It’s unclear whether Psystar, a Mac cloner that recently lost a long legal battle with Apple, is dead or alive. The startup was quoted in a news report saying it was shutting down, and then in a followup story the company retracted the statement.
Apple last week won a permanent injunction against Psystar. The injunction effectively banned Psystar from selling Mac clones or distributing tools that would enable consumers to create their own Hackintoshes.
Subsequently on Friday, Dow Jones Newswire quoted Psystar’s company attorney Eugene Action, who said the startup would immediately fire its employees and shut down. Psystar’s website promptly went offline.
However, hours later lead counsel K.A.D Camara said the opposite in an interview with Computerworld, as well as an e-mail statement provided to Wired.com. He said Action had been misquoted and that the company plans to ask the judge to decide the legality of Rebel EFI, a piece of software that enables consumers to make their own Hackintoshes. (Though the permanent injunction effectively banned the functionality of Rebel EFI, Rebel EFI was not explicitly mentioned in the case.) Psystar’s website went back online over the weekend.
“Psystar is fighting on,” Camara told Wired.com in an e-mail. “Psystar will file a motion in Judge Alsup’s court asking him to decide the legality of Rebel EFI. Judge Alsup invited us to do that in his injunction order. Psystar will also appeal Judge Alsup’s summary judgment to the Ninth Circuit.”
Camara told Wired.com the antitrust suit will proceed.
In a settlement, Psystar agreed to pay Apple $2.7 million in damages. However, the company will not be required to pay a dime until the appeals process is complete.
Mohammed is a bicycle repair man in Nairobi, Kenya. His repair stand is the dirt floor, and his tools are home-made. His wheel-building and truing machine is… Amazing. Check it out:
That stand looks a lot better than the ones they use in my local bike shops — it seems like it would last forever. Even Mohammed’s spoke key looks home-made, to a superior design than any I have used — the slotted ring acts as a lever and makes it easy to locate the right sized slot for the nipple you are twisting. The price to have a wheel trued by Mohammed? 10 Kenyan Shillings, or around 13 cents US.
Then we see his freewheel cassette remover. Taking one of these off is near impossible without the right tool, so Mohammed built the right tool. The huge metal mitten grabs the cog-teeth an a screw locks the cassette so it unscrews instead of just spinning.
Innovative stuff, and a lesson to you next time you go to the bike shop just to have them change a tire. Quit being so lazy and do it yourself.
A small, often forgotten, but significant advantage of digital cameras is that they can be fed through countless airport X-ray machines and the pictures feel no ill effects. Try that with a film camera (or even the bag of film you plan to use on your vacation) and things quickly start to get cloudy. Literally.
That’s because X-rays expose film just like light does, although the X-rays don’t get blocked by the camera body quite so well as the visible spectrum does. This is the trick that PopSci’s Theodore Gray used to make a DIY X-ray camera.
In fact, you don’t even need a camera to try this. Take a sensitive piece of film — Gray used ISO 3000 Fuji instant film — and wrap it in something that will keep the light out (do this in the dark, of course), like tinfoil.
Next, Gray put and old butterfly-shaped earring on top of the package, and hung a radium button (saved from an old science kit) above that. After a day and a half, he developed the film in a Polaroid machine and there on the sheet was a photogram of the butterfly.
Amazingly, you don’t even need the radium button. Although glowing, radioactive watch hands would be even quicker, if you are patient (as in, several months patient), you can use ordinary sodium-free salt to beam particles from decaying potassium-40 at the film.
You could actually try this at the airport, packing up your wrapped film and trinket together in an envelope, say, and letting it run through the X-ray machine. Just be prepared to do some fast talking. And don’t tell them I sent you.
Steorn is back, and it is still hawking its perpetual-motion machine, the Orbo. We spent several carefree days back in the summer of 2007 ridiculing the whole project, which purported to use spinning wheels and magnets to generate more electricity than the little Orbo took to run.
Now, the Orbo has relaunched. Ireland-based Steorn’s CEO, Sean McCarthy, explains the mechanics behind the machine, which exploits a magnetic anomaly discovered “during the course of developing another technology”. “The anomaly is that we could gain power from magnets with no apparent source” [emphasis added].
No apparent source. Perhaps there is a man behind the curtain? If you want to see the Orbo in action, it is now being demonstrated at the Waterways Centre in Dublin, and can also be viewed on a live stream. This is at least a step further than Steorn managed last time, when six sets of precision watch bearings, designed to last 25 years, all broke at the same time due to “hot lights”.
So how does the Orbo work? The device is a simple motor — a battery is connected to magnetic coils which then exert a turning force on the magnets in an internal wheel. On top is a generator which feeds a rectified current back into the battery. If those bearings hold up, the Orbo should run forever, and should also power other devices hooked up to it.
The trick is “time variant magnetic interactions”, which make it possible to “contravene the principle of the conservation of energy”. This appears to be something like the Flux Capacitor, which as we all know is “what makes time travel possible”.
Poor Orbo. We tease, but we love your plucky never-say-die attitude. If your gadget turns out to truly be a world-changing, free-energy machine, then we’ll happily hook up our laptops to one of your magic spinning-wheels. We have a feeling, though, that this snake-oil may just be another publicity stunt. A stunt we just keep falling for, again and again, perpetually.
A few Nook device owners have hacked it to run the Pandora music application in the background. The move opens the door to adding more apps to the e-reader — something that Barnes & Noble does not support officially.
“It wasn’t that hard,” says Robbie Trencheny, a 18-year-old student who is also the team leader at nookDevs, a wiki and an online forum for Nook enthusiasts. “Once we had rooted the Nook (on Sunday), it was only a matter of time until we could put an app on it.”
“Rooting” the Nook involves hacking its system files to get full access to the device’s Android operating system. But unlike jailbreaking the iPhone, rooting the Nook isn’t just about tinkering with the software. Instead, Nook customers have to take a screwdriver to get to the device’s innards. Nook’s Android OS is on a microSD card that needs to be connected to a computer to change a file on it. Once that’s done, the power of Nook’s Android OS is available to its users.
To run Pandora, Trencheny first searched for the .apk file associated with the app. “It’s a file extension that Android uses and every app has it,” he says. Once that file is wirelessly downloaded onto the 3G-enabled Nook, users have to run a command in the terminal shell of the device. With a few more steps described on the nookDevs wiki, they can get Pandora installed on the Nook.
There are a few more steps to get it operational. The Nook’s touchscreen won’t cooperate with the Pandora app so users have to use a VNC remote control software to get past the app’s initial login screen. Once that’s done, Pandora works perfectly with the Nook touchscreen and can run in the background as you browse books, says Trencheny.
If all that sounds a little rough for someone who just likes to pick up an e-reader and read, then there’s a fix in the works, assures Trencheny. NookDevs is working on creating a software unlock so users won’t have to open up the Nook. They are also trying to open a marketplace just for Nook apps.
And while Pandora is the first to make it to the Nook, adding other apps should be easy, says Trencheny. “We can run multiple apps if we want to,” he says.
NookDevs members haven’t heard any complaint, so far, from Barnes & Noble. “We have looked through the end user license agreement and, as far we can tell, there is nothing in there to get us into trouble,” says Trencheny. “We are not abusing the 3G or breaking the DRM rights on the books.”
Apple on Tuesday afternoon won a permanent injunction against Psystar, a Florida-based Mac cloner. The ruling prohibits the startup from selling hardware hacked to run Mac OS X.
US. District Judge William Alsup issued the ruling, banning Psystar from the following:
Infringing Apple’s copyrights in Mac OS X .
Circumventing any technological measure used by Apple to prevent unauthorized copying of Mac OS X on non-Apple computers.
Creating or selling a product intended to circumvent Apple’s methods for preventing Mac OS X to be installed on non-Apple hardware.
Aiding or abetting any other person or entity to infringe Apple’s copyrighted Mac OS X software.
Doing anything to circumvent the rights held by Apple under the Copyright Act with respect to Mac OS X.
In short, that means Psystar can no longer ship generic hardware that’s running Mac OS X. And the cloner can’t sell goods that assist consumers in creating Hackintoshes. Psystar must comply no later than Dec. 31, 2009.
However, it doesn’t spell a complete end to Psystar’s Rebel EFI software, a $50 downloadable utility that enables consumers to create Hackintoshes of their own — even though the ruling about circumvention applies to DIY solutions. Psystar argued Rebel EFI was not explicitly covered in this case and thus should not be included in the injunction. Alsup said Rebel EFI was not covered in the injunction, but the startup could continue to sell its software “at its own peril.”
“What is certain, however, is that until such a motion is brought, Psystar will be selling Rebel EFI at its peril, and risks finding itself held in contempt if its new venture falls within the scope of the injunction,” the final judgment states.
Long story short, even though Rebel EFI was not explicitly mentioned in the case, its functionality is banned by this injunction. So although technically Rebel EFI can be sold, it would be a very, very bad idea.
Psystar opened its business selling Mac clones in April 2008. Apple filed a lawsuit three months later against Psystar, alleging copyright, trademark and shrink-wrap licensing infringements.
People have been inventing non-lethal and “humane” mousetraps for years. Some are worse than the traditional cheese and sprung-steel spine-snapper. The sticky-board, for example, which is supposed to immobilize the rodent but instead presents you with a live mouse staring pleadingly, all four of his legs chewed through in a desperate attempt to escape.
The Better Mousetrap doesn’t bother with innovation. It just throws a lot of tech at the same old trap we have known for years. Designed and built by tinkerer Jake Easton, the machine is deliberately over the top in its operation. Power it up with a key and watch the pressure-meter leap to attention. When the mouse comes in to nibble the cheese, the “Detect” light flicks on and, moments later, the bar snaps down delivering a vertebrae-shattering crunch of force (102-pounds). The build photos show the crazy attention to detail: This polished aluminum case isn’t just pretty on the outside — take a look inside and you’ll see something as neat and carefully designed as the interior of a Mac Pro.
Is this trap humane? No. Efficient? Not really. Is it an awesome, shiny, mouse-murdering machine? Hell yes!
The specs:
Pneumatic Cylinder: 1/2” Bore with 3/4” Stroke
Air Pressure (Max): 60 PSI
Strike Force at 40 PSI: 102 lbs
Key Lock Switch and Manual Hammer Override
Visual Monitoring: Power, PSI, and Armed – Detect – Fire
Barely weeks after its launch, Barnes & Noble’s Android-based Nook e-reader has been hacked and ‘rooted’ (root, or full system access, has been obtained). A loose team of hackers reported the work on their wiki, Nook Devs.
If you tear open a Nook (which the team has done) you’ll find that the Android operating system is contained on a microSD card (separate from the microSD expansion slot). From here, it’s a simple matter of using a card reader to mount this card on your computer and changing a single word in the init.rc file (the file that’s in charge of which services are begun at startup, similar to a Linux boot).
This single hack will let you plug the Nook into your computer (once you have reassembled it) and access the OS, using the freely available Google Android developers kit. Right now you’ll have to be a hardcore nerd to make much use of this, but as we saw with the iPhone, these things progress to user-friendly applications fairly fast, especially when the hard work has already been done.
Before you tut, toss your head and mutter ’so what?’ like some petulant teenager, think about the uses. The Nook is now a computer running a full Android operating system, with a built-in, free cellular connection to the internet. It also has a battery that lasts days, not hours. Now are you getting excited? This could turn into the Roomba of e-readers, only it won’t suck.
For nearly two years, Daniel Reetz dreamed of a book scanner that could crunch textbooks and spit out digital files he could then read on his PC.
Book scanners, like the ones Google is using in its Google Books project, run into thousands of dollars, putting them out of the reach of a graduate student like Reetz. But in January, when textbook prices for the semester were listed, Reetz decided he would make a book scanner that would cost a fraction of commercially available products.
So over three days, and for about $300, he lashed together two lights, two Canon Powershot A590 cameras, a few pieces of acrylic and some chunks of wood to create a book scanner that’s fast enough to scan a 400-page book in about 20 minutes. To use it, he simply loads in a book and presses a button, then turns the page and presses the button again. Each press of the button captures two pages, and when he’s done, software on Reetz’s computer converts the book into a PDF file. The Reetz DIY book scanner isn’t automated–you still need to stand by it to turn the pages. But it’s fast and inexpensive.
“The hardware is ridiculously simple as long as you are not demanding archival quality,” he says. “A dumpster full of building materials, really cheap cameras and outrageous textbook prices was all I needed to do it.”
Reetz went on to upload a 79-step how-to guide for building a book scanner (.pdf). The guide has sparked more than 400 comments. It has also spawned a website, DIYbookscanner.org, where more than 50 independent book scanners spread across countries such as Indonesia, Russia and Britain have contributed hardware refinements and software programs.
Now wearing a large black coat and a carrying a duffel bag that’s stuffed with a scanner made from laser-cut plywood, Reetz goes to conferences to show how anyone can create a machine to scan all the books they own.
As consumers turn to e-readers — about 3 million are expected to be sold by the end of the year — they are also looking for ways to bring their old textbooks and paperbacks into the digital world. And a small group is discovering that the best way to do that is to create a scanner yourself. The scanner is also helping digitize out-of-print books and help people with disabilities get features like text-to-speech that publishers won’t offer or are downright opposed to.
A DIY book scanner also raises questions of piracy and copyright. The basic question being: Do you really own a book in all its forms when you buy a book?
At the same time, ironically, the DIY book scanner is helping new create new tools to make copyright information more accessible. Tulane University is building a scanner based on Reetz’s design that would let it digitize its collection of copyright documents. That is expected to help the university develop a web-based service called ‘Durationator’ that would allow anyone to search copyright information about any particular book, to see if it is currently in the public domain or not.
“It’s amazing that a DIY book scanner is helping create the very tool that will offer copyright information,” says Reetz. “It makes me very proud.”
Scanners are commonplace — just walk into a Target, and you can find a scanner-printer combo for $100– but those machines are designed to digitize photos and documents.
A flatbed scanner can take between 15 and 30 seconds to capture a single page, so a 400-page book could take about an hour-and-a-half to three hours of work. Not to mention that the design of the scanners means that you have to open the book binding wide and press it flat, which can damage the book.
Instead, book scanners are designed to hold the book open at a 90-degree angle. A cradle holds the book face up so that it is gentle on the binding. This kind of scanner is also faster, because it can capture images of two pages simultaneously, using a camera instead of a scanning element. But commercial book scanners that are completely automated cost anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000. The $50,000 Kirtas book scanner, for instance, can capture 3,000 pages an hour.
Reetz’s scanner cuts that cost to a bare minimum: All you need are two basic digital cameras and some readily available construction materials. All the software and post-processing programs are open source and available for free.
But creating the system required a few hacks and a dash of ingenuity. Inexpensive digital cameras are ideal, but they have limitations. For starters, you need to hold down a button to click a picture. And the two cameras in a book scanner need to be synchronized.
Reetz found a program called Stereodatamaker for Canon cameras that could synchronize multiple cameras and flash. All users have to do it is download it to a SD card and insert it into their camera.
“The cameras are running hacked firmware and it works pretty well,” he says.”Then we take it to a whole new level for processing the images.”
Daniel Reetz shows his DIY book scanner.
That would be with some help from Scan Tailor, an open source application written by 29-year old Russian programmer Joseph Artsimovich. Scan Tailor can take the raw, scanned images of the book and split the pages, add or remove borders and process all of the images into a single file.
“You absolutely need post-processing software for digitizing books,” says Artsimovich. “If you try to digitize a book without such software, chances are you will give up because it’s just too much work.”
From there, a program called Page Builder — written by a friend of Reetz — can take the images and process them into a PDF file.
Reetz says the DIY book-scanning forum isn’t about distributing pirated content, but he can see the temptation.
“My project was founded in angry desperation,” he says. “It was a watershed moment when I realized getting an 8-megapixel Canon camera was cheaper than buying a bunch of textbooks.”
But is it legal?
So are Reetz and the builders of the DIY scanner pirates? That would depend on who you talk to, says Pamela Samuelson, a professor at University of California at Berkeley, who specializes in digital-copyright law. Trade publishers are almost certain to cry copyright infringement, she says, though it may not necessarily be the case.
Google was recently forced to pay $125 million to settle with angry book publishers and authors who claimed copyright infringement as a result of the search giant’s book-scanning project.
But not so individual users who already own the book, says Samuelson. If you scan a book that you have already purchased, it is “fine, and fair use,” she says. “Personal-use copying should be deemed to be fair, unless there is a demonstrable showing of harm to the market for the copyright at work,” says Samuelson.
For publishers, though, the growth of the DIY scanning community could hurt. Publishers today sell digital versions to customers who already own hardcover or paperback versions of the same book.
“You cannot look at this idea from the perspective of whether the publisher can make extra money,” says Samuelson. “Publishers would love it if you can’t resell books either, but that’s not going to happen.”
Instead, communities such as these are likely to force publishers to offer more value to customers, she says.
“There have to be things that you get with an e-book that you don’t get by making your own copies,” says Samuelson. “It’s not such as stark challenge for copyright owners, because not many people are going to take the trouble to make their own scanner system. Most of us want the convenience of buying digital books for the Kindle, Nook or Sony Reader.”
And unless, it becomes a hotbed of pirated content, the DIY scanner is unlikely to have a Napster-like end, says Samuelson.
Check out the video below of Daniel Reetz talking about why DIY scanner is fun.
It’s flawed, but I love my Kindle 2. The reading experience is great, and if I can forget about the DRM I can enjoy any of the books Amazon deigns to sell to foreigners. It is also a fantastic personal newspaper when combined with Instapaper, the excellent web-page clipping service.
We already wrote a guide to de-crippling the Kindle, but a combination of an update to Instapaper (it now offers a Kindle-friendly package of your clipped articles for direct download) and some Automator kung-fu, the process of loading up your e-reader with hand-picked articles is as easy as plugging it in.
First, get yourself an Instapaper account. This is free, and allows you to clip entire web pages to read later by simply clicking a bookmarklet in your browser. The article is then stripped of ads and other junk leaving only beautifully formatted text that can be read on your iPhone or Kindle, or even printed onto (gasp) paper. Once set up, go to your own Instapaper page and you’ll see this:
Here you should copy the url of the “kindle” link.
Now fire up Automator. You’ll find it in the Applications folder on your Mac (sorry, non-Mac users, this how-to is Apple-only). Automator lets you automate (duh) many aspects of your Mac. What we’re going to do is make an Automator workflow that will detect your Kindle, download your latest Instapaper articles (they come in a .mobi file) and put them into the right place on the Kindle itself. All this will happen in the background as soon as the Kindle is plugged into you Mac.
Next, create a new workflow in Automator and choose to make a “Folder Action”. At the top you need to choose the “Volumes” folder. The easiest way to do this is to press Cmd-Shift-G together and type in “/Volumes/” (without the quotes). this will get you to the volumes folder, which is where any mounted disk lives.
Next, add the action “Get Specified URLs” and enter the URL you copied earlier. Some magic seems to happen here: The actual url is generic – “http://www.instapaper.com/mobi” – so you need to be logged in to actually get your file. I am assuming here that Automator presents itself as Safari and uses its cookies.
Last, pick the action “Download URLs” and then, in the popup, navigate to the “documents” folder of your Kindle.
Save the action, giving it a recognizable name. I chose “Instapaper Kindle”. Now, whenever you plug in your Kindle, this action will grab the latest copy of Instapaper and add it to the e-reader, ready to go. It will look like this.
There is one problem with this method: right now it will trigger the script when any drive is plugged in, which could be a pain on a portable Mac. There are some workarounds on the web, notably the third-party Automator action called “Check for Disk”, which will only run the action when a specific drive is mounted, but I could’t make it work. If this is a problem, just save the action as an application instead and either stick it in your dock or in the toolbar of you Finder window, from where it is just a click away.
Hopefully this easy how-to will encourage you to get your hands dirty with Automator. It will also bring us one step closer to having a real, self-chosen daily newspaper delivered to us automatically, without paying Amazon’s fees to send it over the air.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
It’s unclear whether Psystar, a Mac cloner that recently lost a long legal battle with Apple, is dead or alive. The startup was quoted in a news report saying it was shutting down, and then in a followup story the company retracted the statement.
