Aug 06

Video: DIY Magic Mirror Predicts the Future, Checks Your Blood Alcohol Level

Posted in: arduino, diy, Hacks, Mods and DIY, Today's Chili

Mirror, mirror, on the wall — who’s the geekiest one of all?

Magic mirrors may be the stuff of fairy tales, but Al Linke used his Arduino coding skills, soldering skills, and software development skills to craft an interactive “magic mirror” for his daughter’s playhouse.

Not content with making it dispense fortunes, Linke also gave it the ability to forecast the weather (via weather reports online), tell you how your stock portfolio is doing, turn the lights on and off, and even tell you whether you’ve had too much to drink, using a small breathalyzer module. Those capabilities are more useful for grown-up parties than the playhouse, we’d say.

If you want to make one of your own, Linke has posted instructions on how to build a DIY Magic Mirror on Instructables. You can even buy a Magic Mirror kit (breathalyzer included).

For more information, check out Linke’s DIY Magic Mirror site.

Video produced by Annaliza Savage / Wired.com.




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Aug 04

DIY Graphing Calculator Is Built From Open Source Hardware

Posted in: Hacks, Mods and DIY, Linux, open source, Today's Chili

A home-brewed graphing calculator called Open SciCal promises to put a powerful machine built entirely from open-source hardware into the pockets of quant jocks and statisticians.

“This is for the alpha nerds of the geek kingdom,” says Matt Stack, who built Open SciCal. “The calculator used to be the ultimate status symbol among the nerdiest of the nerds and I wanted to bring that back.”

Open SciCal has a 4.3-inch color touchscreen and is just a little bigger than an iPhone. The device uses a BeagleBoard, a low-power, single-board computer that’s based on the same 1-GHz ARM Cortex A8 processor that drives most sophisticated smartphones today. It also has a 8-GB SD card, Wi-Fi capability and can run a web browser.

“It’s about the same weight as my Logitech G9 mouse (which weighs about 1.6 pounds),” says Stack.

A graphing calculator can take data sets and plot graphs in addition to running scientific functions on it. Many graphing calculators allow users to attach sensors to them so they can log data directly into the device. But as data sets increase in size and complexity, they are outgrowing traditional graphing calculators available from companies such as HP and Texas Instruments. Add to that restrictions on the kind of external sensors that can be attached and it makes a device built on open-source components an attractive alternative, says Stack.

Open SciCal can run Linux and R — a programming language used in statistical computing — and will let users program in C or Perl. All this for just $200.

“Texas Instruments has a calculator called Nspire that cost about as much but doesn’t do half that this calculator does,” says Stack.

To test Open SciCal, Stack used existing data to predict sunspots and understand the statistical significance of a recent solar storm.

Another task for the Open SciCal: Pull stock data from sites like Yahoo Finance and run auto-correlation on the data to discern trends in the stock.

“It’s like every hedge fund quant’s dream,” says Stack, “and I have a device in my pocket now that can do that.”

Check out more photos of the Open SciCal:

The SciCal calculator is not much bigger than an iPod.

The SciCal can predict sunspots by using existing data to create graphs.

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Photos: Matt Stack




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Aug 04

IOS Clipboard App Runs in Background by Playing Music

Posted in: Hacks, Mods and DIY, iPhone, Today's Chili

Tapbots has come up with an ingenious workaround to get Pastebot, its excellent iOS clipboard manager, to run in the background. From there it will remember what you copy and add it to a list, or send it off to Macs or other iOS devices on your network. But how?

Apple added some limited multitasking to iOS4, letting apps carry on with certain tasks in the background while you go and do something else. This is great if you want to listen to Spotify, or have Skype wait for incoming calls, or even have your GPS logger track your every move. But for a clipboard application there’s nothing.

To keep Pastebot running, the developers use music. It turns out that, if Pastebot loops a silent MP3 in the background, it can also continue to pull data from the clipboard:

[…] it works flawlessly. You can finally copy from your Mac or on your iPhone without having to open Pastebot after each copy. When you copy from another app, the signature Tapbots copy sound plays to inform you that Pastebot received it.

The catch? Apple didn’t like it:

In the rejection letter, Apple gave us two options:

*Provide audible content to the user while running in the background
*Remove the audio from the background

Tapbots chose number one. The newly submitted version will let you chose a track from your iTunes library and play it on a loop. This can, of course, be a silent track. The app is still awaiting approval, but as Apple’s suggestions have been followed, then all should – hopefully – go well.

This workaround raises some questions, though. Will any app now be able to run in the background using this trick? That could really cause battery life problems if abused. Second, how much is an App allowed to do if it is supposed to be just playing music?

Coming Soon to Pastebot: Music in the Background [Tapbots]

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Aug 04

Carrier Unlock for iPhone 4 Available

Posted in: hack, Hacks, Mods and DIY, iPhone, jailbreak, Today's Chili

A full carrier-unlock is now available for the iPhone 4. The whole process, from virgin iPhone 4 to jailbroken, carrier-independent iPhone takes seconds. Even a video showing how to do the whole thing lasts less than a minute and a half.

You need to jailbreak your iPhone to allow support for non-approved applications. Currently this is a one-click (one one-slide) process done by visiting the site jailbreakme.com. Then head to the Cydia store (where you’ll find all these non-approved apps) and search for an app called Ultrasn0w.

Install that, and you’re done. Congratulations: You’re iPhone should now work on pretty much any GSM carrier in the world, although further configuration will be needed to get everything working properly. If you live outside the US, it’s likely that your iPhone 4 is actually sold unlocked (hint: if more than one carrier offers the phone in your country, it is probably not carrier-locked).

Grow, grow ultrasn0w! [Dev Team Blog]

Video [TechTechManTV/YouTube]

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Aug 03

How to Rip a Vinyl Record With Silicone and Glass

Posted in: Hacks, Mods and DIY, Home Audio and Video, Today's Chili

If you have any friends who happen to be music snobs and obsessive audiophiles, you’re likely to have heard from them the argument that “vinyl just sounds better.” You know the types, the ones who spend their weekends shuffling through stacks at their favorite record store like a character from High Fidelity.

But for those audiophiles, pirating their favorite tracks to pass along to friends has always been problematic. Before they can share their music, they have to ditch the antiquated record in favor of MP3s, CDs and tapes, sacrificing the soft fuzzy sound of vinyl that they love so dearly. Well, not anymore.

Mike Senese, the host of the Science Channel’s Catch It Keep It, has posted instructions on how to duplicate one side of a record and it doesn’t look too tough. Simply make a wood box that you adhere to a glass plate with window cement, making an airtight seal. Place the record in the box and pour some silicone that you’ve mixed over the top and smooth over the album. Once this dries you’ll have a mold to reproduce your record. Take your mold and pour in some liquid plastic and let it cure. After it sets, drill a hole in the center and pass along to a friend with a turntable.

I’ll be putting mine together as soon as possible, so my mom’s Barry Manilow and BeeGees albums won’t be lost to history.

[Mike Senese via Oh Gizmo!]

Photo Credit: Andrea Ciambra




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Aug 03

DIYers Mod a Nintendo to Play Mario by Moving Their Eyes

Posted in: Hacks, Mods and DIY, nintendo, Today's Chili

While Xbox Kinect may soon make controllers obsolete, allowing us to flail around in front of our TVs to play video games, some young DIYers couldn’t wait until November to go hands-free. So they modded an old-school Nintendo with some extra gear that allows them to play Super Mario Bros just by moving their eyes.

The group that created the eye-tracking hack is Waterloo Labs, an Austin, Texas-based engineer collective. But unlike Kinect, their version isn’t wireless. The mod tethers a player to the NES with electrodes attached around their eyes, which read the movement of the player’s eyeballs. Because our eyes are polarized with a negative charge in the rear and a positive charge in the front, when they move, the electrical field around them changes.

The electrodes detect these changes and send a signal back to a custom daughtercard mounted on a circuit board that filters and amplify the signal produced by the player’s eyes darting back and forth, allowing them to control Mario. So if you look up, Mario will jump, if you look left that’s where he’ll run.

In addition to the video of them playing (badly) with their eyes, Waterloo has additional videos on their Youtube page that shows in more detail how they built the mod, so you can try it at home, if you’ve got the skills.

But it’s likely that if you do make the NES mod, it’ll be much like the Wii. In other words, everyone will think it’s cool, your friends will all want one, and within a month it’ll sit dormant by your TV, never to be played again.




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Aug 03

Suicidal Bluetooth Headset Looks Like Gun

Posted in: bluetooth, Hacks, Mods and DIY, Today's Chili

Mike Haeg is the mayor of Mount Holly, Minnesota*. He also hates talking on the telephone, and to make his point he hacked together this amazing Bluetooth headset. Inside, the guts are that same as you’d find in any other Bluetooth earpiece. Outside, it’s a gun.

Take a call and you look like you’re about to blow your own brains out. I’m totally with Mayor Mike on this: I feel suicidal every time my cellphone rings (unless the called is from my honey-voiced editor Dylan Tweney, in which case I close my eyes, kick back and just let the lilting, mellifluous tones wash over me).

Mike’s headset charges over USB, and works like this: ” I draw the gun out of my pocket, stick the barrel in my ear (the speaker is in the business end), and pull the trigger to answer the call.” Screwing your eyes shut before you pull that trigger is optional but recommended.

The next stage may or may not be a coat of paint to make the orange toy a little more realistic. Mike says “I get equally giddy and frightened by the panic that this could cause should someone not notice that the gun is a fake or should I accidentally take a call while at the bank.”

This is my favorite hack this month. Playful, simple and very funny. I’m thinking of making two. One to use, and a matching water-filled squirt-gun to sneakily swap in when somebody wants to try it out.

Handgun Bluetooth Earpiece Project [Mt. Holly Mayor’s Office via Boing Boing]

*Minnesota’s Smallest Town

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




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Aug 03

FaceTime Over 3G on Jailbroken iPhone 4

Posted in: Hacks, Mods and DIY, jailbreak, Today's Chili, video

Want a reason to jailbreak your iPhone 4? How about FaceTime calls over 3G?

If you’re comfortable jailbreaking your iPhone by letting a website execute unknown code on it via a browser exploit, then you too could make normally Wi-Fi-only FaceTime video calls over the 3G network. The video above comes from the fine folks at 9to5Mac, and shows the hack in action. As you can see, everything behaves just like a regular Wi-Fi call.

9to5Mac’s Mark Gurman writes that “[the caller] couldn’t tell the difference between the 3G FaceTime call and a WiFi FaceTime call; the quality is that good.” It certainly looks better than previous efforts to route calls over 3G using standalone MiFi routers, but given the state of the AT&T network in the US, and the fact that these high-res video-calls will burn through your precious 2GB data-allowance, it’s hard to see why you’d bother, except for quick chats.

To activate 3G FaceTime, you’ll need to pop into Cydia, the jailbreak app store that is installed when you hack your iPhone. Add a new repository (essentially, you add URL to a new app store section. In this case, the url is http://apt.modmyi.com) and install an app called My3G. After a quick setup, you’re done: just leave My3G running in the background and FaceTime should just work. My3G costs around $3.

Due to briefly rendering my iPad unconscious yesterday in a failed jailbreak attempt, and not having an iPhone 4 with FaceTime, I haven’t tested any of this. If you do, be careful, and leave any tips in the comments.

FaceTime over 3G [9to5Mac]

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Aug 02

JailbreakMe Unlocks iPhone 4, iPad With Your Browser

Posted in: Hacks, Hacks, Mods and DIY, iPhone, jailbreak, Today's Chili

Jailbreaking has gone into the cloud. Visit the Jailbreakme.com website on your iOS device, slide the big button on the front page (which cheekily mimics Apple’s slide-to-unlock button) and you’re done. It’s that easy. It works for iPhones (including the iPhone 4) and also iPads running iOS 3.2.1.

Jailbreaking – the unlocking of an iPhone or iPad to allow access to the file system and install any app you like – used to be done via your computer with a downloaded program. You’d plug in the iDevice and work from there. It was easy, but this is easier still. No doubt the US federal regulators’ recent ruling that jailbreaking is legal has emboldened the hackers: Apple can’t have the site taken down now, after all.

The cat and mouse game that is jailbreaking is not over, though: Just because unlocking your iPhone is now legal doesn’t mean Apple has to support it. The hack works through a PDF exploit in Mobile Safari. Comex, a member of the iPhone Dev Team (the jailbreaking people), uses Safari’s PDF decoder to run the code. Because Safari automatically opens PDFs, the jailbreak code is run. Expect Apple to close this hole in an update, if only for security purposes.

So how does it work? That depends. Our own Brian X Chen unlocked his iPhone 4 with no problems. He reverted almost immediately because Cydia, the unofficial App Store, has almost nothing in it that is optimized for the retina display. OThers have reported that FaceTime and MMS are broken. Currently, my 3G iPad is stuck in an endless loop and cannot get past the boot screen showing a single, lonely silver Apple. Needless to say, you should back up before trying this, and be aware that you are visiting a website that is doing some rather scary things to your iDevice.

The return of jailbreakme.com! [Dev Team Blog]

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Jul 30

DIY Wearable Computer Turns You Into a Cyborg

Posted in: diy, Hacks, Mods and DIY, Today's Chili

Someday humans and computers will meld to create cyborgs. But instead of waiting for it, Martin Magnusson, a Swedish researcher and entrepreneur, has taken the first step and created a wearable computer that can be slung across the body.

Magnusson has hacked a pair of head-mounted display glasses and combined it with a homebrewed machine based on an open source Beagleboard single computer. Packed into a CD case and slung across the shoulder messenger-bag style, he is ready to roll.

A computer is a window to the virtual world, says Magnusson.

“But as soon as I get up and about, that window closes and I’m stuck within the limits of physical reality,” he says. “Wearable computers make it possible to keep the window open. All the time.”

Magnusson’s idea is interesting though one step short of integrating a machine inside the body. In 2008, a Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence decided to embed a tiny video camera into his prosthetic left eye. Spence, who is still working on the project, hopes to someday record everything around him as he sees it and lifecast it.

For his wearable computer, Magnusson is using a pair of Myvu glasses that slide on like a pair of sunglasses but have a tiny video screen built into the lens.

A Beagleboard running Angstrom Linux and a Plexgear mini USB hub that drives the Bluetooth adapter and display forms the rest of this rather simple machine. Four 2700 mAh AA batteries are used to power the USB hub. Magnusson has used a foldable Nokia keyboard for input and is piping internet connectivity through Bluetooth tethering to an iPhone in his pocket.

Magnusson says he wants to use the wearable computer to “augment” his memory.

“By having my to-do list in the corner of my eye, I always remember the details of my schedule,” he says.

Check out photos of his gear:

The innards of the homebrewed machine are glued to a CD case. The CD case is slung across the shoulder by attaching it to a strap using velcro.

Here’s what the homebrewed computer looks like.

See Also:

Photos: Susanna Nilsson




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