“Butterfingers”, they called us. “Slippery Sam.” “Ol’ Johnny Drop-a-Lot.”
Fine, we said. Names can’t hurt us.
How can you not love a pitch that starts like that, especially when it’s from the folks at Photojojo, who have brought us all manner of cheap and smart photography gadgets over the years? And double-especially when the pitch is not for a product at all, but for a rather professional-looking DIY project. This time, its a hand strap for your camera.
To summarize: Neck straps are secure and keep the camera handy, but they are horribly uncomfortable (especially with heavy cameras) and they can get in the way.
Over-the-shoulder straps, like the R-Strap from Black Rapid, are much more useful, but cost a lot.
Finally, hand straps are a great idea, keeping the camera secure in your hand without trailing a tail of canvas behind them. The problem is price and quality, and I have never found one that works right.
Photojojo shows you how to make your own. The ingredients consist of a 1-inch nylon strap, a plastic buckle, a bolt that fits the tripod bush and a key-ring. You’ll also need a lighter or a match, but I’ll let you ready for yourself to find out what for (hint: it’s not a celebratory Cuban cigar).
I shall be making one of these. In fact, I think I have everything I need in the junk box. Go check it out.
Apple has reportedly begun shipping iPhone 3GS units with a new bootrom, which might help combat hacks enabling installation of unauthorized software. However, iPhone hackers say Apple’s new firmware only causes a temporary inconvenience for jailbroken devices, and the handset is still hackable.
“It’s not going to be impossible to jailbreak even if the exploit we used is gone,” said Eric McDonald, a member of the iPhone Dev-Team, which publishes tools to jailbreak the iPhone, in a phone interview with Wired.com.
McDonald explained that current tools will still work with the latest batch of iPhone 3GS units. The “24kpwn” exploit used to help jailbreak previous iPhones and iPod Touch devices only made it easier to boot up the hacked devices.
The newly shipping iPhone 3GS’s bootrom interferes with 24kpwn, but that will only make the handset difficult to start up after it shuts down. Booting up will require being “tethered” to a computer. That means if you shut down a jailbroken iPhone 3GS, or if it runs out of power, you can only turn it back on by plugging it into a computer.
In short, changing the bootrom makes owning a jailbroken iPhone even more of a hassle than it already is. However, McDonald said the Dev-Team will just have to find a new exploit to enable untethered booting once again.
Several publications on Wednesday reported Apple’s latest iPhone 3GS units came with presumably jailbreak-proof firmware. The reports were half correct: The phones do indeed ship with different firmware with a new bootrom, but they are still hackable.
McDonald compared this situation with the newest iPhone 3GS devices to the second-generation iPod Touch. Apple shipped this iPod Touch with a different bootrom from the previous version, and for a while, owners who jailbroke the device needed to tether their devices in order to boot up. Later, the iPhone Dev-Team released another exploit to enable untethered booting.
The iPhone jailbreak community emerged soon after the original iPhone launched in June 2007. Hackers discovered methods to install unauthorized third-party software on the device, as well as unlock the iPhone to work with carriers that otherwise did not serve the iPhone.
Apple wasn’t pleased. At the launch of the British iPhone in September 2007, Steve Jobs said Apple would work to suppress unlock hacks.
Apple has even suggested to the U.S. Copyright Office that jailbreaking is illegal — to no avail, as the Dev-Team has been careful to only provide patches hacking the iPhone, as opposed to copying the software, according to McDonald.
“It’s a cat-and-mouse game,” Jobs said in September 2007. “We try to stay ahead. People will try to break in, and it’s our job to stop them breaking in.”
With the latest upgrade, it appears Apple has not stopped the Dev-Team from breaking in. But for the time being, the company has made hacking new iPhones very inconvenient and perhaps impractical.
Avast! There be a mighty tempest rocking the good ship Gadget Lab. OK, it’s just raining really hard in San Francisco and most of the Bay Area. But what better time to check off all those do-it-yourself gadget projects you’ve exiled to the bottom of your to-do list?
Sure, copious sunlight makes it hard to concentrate on backing up your data. But when it’s pouring and there’s nothing better to do than geek out, tasks like beautifying your iTunes library, turning your Mac Mini into the ultimate media center, or hacking your netbook can be a dorktastic blast.
Even if the skies are clear in your city, here’s a list of tech-centric activities you can take on when the weather is being a harsh mistress. Trust us — they’re a lot more fun than playing Monopoly or constructing a magical butterfly garden.
1. Straighten Out Your iTunes Library With TuneUp
Anybody with a sizable iTunes music collection is bound to have a bunch of albums with incorrect or ungrammatical song tracks (e.g., Track 01, Track 02, “here comes the sun,” etc). TuneUp is an awesome plug-in that hooks into an online database and analyzes your incorrect track titles and automatically renames them for you.
The TuneUp plug-in automatically launches with iTunes, and you drag a list of incorrect song tracks into the TuneUp menu to begin automatic renaming. The only drag is that it takes about 5 to 10 seconds per song, so if you have a ton of improperly named tracks, this can take a pretty long time.
Other than renaming songs, TuneUp can also identify any albums in your iTunes library that are missing cover art. Then, it will download that art from its database and automatically tag it onto the respective album.
TuneUp isn’t 100 percent reliable, especially when it comes to dealing with super-indie tracks, but it successfully fixed up about 80 percent of my iTunes library, which contains about 5,000 songs. Not bad. TuneUp costs $20 for a one-year license, or $30 for a lifetime license.
2. Turn Your Mac Mini Into the Ultimate Entertainment Box
Ever dream of a TV set-top box that offered every type of media you can imagine? An ultraversatile media machine doesn’t really exist yet on the market, but if you own a Mac Mini, you’ll like this solution. Sporting a gorgeous UI, Plex Media Center is a Mac app that serves your movies, TV shows, music and even content from websites such as Hulu and Netflix. It supports a large number of file formats, so even digital pirates will be pleased. Just install Plex on a Mac Mini, hook up the Mini to your TV and you’re gold. You can access and control Plex with your Apple remote, so forget about that shoddy keyboard-and-mouse experience.
Similar to TuneUp, Plex uses metadata from the internet to automatically retrieve art to accompany your media. In the screenshot above, Plex provides that slick Seinfeld background. One caveat: It’ll take some time to make Plex look just right. Plex can be pretty particular about just how you organize your files in order for it grab metadata for your media files. That means you’ll have to do lots of renaming of files and folders. Example: To load that Seinfeld menu, Plex required arranging the folders as such: Movies–>Seinfeld–> Season 3. Still, it’s worth the time and effort.
The best part? Plex is free.
3. Hack and Mod Your Netbook
Netbooks are popular not just because they’re so small and convenient to carry around everywhere; they’re surprisingly hackable. There’s a wealth of literature on the web that will teach you how to hack a netbook to run Mac OS X, or install mods such as an HDTV tuner, GPS or Bluetooth.
… the digital cloud that is the interwebs, of course. Indeed, cloud storage is the hip way to manage your data (unless you’re a T-Mobile Sidekick customer). By throwing your files into a cloud-based service such as Dropbox or Box.net, you’re automatically backing them up to protect against data loss. Not only that, you can enjoy access to your files from any computer with an internet connection. For example, on my office computer, I can listen to my entire iTunes library, which I copied into Dropbox.
The words “cloud storage” are pretty yawn-inducing, but once you get past that and start experimenting with the tech, it’s pretty fun. After trying out cloud backup services, you might consider throwing your notes into Evernote, an online note-taking service. Evernote has apps not only for the Mac and Windows, but also for several smartphones including the iPhone and RIM BlackBerry. When I find a recipe I like while browsing the web with my computer, I paste it into Evernote, hit Sync, and then on my iPhone I launch the Evernote app — and there’s the recipe. Pretty sweet.
5. Set Your iPhone Free
Apple plays gatekeeper for its iPhone, enforcing stringent control over what types of third-party software appear in its App Store. This, of course, has resulted in some questionable app rejections, most of which blew over after a short duration. But Apple crossed an invisible line when it rejected the Google Voice app, a service that enables users to rely on a single phone number to ring all their phones, while also delivering the gift of free text messages and voicemail service, as well as cheap international calls. Fortunately, there’s a way around Apple’s restrictions: Jailbreaking the iPhone.
Jailbreaking (i.e. hacking) the iPhone gives you access to an unauthorized app store called Cydia, which offers a Google Voice app among other wares Apple would forbid. Want to tether your iPhone? There’s a Cydia app for that. Want to download files larger than 10 megabytes on the 3G network? Yup, there’s an unauthorized app for that, too. Jailbreaking is also the first step you must take if you wish to unlock your iPhone to work on a different carrier, such as T-Mobile.
The drag about jailbreaking is that it just isn’t very convenient. Every time Apple releases a software update, you lose access to Cydia, and your unauthorized apps temporarily disappear. Then you must jailbreak and re-download those apps again. (If you paid for a Cydia app the first time, you don’t have to pay to download it again.) But if you actually have free time, having a jailbroken iPhone can be largely beneficial.
From our experience, the best tutorials on jailbreaking can be found at iClarified, and if you need more visual aids, plenty of YouTube users have posted tutorials as well. What are you waiting for? Jailbreak away!
What are the rainy day activities you enjoy with your gadgets? Post your suggestions in the comments below.
Have a Sony gadget lying around, like a broken, original PlayStation or a neglected DVD player? You might as well rip it apart for a chance to win a brand new PSP Go or a PS3 Slim.
Wired.com and hardware repair company iFixit are hosting a contest. All you have to do to participate is take apart any Sony product and snap photos of the teardown process. Post your photos using iFixit’s teardown gallery tool, along with your observations about the teardown process or the gadget’s insides, and you’re good to go.
Trust us, it’ll be a blast! We’re not asking you to pull a MacGyver and turn a ripped up CD player into a remote-controlled boomerang. (Although, that would be kind of cool.) Just impress us with some neat photos and clever analysis.
A panel of five Wired.com staff members will judge your submissions. You can win one of two prizes. The winner of “Most Creative Teardown” will get a PSP Go (along with a T-shirt). And the winner of “Best Overall Teardown” will receive a PS3 Slim (plus a T-shirt). We want you to be imaginative, so we’re not going to list any strict guidelines. Just have some fun and learn a little about hardware while you’re at it.
iFixit will be taking submissions for two weeks, meaning the deadline is Oct. 23, 11:59 p.m. Pacific. Here are the rules in summary:
The teardowns will be judged by the Wired.com staff.
Contest ends Oct. 23, 11:59 p.m. Pacific time.
We’ll post pictures from the winning teardowns, plus any notable honorable mentions, right here on Gadget Lab.
Need ideas for what makes a neat teardown? Here are some examples:
Just last month, iFixit disassembled the new iPod Touch and found a hole that could have been used for a camera. Strange, because Steve Jobs said Apple intentionally left a camera out of the iPod Touch so the device could focus on gaming! Also, iFixit found an 802.11N chip — an even faster module than the Wi-Fi chip in the new iPhone 3GS. No clue why that’s in there yet, but that’s interesting.
When iFixit ripped apart the iPod Touch in September 2008, the company discovered a hidden Bluetooth module. This was a pleasant surprise, as Bluetooth was not unlocked by Apple until the release of iPhone OS 3.0 just four months ago. This illustrates how teardowns can reveal technology’s fascinating secrets. Who knows what else is out there that we haven’t discovered yet?
Question: Is it possible to graft the cables and electronics of a set of iPod inline-remote earbuds onto a pair of regular headphones, and still retain full functionality? Answer: Kinda.
Yesterday, I broke yet another set of headphones, this time yet another pair of my long-time favorite, the Koss Porta-Pro. These foldable headphones are lightweight, they sound great and they’re don’t cost much more than a pair of earbuds. They are also very delicate and I break them all the time. This time the cable wrapped itself around something and yanked. Result: dead cans.
Instead of tossing them, I thought I’d try to marry them up with the cable and remote from a pair of cheap but terrible earbuds. The goal was to make a pair of frankenphones with the great sound of the Koss’s, and the convenience of the remote. I had partial success, and made an interesting discovery along the way.
The first step was to chop off the useless parts of both. I popped open the Porta-Pros with a tiny screwdriver. There is an access panel glued over the solder joints and it is easy to pry open. Then I snipped and stripped the wires on the fully functional donor-phones (I have a broken set of Apple earbuds, but I wanted to make sure that I was working with fresh cables to eliminate one source of doubt).
Here came the first problem. Many headphone cables come stranded with filaments of nylon or some other thin cord. These are mixed in with the copper strands to add strength and stop stretching, but they also make these wires almost impossible to solder. The other hitch is that the two wires are pretty much intermingled in there, rather than in their own separate sheaths.
Before soldering (or rather, before searching the apartment for a soldering iron) I twisted the strands to make a test connection. To finish, you should take the cables right into the terminals on the earpieces, but this turned out to be unnecessary.
Why? Because no sound came through. Twisting the strands doubtless shorted something, but I have tried in vain to solder these kinds of cable before and it was beyond me. The soldering iron can stay under the sink or wherever it is for now.
But what was surprising was that the inline remote actually works. In fact, you don’t even need the earpieces connected. Plug in the jack and, like a decapitated chicken, things keep working even without a head. Play/pause and skip both worked great.
Which leads us to the real discovery of this otherwise failed experiment. Instead of buying a purpose made remote adapter, you could instead just use a splitter to plug both your headphones and a broken donor cable into the iPod. Listen through one, and control through the other. You can even run the remote section to an inside pocket or down your sleeve, something impossible when the remote is inline. And perhaps this would work with Bluetooth connected headphones, too. Conclusion: Partial success.
It’s hard to see Palm as anything but a masochist. The catch-phrase for the Pre smartphone might as well be “Thank you sir. May I have another?” spoken as Palm bends over and Apple raises a heavy wooden paddle yet again.
Arriving quickly behind last week’s 1.2 software update for the Pre comes 1.2.1, which — along with a few maintenance fixes — restores support for syncing the phone with iTunes. It’s hard to fathom just what Palm is thinking here, as you know for sure that Apple will just update iTunes to lock the Pre out once again.
Palm could, as we mentioned before, sync to iTunes’ library by simply reading an xml file. This is what all other applications do, and it is an official, Apple supported method for doing so. But Palm, for reasons unknown, continues to try to fool the iTunes application itself into thinking that the Pre is an iPod.
IPhone and Mac developer Craig Hunter sums it up very nicely:
I seriously question the strategy and brains of any company that ties critical product capabilities to the unsupported use of their competitor’s software. I mean, really? Can it get any more ridiculous? Can you possibly send a more mixed, less confidence-inspiring, “we’re a bunch of hacks who can’t provide our own sync software for our products” message to customers?
Still, the cat-fight is undoubtedly entertaining, although the ultimate winner can only be Apple. Every time Palm bends over and begs for another whack, it suffers a loss of credibility. Apple, on the other hand, is doing nothing more than working out its spanking muscles.
Want to trade your expensive car for a cheap bike in “These Troubled Economic Times”? Scared that you might not be able to make those monthly mega-mart runs and still carry home all that important junk food? Clearly a purpose-made cargo bike is out of the question, as it is a relatively expensive specialist machine. We have the answer: A hacked together cargo bike.
Flickr user Harvwoien took two old beaters and joined them together. The front bike is unmodified, other than the removal of the rear wheel. The rear bike has been more drastically chopped, and is now missing its down-tube. The end of the top-tube has been hammered flat and drilled and then bolted onto the back of the seat-post of the front bicycle, and its bottom-bracket bolted to the dropouts.
Lastly, an old derailleur has been used to guide the chain through the frankenframes, and a pair of wire baskets hung on the sides to carry cargo. Although rather scrappy, the solution is elegant in its simplicity, and while it doesn’t have the flat load-bed of some ready-made options, you do get the extra stability of a long wheelbase. Now, imagine this made with an old mixte or step-through frame, and the extra load-space it would give, and you have a rather splendid and cheap bike, ready for a shopping trip. Bonus: It’s so ugly, nobody would ever steal it.
If the future could be somehow wrangled from an abstract concept and transformed into a city, that city would of course be Tokyo. And riding the streets of that future-tropolis would be a cyclist wearing the iPhone ARider Bicycle Navigation System, a helmet mounted display that hooks into the iPhone.
Designed by future-mongers Ubiquitous Entertainment, the ARider consists of a mount on top of the helmet for an iPhone 3GS, which keeps the handset horizontal and lets the compass-guided maps swing freely. The iPhone is connected to a flip-out display which puts the map in front of the cyclist’s eye: a safe, always available HUD.
The display itself is an off-the-shelf unit from the Scalar Corporation, and is small and light enough to simply be Scotch-taped to the helmet. A wire runs video from the iPhone, but as the built-in Maps application offers no video-out signal, the folks at Ubiquitous Entertainment wrote their own application which sends video to the HMD (Helmet Mounted Display). The result is an always visible map that, although not very sharp or of high enough resolution to replace the iPhone’s screen, will give enough directional and distance information to guide the rider along city streets.
I’d love to try this, and maybe we’ll see a real product in the future: Ubiquitous Entertainment is no tiny garage-band of a company. It does business with the likes of NTT DoCoMo and Konami.
On the morning of September 11th, a small group of Stanford Aeronautics and Astronautics students set up their class project at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center. The gear consisted of a small table, a couple of MacBooks and two battery-powered model airplanes. The goal: fly the autonomous balsawood and foam aircraft as high as possible.
One of the team, Zouhair Mahboubi, launched the first plane, throwing it into the air much like you or I would throw a paper-dart, and it behaved just the same, crashing to the ground a few seconds after launch. The second plane was more successful, and after take-off flew to 2,177 meters, or 7,142 feet, before the team lost contact.
Because the aircraft was autonomous, the flight didn’t end there. The plane went immediately into landing mode and made it safely back to land, and this turned out to be the trip that set an (unofficial) world record for autonomous craft under 5 kilos in weight. A third sortie saw similar altitudes, but before the plane could climb higher it flew too close to the edge of the allotted airspace — this was on NASA’s ground at Edwards Air Force Base, remember.
For the final attempt, the plane was sent soaring from a mile to the north to buy more climbing time before the strengthening winds again took the craft too far south. The plane, named Blue Panther, made it to 2,490 meters, or 8169 feet, but the winds finally won and blew it well off course to the East, where Blue Panther sent itself spiraling to Earth at 78 mph when it engaged “flight termination” mode. The flight was the highest, but because of the crash landing it doesn’t count for the record.
The students had managed to put these planes, very successfully, into the air where they pretty much looked after themselves, and to do it in just a year, from drawing board to sky. More surprisingly, the models cost just $500 each. Not pocket money, but the sort of success-to-cash ratio that is certainly to be attracting the military. Especially as the tests took place in its backyard.
Pool, the cut-down version of snooker preferred by degenerate hustlers and people who like fun, seems ripe for automation. After-all, it’s all about calculating the right angles and then holding the cue steady, both of which a robot can easily manage. Add in the fact that a robot doesn’t drink its performance into oblivion as the night deepens, and the ball-sinking pool robot known as Deep Green seems invincible. In short, once it is playing, it will never have to leave a quarter on the side of the table.
Deep green is an industrial gantry robot, equipped with a cue and hung over a standard coin-op table. A digital camera reads the scene below and the robot’s computer brain compares it to 30 pre-stored images of an empty table, using the differences to decide where, and what color, the balls are. From there, the robot can nominate a ball and pocket and slide into action.
Because the motors that move the robot are capable of error, there is a secondary camera which looks along the line of the cue, just like a human does. By comparing the line seen from this point-of-cue (effectively sighting the centers of the balls) with the ideal line seen by the overhead camera, Deep Green can adjust itself to sink the perfect pot.
It can even rack the balls with perfection, picking up and then placing each one precisely in position without the need for a rack.
But what of a machine that can pot the ball every time? It would be a kind of idiot savant without a complex physics engine that knows about spin, bounce and all the other strategic factors a pro-player’s brain can assimilate. Thus, Deep Green thinks ahead. You’d better make sure you get your first shot in, and don’t miss another, or it’ll be game over.
Or will it? Deep Green also has an “augmented reality pool” mode where it can help you make your shots. Just like a pool-sim video game, Deep Green can project the ideal line for you right onto the baize. It will show you exactly where each ball will go depending on how you hold the cue, adjusting angles and rebound lines in real time as you change the angle of your incipient strike. Of course, you still have to hit it right, and decide on the amount of power and spin you want to add.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to beat the pool-playing robot. No amount of standing behind it and shouting “Miss! Miss!” is going to help you. Asking your girlfriend to stand behind the pocket it’s aiming for is unlikely to help either. We guess you could try our cheat of last resort, which is lot lot safer practiced on an emotionless bot than the usual tattooed pool-shark we lose to: Stand nearby and, just as it makes the shot, shove it’s elbow, apologize and buy it a drink.
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.
