-gun.

The styling is straight out of a video-game, but inside the engineering is very real, and very lethal. A coil-gun uses a magnetic field to accelerate a bullet up to projectile speed. Jason’s uses a bank of recycled rechargeable laptop batteries to provide the juice, and various bits of circuitry to step up the voltage, prevent overloading and charge the array of capacitors. These capacitors are what you see in the cylinders at the back.

To use, flip the switch, hit the charge button and wait 30 seconds for the capacitors to fill up. Slot in the slug and take aim, and pull the trigger to fire. One charge is good for around 15 shots. As you see in the video, it looks like a lot of fun, but it’s no .457 Magnum. Jason’s gun will put holes in his various toys (and what looks like his mother’s toaster oven) but the fact that just a couple of cardboard boxes are need to protect the fence is a giveaway.

The gun uses 1.25kJ of energy to fire the bullet into the model-airplane (shooting commences at around the 2:50 mark), TV-remote or Mom’s best glassware, but doesn’t have enough force to kill anyone. If you want to do that, you’d do better converting this into a taser and sending the stored potential of those four 3900uF, 400-volt straight down a wire into some poor-schmuck’s body.

The project took Jason two years to complete. We say it was worth every geeky, blood-crazed moment. If I’d had the skills to put one of these together back in school, then those bullying jocks would have, well, they’d all have had broken TV-remotes, that’s for sure.

Portable 1.25kJ coilgun finally done [4HV]

Portable 1.25kJ Coilgun [Larsplatoon / YouTube via Hacked Gadgets]

See Also:

• Wii-Controlling Heckler and Koch Machine Gun
• 20-Pound Aluminum Rubber-Band Gun Takes Things a Little Too …
• Suicidal Bluetooth Headset Looks Like Gun

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

If you haven’t heard of the Insignia Infocast, a photos and apps viewer billed as an “internet media display,” it may be time to give this device a second look.

The Infocast has enough hardware chops and an Linux-based operating system to transform it into a kind of a tablet. Some electronics  hackers have tweaked it to run a Webkit-based browser and use the device’s native capability to run apps.  It’s no iPad but the hack is intriguing.

At $170, the Insignia Infocast is cheap enough to experiment with. The device has a 800 MHz processor, 2 GB memory, a 8-inch LCD touch screen, Wi-Fi connectivity and two USB 2.0 ports. The gadget runs Chumby Linux 2.6 operating system.

“While it’s marketed as a device for viewing Chumby apps and sharing photos,” says Bunnie Huang, founder at Chumby on his blog, “as far as the DIY crowd is concerned, the Infocast is a Linux machine.”

Since Apple iPad’s debut in April, the popularity of tablets has surged. Apple sold 2 million iPads in just 60 days of the product’s launch. Other companies such as Samsung and Dell have introduced tablets. Even DIYers now have the option to put together a tablet for $400 using a BeagleBoard kit.

Hacking the Infocast falls somewhere in between buying an off-the-shelf slick product like the iPad and putting together a tablet from a starter kit.

The Infocast already has some of the software pieces that consumers may want in a tablet such as access to limited apps. These apps include online radio services such as Pandora, media content such as NY Times podcast, photos and videos.

But to take the device to the next level, developers have ported a user interface framework that runs Webkit–the browser engine that powers Safari and Chrome among others.

If you want to take a shot at it, there are instructions on the Chumby wiki and more information on Huang’s blog. For text input, though, you will have to use an USB keyboard plugged into the device.

This is just “scratching the surface on what you can do with the platform,” says Huang. Open source hardware enthusiasts are working on plans to port Android OS on the device.

The catch here is that the Infocast doesn’t have a built-in battery so it has to remain tethered to the wall socket. Still, for intrepid DIYers that shouldn’t be much of a roadblock. There must be a hack for that too.

See Also:

• Build Your Own Tablet for $400
• Why India’s $35 Tablet May Be Just a Dream
• Dell’s Streak Tablet Is Priced Like a Phone
• Samsung Introduces 7-Inch Tablet to Rival iPad

Photos: Bunnie Huang/Bunnie: Studios

[via Hack a Day]