What (non-PC) Hardware Do You Hack?

Lis writes "Mike Langberg at the Merc News interviewed Scott Fullam - Scott wrote the book 'Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks' which includes things like a video periscope for your car, an Internet toaster, Cubicle Intrusion Detection Systems, and talking Furbys. (Instructions for the toaster and coffeemaker are up on the O'Reilly site.) Almost any kind of consumer electronic equipment can be modified to do things it wasn't intended to do. Ok, you'll probably void your warranty in the process, but you could end up with something even better than the original. Or not. But it's just gotta be interesting. So what have you hacked, and into what?"

Lately, furniture...

...with all the people I've helped move lately, I've become somewhat of an expert on taking apart and putting together beds, desks, entertainment centers, large tables, small tables, etc...

Re:Lately, furniture...

I don't know that following the IKEA directions counts as hacking.

Now if you used all of the leftover pieces that for some reason you didn't "need" in the rebuild to create pulley system that saved you some trips upstairs (or an IKEAbot to do the work for you)... now *that* would be hacking.

Re:Lately, furniture...

Nope, that would be manufacturing, not hacking.

Hacking, for example, would be more like modifying the tractor and stable to move your fiance directly from her milking station to your bed made of hay.

Basically, modifying something(s) to do something they were not originally designed to do.

Darth Vader Toy

I hacked my son's Darth Vader Toy to spin clockwise when I received and e-mail and counter-clockwise when my machine was attacked (port scanned). I used a floppy drive stepper motor and mouted it in an old CDROM case

http://www.cityhall.com/projects/darth/darth_per ip heral-2.jpg

-Monta at cityhall.com

You know...

is anyone else disturbed by the seemingly huge amount of misogyny in the Slashdot readership? Reading through the comments to this story reveals a lot of "jokes" about "hacking up women." Sure, it's mostly AC trolls, but it's kind of scary. Just because you can't get a girlfriend, guys, doesn't mean we need to kill women.

The gf?

Does 'hacking' into my girlfriend count?

Re:The gf?

Yes, yes. We all know you've built a girl robot for the prom. Haven't we all? But it's not really hacking if you built it yourself. Now can we stay on topic?

Re:The gf?

*cough* She wasn't that secure in the first place.

Re:The gf?

I heard that she was already in promiscuous mode when you met her...

Re:The gf?

I tried accessing his girlfriend but apparently it had exceeded the maximun number of simultanious connections :(

Re:The gf?

So it's hard coded? Figures...

O'Reilly's "Girlfriend Hacks"

The pentium flaw could be "fixed" by disabling the FPU in software.

This is akin to getting her drunk to suppress those pesky frontal lobe messages that counter the "I'm horny" feelings with "He's ugly and he reads Slashdot" reasoning.

Actually, this is a bad analogy. The Pentium FPU was disabled because it was giving faulty results. The girl-frontal-lobes are functioning perfectly when they report that you're (*) an ugly geek.

Even hard drive sizes used to be "hacked" bigger by using compression software.

The girl-equivalent being the wonderbra that makes the important things appear larger where it matters (i.e. where you can see them). Unfortunately, like the compression software, you'll eventually see that neither of these methods actually give you more.

(*) No, not you (the parent poster) specifically.... why do people say "you" instead of "one" in English...?

How to hack the American woman culture.

Here are some ideas and suggestions for those who want to hack the U.S. woman culture. The first thing you should know is that hacking your own culture can be scary. It's definitely an E-Ticket ride, for those who want to tackle something seriously complex.

Bitching is part of the American woman culture. It cannot be disabled. For a better experience, try a different nationality. In the U.S., the word "bitch" means both "complain" and "woman". Did you know that there are no other English-speaking countries in which this is so?

This is a bit extreme, but a good exaggeration might be that if you have only known women of the U.S. culture, you have never really known a woman at all. Women in the U.S. commonly: 1) are infantile, 2) live in a fantasy world in which the rules of life don't apply to them, 3) are self-destructive, 4) want control, 5) believe that men are reponsible for all of their problems, 5) are irresponsible to an amazing degree, and 6) use anger and hostility to try to intimidate and get their way.

Want examples? Read the women's magazines on any newstand in the United States. Watch some of the episodes of the Oprah Winfrey show, in which men are seen as the objects of fantasy, or as inherently evil enemies.

If there are any readers who want to give an instant negative reaction to this, please think carefully first. I've traveled to 33 countries and talked with hundreds of women extensively from other countries about their lives. I'm serious about understanding the problems. Ask yourself, are you? Do you really care about what happens in your country?

When I lived in England, it was common to see English and European movies in which there would be a comedy episode in which an American woman did something selfish and out of touch.

That said, the American woman culture can be successfully hacked. It's a limited kind of success, like living in a cesspool and saying that you like the brown things that float past better than the black ones.

First, don't take American women seriously. That gives them responsibility and they don't like that.

Second, don't depend on them. They may want sex with you today for no good reason, and not want to talk to you tomorrow, also for no good reason. A Russian woman said, "It may take me only one minute to fall in love, but I have to be in love to want sex. American women sleep with anyone." I've heard that from people of several nationalities.

Third, don't blame everything that happens in your relationships with U.S. women on yourself. If you did something bad, accept that. But recognize that a common way for a U.S. woman to get control is to try to get you believe that you are an inferior kind of being.

Fourth, spend considerable time understanding the U.S. woman culture. It is, in many ways, not what it pretends to be. For example, women in the U.S. often project confidence, when they don't feel confident at all.

Fifth, stay with what is logical. Logic has little importance for many U.S. women, even those who are successful in the U.S. computer industry. If you stray away from what is logical, you may soon be as confused as her.

Sixth, treat women right even if they treat you badly. Everyone needs more experience in learning how to be good to themselves and others. I'm not religious, but it happens that Jesus Christ was right: Don't answer violence with more violence; don't answer bad behavior with more bad behavior. Like it said in the movie, "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure", "Be excellent to each other." Being excellent to women does NOT mean spending money on them. You should each contribute equally to your relationship. If she doesn't want to do that, she doesn't want a real relationship.

The U.S. is suffering a social breakdown. The breakdown is caused in part by the largely hidden breakdown of the U.S. woman culture. When a man cannot find a suitable woman friend, when a man and a woman cannot make a stable relationship, wh

Re:How to hack the American woman culture.

I have mod points, and I very nearly modded this flamebait.

But I've realized (after careful reading of this post and some perusal of your website) that this isn't flamebait or a troll, in the usual senses of the words, and that you seem in some ways to be a very thoughtful individual, if rather misguided about some issues.

So I'll rebut your arguments instead.

"Bitching", defined as complaining, is hardly a pursuit limited to women (american or not). I've worked in male-dominated (not purposely, just because it fell out that way) offices that held 'bitch sessions' that were called exactly that.

The use of 'bitch' to denote all women is a misogynist term, and almost certainly did not originate with women. The more or less male analog to this is 'bastard', yet not all men (american or not) are illegitimate.

> This is a bit extreme, but a good exaggeration
> might be that if you have only known women of
> the U.S. culture, you have never really known a
> woman at all.

Just for the record, my mother is Japanese, as is her mother. So I grew up with women who were not socialized predominately in the U.S. While I have not been able to leave the U.S. as an adult, I have certainly dealt with women who did not grow up here. So this argument does not apply to me.

> Women in the U.S. commonly: 1) are infantile,
> 2) live in a fantasy world in which the rules
> of life don't apply to them, 3) are self-
> destructive, 4) want control, 5) believe that
> men are reponsible for all of their problems,
> 5) are irresponsible to an amazing degree, and
> 6) use anger and hostility to try to intimidate
> and get their way.

Oprah Winfrey and Women's magazines in general are not indicative of 'women's culture' any more than esquire, playboy and sports illustrated are indicative of 'men's culture'. They are corporate entities created to make money. Nothing more, nothing less.

So, unless you would like to try to claim that men are 1. infantile, 2. live in a fantasy world in which the rules of life don't apply to them, 3. are self-destructive, 4. want control, 5. believe that women are reponsible for all of their problems, 6. are irresponsible to an amazing degree, and 7. use anger, hostility, violence and a larger body size to try to intimidate and get their way. I'd suggest you either reconsider your sources or reconsider your hypothesis

Incidently, all of these things are true for individual examples, regardless of gender. None of these things are true for the entire gender.

I fail to see a problem with some of these things ('want control' -- I want control over my life, and I fail to see why it's wrong for a woman to do so) and some of these problems (irresponsibility, blaming others unreasonably, intimidation) are problems in American culture, period, and are not particularly gender linked, though the way they manifest may be, i.e. statistically, women will be more likely to use emotional manipulation, like crying, where men will be more likely to use physical intimidation. But this is still statistical, and any individual may use either or neither, regardless of gender.

Also, these traits bear startling resemblance to the psychological profiles of a healthy woman (as in, this is what a psychologically healthy woman is like -- a woman who acts as an adult, is responsible, likes men [and therefore sex], etc is neurotic and requires treatment) from the first half of the twentieth century. If you are not aware of this you may want to do more research here. A fair chunk of women's problems in this country stem from psychological and psychiatric practices.

And yes, I really do care about what happens in my country. Which is one of the reasons I hate seeing energy wasted on misguided attacks and other strategies.

I fail to see how the satiric practices of any country accurately reflect the reality of any other country reliably enough to draw good conclusions about that cou

Re:If you don't like my hypotheses, what are yours

To clarify, I don't particularly disagree with your assertion that Americans have some serious problems. What I do disagree with is your analysis of women's culture in the U.S. (I think you've got a very narrow band of data, I'll eleborate below) and that somehow women are (or women's culture is) somehow more responsible for the problems in the U.S. than men or men's culture or any other factor. If you'd posted something that criticized all Americans I probably wouldn't have blinked, if you'd posted something that was critical of women, but didn't echo known, common anti-woman beliefs/propaganda (for lack of better words for the phenomenon), I would have been less likely to react as well.

Your complaint about women not wanting to commit is interesting, as it's one I'm more used to hearing from women about men than vice versa (though I've heard it from women about women and men about both men and women, so no one gets to completely avoid it, I suppose). I don't find that surprising. Marriage has it's pros and cons. It's not just about committing to have sex with only one person. There are a lot of practical aspects -- financial (dependant on where you are and who has what money and what income, you can lose quite a bit of money in taxes and such if you're married that you wouldn't if you were single), geographical (if one partner gets transferred at work, do both move or does that partner have to lose their job and find another?), emotional (living with someone is very difficult -- esspecially if one was an only child in a 'standard' household [parent(s) only, no extended family]) etc. And some of these fall particularly hard on women, because traditionally they've been the ones expected to make greater sacrifices for the marriage. If a woman wants to have a career or continue her education than it makes sense to delay marriage. And all of this is intensified if children are expected to be part of the package.

My mother went to four different colleges and ultimately decided to go into nursing rather than medicine, because she got married and had to follow my father around. Two years later she had me and three years after that my sister. It took her fourteen years to get her BA in Nursing, and she started before she met my father (and she was her high school valedictorian, so I don't think that was a problem with the academic work). Now, she doesn't (to my knowledge) regret any of this, and I respect the decisions she made as those that were best for her, but I certainly can understand why a woman would *not* want to do that. I don't think one can explain away difficulty finding a wife or the rising age of first time brides by claiming that women on the whole have become less willing to commit. The social and economic factors affecting marriage have changed in the last two generations, and they combine to make getting married, and esspecially getting married young, a less attractive choice than it was before, at least unless one really wants to have children.

Incidently, life expentancy stats would seem to bear this out. Married men have longer life expentancies than unmarried men, but the reverse is true for women.

On a related point, to find a wife, being popular with women is not really the best strategy. It's being appealing, as marriage material, to at least one woman (and it only has to be one, though I suppose increasing that number would increase your odds somewhat) who is interested in getting married. I know one guy who is really popular with women, but not in any way that would be useful to find a partner -- for various reasons he's very popular with..lesbians. Not very useful for getting married or getting laid, but his parties are great. Actually, I exaggerate a little -- he ended up marrying a woman who thought she was a lesbian, but decided she'd just hadn't met the right man. This is, however, a lousy strategy in general and I don't recommend it (because it wastes your time and annoys the lesbians :) ).

Modeling and the whole beauty queen business is

Re:The gf?

Please, let's skip the jokes about 'port sniffing' here... /. is about stuff that matters after all ;)

Re:The gf?

(Not my writing, but it answers your question)

Dear Tech Support:

Last year I upgraded from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0. I soon noticed that the new program began unexpected child processing that took up a lot of space and valuable resources. No mention of this was included with the product information.

In addition, Wife 1.0 installed itself into all other programs and now launches during system initialization, where it monitors all other system activity.

Applications such as Poker Night 10.3, Football 5.0, Hunting and Fishing 7.5, and Racing 3.6 no longer run, crashing the system whenever selected.

I can't seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background while attempting to run my favorite applications. I'm thinking about going back to Girlfriend 7.0, but the uninstall doesn't work on Wife1.0.

Please help !!!!!!

Thanks, A Troubled User.

REPLY:
Dear Troubled User:

This is a very common problem that men complain about. It is due to a primary misconception.

Many people upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0, thinking that it is merely a Utilities and Entertainment program. Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM and is designed by its Creator to run EVERYTHING !!!!

It is also impossible to delete Wife 1.0 and to return to Girlfriend 7.0. Hidden operating systems files cause Girlfriend 7.0 to emulate Wife 1.0, so nothing is gained. It is impossible to uninstall, delete, or purge the program files from the system once installed.

You cannot go back to Girlfriend 7.0 because Wife 1.0 is designed to not allow this. Some have tried Girlfriend 8.0 or Wife 2.0 but end up with more problems than in the original system. Look in your Wife 1.0 manual under "Warnings--Alimony/Child Support."

I recommend that you keep Wife 1.0 and work on improving the situation. I suggest installing the
background application "Yes Dear" to alleviate software augmentation.

Having installed Wife 1.0 myself, I also suggest that you read the entire section regarding 'General Partnership Faults' (GPFs). You must assume joint responsibility for any faults and problems that occur, regardless of their cause. You will also find that GPFs are cyclical.

The best course of action is to enter the command

C:\APOLOGIZE. Avoid excessive use of C:\YESDEAR
because ultimately you will have to give the APOLOGIZE command before the system will return to normal anyway.

Remember the system will run smoothly as long as you share the blame for all GPFs. Wife 1.0 is a great program, but it tends to be very high maintenance.

Wife 1.0 comes with several support programs, such as Clean and Sweep 3.0, Cook It 1.5 (which replaces Burn It 1.0), and Do Bills 4.2. You must, however, be very careful how you use these programs.

Improper use will cause the system to launch the program Nag Nag 9.5. Once this happens, the only way to improve the performance of Wife 1.0 is to purchase additional software. I recommend Flowers 2.1 and Diamonds 5.0 should this happen.

WARNING!!!!! DO NOT, under any circumstances, install Secretary With Short Skirt 3.3. This application is not supported by Wife 1.0 and will cause irreversible damage to the operating system.

Best of luck,
Tech Support
Have a Great Day!

Not from a Pc but used with it...

I screwed around with a dialpad and set it up so when the right PIN is punched in, it turns on my computer. (I saw someone do it once with a garage door opener too)...

Re:Not from a Pc but used with it...

Similarly, there is a bar in Milwaukee called The Safe House. If you go into the Get Smart phone booth and dial the secret phone number, it's hacked so that instead of dialing out it opens the secret back door out of the place. (How's that for a backdoor hack!)

SafeHouse

The phone both there would be alot cooler if it actually worked as a phone....and didn't tell you the damd code to enter after picking up the handset.

Aibo

I hacked my Sony Aibo into its component parts. Worthless f'n robot.

Furby's

I performed surgery on my Furby and created a secret stealing super agent. Muhahahaha...

Rapid prototyping

3 old dot matrix printers and a dremel become a 3D rapid prototyping machine that can carve a 3D relief into styrofoam (or anything else, if you've got the patience to let it run that slowly...)

3D Scanner

A work in progress. [chromecow.com]

Slowed down recently due to house-hunting, but nearing completion. The hardware is ready to go, just need to write the drivers & integration software.

Tree hacking..

I once painstakingly hacked a rotating fiber-optic Christmas tree and removed the parts that made it rotate. Does that count?

Re:Tree hacking..

Speaking of tree hacking...

We built a fireplace and I wanted something cool for the kids so I took one of the kid-high rocks and drilled a hole in it then epoxied in a brass "peep hole". I put a geode behind the rock and ran some fiber optic cable to it then mortared the whole thing up.

The other ends of the fiber optic cables went to a hidden box which contains the guts of one of these fiber optic Xmas trees (including the spinning color wheel).

Push a secret rock near the peep hole rock and the whole thing turns on - cool crystally color changing happiness. The kids love it. Now on the other side of the fireplace I installed a "peep show" but that's a different story...

Re:Tree hacking..

I did that for my kids once, too. Lessons learned: 1. Don't put the peephole on the inside of the fireplace. 2. Kids are fuckin whiners.

Re:Tree hacking..

Man, I wish you were *my* dad.

Cars!

I know a distressingly large amount of trivial about what USED to be my 1989 Corvette. Just about the only stock part left is the distributor _shaft_.

Re:Cars!

I'd actually be interested in what people think about working with cars in terms of hacking. Do you consider it hacking if you're modifying your car to improve performance, for entertainment (ie, stereo stuff, DVD, etc) or reliability?

Would it be hacking if you just took off the shelf (either stock or aftermarket) and installed them? Or would you have to kind of cobble together something that's rarely normally done for it to be hacking?

Re:Cars!

I knew a guy with a Civic that put a 12v computer P/S fan in his air intake ducting to "increase" airflow into the engine.

This was a waste of time. Everyone knows that a big wing is the biggest performance boost for a Civic. Also, a Type-R sticker is even cheaper and adds 20HP as well as improves handling.

Hacking cars - from a Car Nut

On the other end of the spectrum. I knew a guy with a Civic that put a 12v computer P/S fan in his air intake ducting to "increase" airflow into the engine.

The power supply fan would do very little, since it drives so little air. Most throttle bodies and carburetors are rated in the hundreds of CFM, most small fans like that are rated in the dozens of CFM. If anything, it would reduce the engine's peak power.

At partial throttle, the fan will drive a small amount of extra air into the engine meaning that the throttle won't have to be open as far for a given amount of power.

At wide open throttle, the engine's vacuum would massively outstrip the fan's flow, and the engine would end up dragging the fan. The energy required to spin the fan would be coming from the fast-moving air trying to enter the engine. The restriction and turbulence caused by the fan would reduce the volumne of air drawn into the motor, and therefore reduce the peak wide-open-throttle power.

People who do stuff like this - and, in fact, try to "tune" a Honda or other silly front wheel drive car - almost universally know nothing about cars, then try to take on Mustangs and Camaros which are, by virtue of large displacement V8 engines and rear wheel drive, far more suited to the task of stoplight confrontations.

If the guy were serious, he'd install a very high volume fan. Vacuum cleaner fans have been used as "electric superchargers" but require 120V in your car. Turbochargers and superchargers are far more reliable.

If he were really serious, he'd yank out that cute little 4 cylinder engine and transaxle and sell them. Then he'd cut out the rear suspension, weld perches onto his roll cage to attach the leaf springs or ladder bars. He'd stuff in a nice differential and rear axle (probably a Ford 9"), and stick a big V8 and automatic transmission driving the rear wheels. Personally, I'd stuff a big block Mopar V8 in there, but an early 1980s Buick 3.8L V6 would keep a Civic street drivable, getting over 25MPG and turning reliable low 12-second 1/4 mile times.

If he did that, then he would have a serious car for stoplight confrontations.

Hacking cars? Check this out, it's my buddy's 1986 Chevette [glowingplate.com]. He cut off the back end of the car and welded on the tailfins of a 1956 Dodge Custom Royal. Together, we built a Chevette Targa [glowingplate.com]... it had started out to be a hard-top convertible, but we never finished it.

Me? I do engine swaps [glowingplate.com]. Then I go drag racing [glowingplate.com].

Re:Cars!

I think my Mini would count as a "hack" - See Picture [myfridaynight.com]

Re:Cars!

You know those demented motorists who drive at 40mph in the fast lane on the interstate? I was looking for a way to get back at those pseudo-maniacs. I found a cute LED display (BetaBrite [betabrite.com]) in Sams. Picked one up, googled a bit and found the protocol. Put together a Java program to interface with the LED sign through RS-232. Placed it at the rear window/windshield, plugged it into my cigarette lighter socket and connected it to my laptop. Stored a few choice messages into the sign's memory.
Now, depending on the situation, I display the appropriate message on the sign. It's fun to see the looks on people's faces! Good to know that if you are a geek, you don't have to take road-abuse.

Re:xbox

I don't see why it wouldn't, it certainly qualifys as hacking.

I hacked a Dakota digital camera.

10 bucks for a blurry 1.3 mp camera, how could I not hack it?

Re:xbox

I can't afford an Xbox, you Insensitive Clod!

Besides doesn't the posting specify "non-pc" hacking? An Xbox is really just a neutered PC. Now if you made the Xbox actually DO something cool, other than just boot/run unsigned code, that might be worth mentioning.

My other Xbox is a Long-Range ballistic missile guidance system

phones

phone's are my personal favorite, they are easy to do and you don't get shocked too hard... the light up ones and the caller id's are the best to do, changing leds and such. speaking of changing leds, someone will mention the dreamcast or ps2 LED mod [cjb.net]

but phones are simple, and don't hold a big charge... although, there's nothing like a good 9 volt zap in the morning to wake you up.

Re:phones

phone's are my personal favorite, they are easy to do and you don't get shocked too hard

That's my primary criterion before beginning a hacking project - will the electric shock cause permanent injury or death?

Re:phones

Slightly OT

I once bought an original Pole Position II arcade off ebay (about 120). After a few months the screen went a bit screwy, so i found a newsgroup concerning acade repair.

The people on the group were really helpful and were talking me through fixing the problem... however I kept the arcade plugged in so I could see the results. FZZZZZZPT! I get knocked about 5 foot, manage to crawl to my laptop and type very slowly "brb, ambulance"

my gf was first shocked, then scared, then calling me "pathetic"

Re:phones

Yeah, you had me until gf. Nice try.

Let's just say ...

nitrous-oxide powered nose hair clippers and leave it at that (and way over there against the wall if you know what's good for you).

Is it staring at me?

my coolest 'hack'

its non-technical, but i think it counts for a hack.

When i was in high school there was a particular big dumb jock that would pick on me. It was a catholic high school. So I stole some official letterhead paper from the guidance counselor's office and an official envelope with the school info on it.

I proceeded to type up an expulsion letter on the letterhead paper, saying he had been caught masturbating on campus, and as a good catholic school we could not allow that. I made it sound much more official. Had my friend forge the dean's signature, and that if they (his parents) had any questions about it, feel free to call (phone number included).

Then I mailed it.

he never found out it was me that did that, and he did still pick on me... but i'd say I got even.

Re:my coolest 'hack'

Well I have a situation with a particular arsehole at work who actually complained to higher management about me using *his* coffee up, so I take revenge when ever I feel like it.

I hack into his Windows machine and kill the WinLogon process. Then I jump up and go make coffee - looking all innocent! It takes 5-10 seconds before the machine just reboots. He's reinstalled Windows 4 times so far and changed most of his hardware. I let it go for a week or two between reboots to give him the impression that a rebuild actually helps things.

I try and time these events with his lunchtime game playing or when he's lecturing a junior on how good his software is. (During his good programming lectures I selectively kill OLE processes, causing his app to fail with access violations.)

Pathetic I know, but boy it cracks us all up.

Re:my coolest 'hack'

It's FUN working in an office full of old time "techies" and "programmers" who don't know shit about a modern PC..

My old standby is "NET SEND * ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!" or a "WILDCAT IS ON TEH SPOKE" or a "CRAMAK GONNA FIX IT!" or other such geek in-joke nonsense.

Noone knows where the messages came from (I change my computers ident to something like "CPU-CORE" to make it look official).

The best use of it was when a kid who worked here for about a month was fired, I changed my PC's name to his login ID, and started NET SENDing messages like "FIRE ME, WILL YA? YOU'll BE SORRY MOTHERFUCKERS!!!"..

They pulled plugs out of the T1 demarq spot, unplugged all the modem lines, disabled the WiFi module we use to test our mobile apps, but the messages persisted!

I could hardly keep a straight face as people were bursting into my office, panic stricken, saying "He's in our computers!! He's going to delete all our files! How's he getting in! How do we stop him?"

Re:my coolest 'hack'

Conversely, it can be fun to work in an office of old-time Win weasels, who know nothing about Unix, but manage to have much cooler workstations than I do. A simple amusement is to wait until they have someone in their office (or on the phone) to whom they are loudly bragging about their technical prowess, and then telnet in and run some nice .au like a toilet flushing.

BTW, our Sun systems have the flush.au installed by default in /usr/demo. I always thought this was very considerate of them, but I do wonder what the intended use for it was...

My latest hack.

I had some cobwebs up in the corner of the tall "cathedral" ceiling of my apartment. I zip-tied my Swiffer to a mop handle, making an extra-long Swiffer.

If you don't think this is a good hack, you have no imagination.

Re:My latest hack.

Two sheets of bounty with a little Pledge sprayed between makes an excellent, cheap replacement for those damn swifter rags.

Re:My latest hack.

Real geeks have their mom clean the cobwebs.

Routers

Many routers (wired and wireless) are free or dirt cheap after mail in rebate. I've attempted to hack cheap belkin and US Robotics routers I've picked up - attempting to pick apart the firmware. The only thing is, once you flash it, if you made one mistake the device is as good as ruined. On the belkin router, I made the kernel out to be a Nucleus Plus kernel with strings with "Aurora" in them scattered throughout. I found a large hunk of gzipped data in the file, but I couldn't find any structures deeper than that. Does anyone know about the structures of this type of firmware, and know how I could take it apart, to at the very least see how it works?

Does this count?

Running solar ignitors to a couple of bottle rockets mounted to the grill of an old Buick Regal, connected to a switch panel in the front?

Ok, maybe not, but it was fun to have bottle rocket launchers in the front of the car.

Once in a while, they actually went where you wanted them to (the rockets, not the car).

Possibilities

Almost any kind of consumer electronic equipment can be modified to do things it wasn't intended to do.

*eyes electric massagers*

You don't saaaay....

Re:Possibilities

"eyes electric massagers"

I once hacked a sybian [sybian.com] into a sanding machine.

Wall mounted alarm clock...

It's easy, with just a standard quad-NAND integrated circuit, to make your alarm clock wall mounted.

1) Hold clock up by power cord, against wall
2) Position IC over power cord
3) Apply hammer to IC, driving pins 1-16 into wall.
4) Connect ground, Vcc, and inputs as desired.

Laminate flooring and electrical system

Home ownership: the ultimate hackers dream.

How about...

building a Apple Lisa (more or less) from the ground up for a class with nothing but the 68000 reference material, the chips, and wire.

Re:How about...

building a Apple Lisa (more or less) from the ground up for a class with nothing but the 68000 reference material, the chips, and wire.

I find that unlikely. Among other quirks, the Apple Lisa has a home-grown MMU, developed in house by engineers who empirically determined what 68000 instructions could be restarted after a page fault, and how. The 68000 was not designed for virtual memory, you see, so the Apple folks had to experiment and create their own software and hardware to make it happen.

I would be surprised if anyone put that much that effort into a class. If you built a 68k computer with a bitmap display, then you have something there, but it's not a Lisa. Don't think that just because the Lisa came out before the first Mac that it's a more primitive system--in fact it's quite the opposite.

Please substantiate your claim!

--Tom

That periscope wigs me out.

If you're looking anywhere other than out your windows or at your dashboard while you're driving, there are issues.

And it's nice to know that my dreams of Internet toast have been fulfilled.

Anyone with a little skill/determination (yeah, that's a slash, not an "and") can hack anything; I think a more interesting article would be about maverick hacks that actually turned out to be useful. Like, say someone turned a toaster into a door-to-door salesman irradiation device. That would be amazingly useful.

you mean like...

I hacked several functioning consumer electronic devices into fully-working doorstops?

Cheap oscilloscope using sound card

I once dremeled a PCB from an old power supply into several pieces, then resoldered and glued it back together so that it still worked, and tried to sell it on eBay as modern art. Unfortunately, no one bit. An interesting hack I've seen is something I think a lot of electronics slashdotters out there should note: Cheap oscilloscope using your sound card. The software is available on the web, just get your signals into at +/- 1 or 2V range, and you have a dual channel low frequency scope that plugs into any sound card. Check the voltage range of line-out to get an idea of what's acceptable. I started making an adapter to provide a high impedance input and scaling the signal down, but got distracted and haven't revisited the project in a while.

Re:Cheap oscilloscope using sound card

I prefer a portable scope [elektor-el...nics.co.uk]. Plus, it puts ancient gameboys to work.

EFI

Reprogramming the fuel injection computer on my car. When you change pretty much anything on the engine (cam, intake, etc...) in order to make it run to full potential, you really need to change the fuel tables.

Plus on 80/90's GM EFI cars, there's a cruise fuel saving routine that's not enabled from the factory. 29 MPG highway from a 350 CI V8 baybee.

MEGASQUIRT!!

If you are interested in EFI, ( even if you wish to keep your stock computer) check out megasquirt [bgsoflex.com]. I have learned more about how EFI works, and I plan to use megaquirt on my 65 barracuda. This type of garage/junkyard technology will keep older vehicles on the road, with better emissions and performance.

you can get premade boxes to do that

they aren't cheap, but a MoTeC ECU [motec.com] will let you play with your injection maps to your little hearts content, along with pretty much everything else that you can electronically control in your engine (uhh...injection mapping, ignition...what else is there?). truly a hacker's dream toy.

Several things, really.

My first big hack was tearing into my radio shack scanning receiver and interfacing the serially programmed PLL tuner IC to the parallel printer port of a PC. Gave my cheapo 8 channel scanner an infinite channel memory and other features.

I've also interfaced a "radio controlled clock" to a PC to automagically set the exact time.

Turned an old CD-ROM drive into a hand-powered LED toy [fieldlines.com] for my son.

Latest interesting project was to convert a box fan motor into a permanent magnet for use in a wind generator... that hasn't worked out too well so far. [fieldlines.com]

Music Gear

Recently I've been studying up on electronics and modifying the electrical components to my basses. If you're a geek and into music this can be a lot of fun. It has the added bonus of helping you as a musician really understand every single part of your signal chain.

There are several reasons why this is cool. The components of a passive pickup system are real simple, allowing you to get started easily. As you build up your base of knowledge you can get involved in much more complex projects, like modifying amplifiers, building your own stomp boxes, etc.

Another reason this is a cool field is that you can approach it from different angles. If you're good with calculus you can design and calculate the frequency response of your filters before you build them and know exactly what you're doing. You can design a whole effect if you want and model it in circuit modelling software. In fact, with some programs I believe you can do that and use a wav file for input to get an idea of how the circuit will sound, although I haven't tried that myself.

If you're a physical experimenter kind of a person you can take existing circuits and see, for example, how a tone knob sounds different when the pot is connected to different values of capacitors. Plus, if your favorite part is building, not designing then there is a huge amount of free schematics for things on the web, kits you can order, etc.

It's loads of fun (pun intended?) and you can really individualize your sound (for better or for worse).

Grill

A Weber Grill, old hair dryer (metal barrel), and various compression fittings hack nicely into a turbo-grill. Just attach the dryer to one of the bottom ash-emptying holes (and turn it (the dryer) on, 'natch). Turns out Alton Brown also did this. He is the ultimate kitchen hacker.

a camera

not quite an electronics hack, and not quite a full modification... more like a hacked add-on accessory...

When the Hasselblad Xpan (makes 24mm x 60 mm panoramic frames on 35mm film) was first marketed, I drooled over the ads, but didnt have the budget for it.

But I did have a medium format Rolleicord TLR (which makes 60mm x 60mm frames on 120 film), and I knew that a 35mm film adapter existed for it, so I shopped around used camera store until I found one that had kits.

Now the full kit prevents you from not using the 35mm mask (to make 24mm x 36mm frames).

Luckily, the store manager had an incomplete kit, which I got at a substantial discount from a complete (collectible priced) kit.

So I used the two parts that serve to hold the 35mm film canister, and used some medical duct tape wound on either end of a 120 film spool to narrow the space for the 35mm film and voila!

Cheap "real panoramic" 35mm photos.

The only downside is that I have to rewind the film in a changebag or in a darkroom.

HP-41C Synthetic Programming

Back in college, I used to love synthetic programming [hpmuseum.org] in an HP-41C. When it was first discovered, one had to use various evil processes (yanking a memory modules, corrupting a magnetic card). The result was programming instructions that HP never intended. With synthetic programming, one could access hidden memory locations, display strange characters, and emit unusual sounds (just be careful with "STO c"). I spent way to much time exploring all of the tricks and documenting what did what.

My favorite little synthetic program made the machine tick ominously like a Geiger counter.

Thanks for bringing back fond memories from 20 years ago.

Kinder, Gentler Children's Toys

My boys are 10 and 13 now, but back when they were more like four and five, family and friends thought it was fun to buy them toys that created noise volumes that made a landing 747 seem quiet in comparison. I took the toys apart and would find the right value resistor that would top off the speaker volume at some level that was at least just under a dull roar. Not the most ingenious of hacks, but very effective.

Happy Trails!

Erick

Re:Kinder, Gentler Children's Toys

I took the toys apart and would find the right value resistor that would top off the speaker volume

Wow, that's a lot more work than putting a piece of tape over the speaker grille.

Kiddie synths, toys, etc.

Anything that makes noise can be used for musical purposes. Tiny kiddie keyboards, Speak n Spells, etc. Always fun to take apart, add audio outputs, extra knobs, buttons etc.

See Reed Ghazala [anti-theory.com], father of circuit bending.

Programmable thermostats

I put the thermistor on a programmable home thermostat on the end of a cable to allow for remote programmable temperature control of reptile cages and aquariums. Half the price of commercial solutions, with more features and higher reliability.

Xbox, the most efficient device to hack

Jesus, the amount of things you can do with a hacked Xbox are insane.

You can turn it into a baby Linux box - Thank God Linux doesn't need much hardware to run well.

You can turn it into a media center - Home brew applications allow for a/v playback of any codec you can think of. Now it even supports HD.

You can turn it into a portable Xbox (Instead of lugging around your games, just put 'em on a HDD)

You can turn it into a homebrew gaming system, with support for stuff like Stepmania (DDR simulator)

You can turn it into an arcade with emulation support for any gaming system that isn't current generation (sans maybe the Sega Saturn).

Well, you get the point. $200 Xbox + $50 mod chip + $100 HDD = $5,000 worth of entertainment equipment

G.I. Joe centrifuge

It was my first electric motor. I was about 9 years old and had extracted my first electric motor from some doomed toy, and figured out how to attach wires manually to the brush leads and a battery and make it run. Unfortunately, as with most things I played around with at that age, I didn't know much about cause and effect.

I believe the motor was originally driven by two 1.5 V AA batteries, and I was using a 9V. (Hey, it's easier to connect!) My plan was to use it as a climbing winch, enabling Snake Eyes (tm) to sneak up on the evil Destro(tm)'s clifftop lair. I tied one end of a 3 foot piece of sewing thread to the motor shaft, and the other to Snake Eyes' left hand. I wedged the motor under a book and connected the battery to winch him to the top!

Little did Snake Eyes know what kind of evil Destro had in store for him. Little also did I know - it happened so fast that I am still fuzzy on some details. At some point, Snake Eyes stopped standing on the ground at the base of my dresser and entered into a state where he was spinning at insane velocities about the motor, attached by a tangled 6 inch piece of thread. I have no memory of a transition between these two states.

The moral of the story - if an evil overlord leaves an electric motor conveniently located for you to winch your way up the cliff face to his mountain fortress, don't use it!

My best "hack"

The best hack I did personally, was to recode the eprom on a Tranz-330 Credit Card terminal. Was able to get the terminal to constantly display the following lines:
Answers: $1.00
Answers w/thought: $2.00
Correct Answers: $4.00
Dumb Answers still free
Visa/MC Accepted...

Sold it on ebay a few months later for like $80.00.

How about the Italian Army rulebook?

A friend of mine (who can hack BGP - respect!) had to do military service back in Italy - so he devoured the Rule Book.

Within weeks he had his unit all wearing beards.

He arrested a senior member of the army who came back to the base too late after a night out.

And the best bit: In the army one's transport to and from home each weekend is paid for. He lives the other side of Europe from Italy, so they offered to fly him. But no - the rules state that it had to be by train (which takes what, a day? a day and a half?) so he ended up spending just a couple of days a week in Italy...

They sent him home soon afterwards. Nicely. Permanently.

Give this guy a system (of whatever kind) and he'll do scary scary things...

squirt gun

When I was in college, my friend and I mounted the nozzle from a squirt gun into the grill of his honda civic. We attached that to the windshield wiper supply line and installed a valve under the dash to swithc from windshield wiper mode to soak unsuspecting pedestrian mode. Not very difficult, but man was that good for days of stupid fun.

Morning simulator

Ever notice how it's so difficult sometimes to wake up when it's dark outside? It seems that I'm at higher risk for getting up late when it's overcast or stormy outside. It seems that the light level triggers how awake you are. If I have to wake up early, I'll usually leave a light on in the room; it helps a lot. But it's not the best solution, and I'd love to smooth out the roughly torn edge between sleep and consciousness when the buzzer screams at you.

I'm building a clock that includes a wall socket. You plug a lamp into the socket, and half an hour before your set wakeup time, the lamp begins glowing. It increases brightness gradually over a half hour so that by the time you need to wake up, you already are. It's not really a new idea, but it's fun. It uses a realtime clock chip, a microcontroller, and a triac for power control. Maybe not so much hacking...I guess it does "hack" a desk lamp into a wakeup alarm notification device.

Most of my other hacks are computer related; for example hacking a Sandisk 6-in-1 memory card reader to work with ALL CompactFlash cards, instead of only the new ones, with a single wire. I hacked a Nintendo R.O.B. into an internet-controlled pan/tilt webcam mount [macetech.com] in an hour or two. Also ran a small server in college which used fetchmail to check for new messages, and would flash one LED over my desk and one in the door's peephole, so I knew I had mail just by looking down the hall from a friend's room. Lots of random stuff like that. My most recent major project was a small CNC machine, the computer, power supply, and driver electronics housed inside the case of an old Yokogawa data analyzer.

Good hacking tool:

PIC processors can be insanely useful for this sort of thing and very cheap (most around $10) and easy to get, and once you've got the basics down (which can seem a bit daunting at first) they are very easy to learn and program to do pretty much whatever you want. The playstation mod chips are cheap miniture 8-pin PICs usually - just to give you an idea of what they can do, and some of the more advanced models have RS232 (i think) builtin so you can directly interface it with your PC. Add to that some cheap easy to use wireless modules (they just take a power supply and you stick the on/off binary signal in and thats all you need, takes 2 minutes) you can do some nifty remote controlled things. Basically anything from just switching something on and off or blinking some leds (which can be programmed in minutes) to full fledged computing can be done with these babys. They have loads of extras too - analog-digital converters, eeprom memory, high-current switching and more.

Remote key-loggers anyone? ;)

The PIC makers [microchip.com]
More stuff [brouhaha.com]

R/C cars

When I was in middle school I came across an old cheapo 9.6v R/C truck. I took the wires off of the motor and wired it to a homebuilt relay that I made out of a small motor and some aluminum foil (motor comes on, foil on the arm spins and makes contact to more foil, completing the circut. Reverse to stop). Through the relay I connected 2 more 9.6v batteries directly to the motor.

Holy shit that thing was fast. It didn't last very long, was not wired to go backwards, and couldn't turn without flipping over, and took 3 battery packs, but it was fast!

Foreign hardware

I was gifted an Mp3 player that came from China. Unfortunately, it also came with Chinese instructions (though the unit had English on the display and buttons) and a 200-240V adaptor (5V 600mA output).

This was a fairly sensitive unit, so I wanted to be careful about the voltage. A decent step-up transformer for 110-220V is around $70 here. It's also not as easy as one things to find a decent priced 5V/600mA adaptor (most are about 300mA, and not all that "stable").

I eventually came to the bright conclusion that computer power leads have a 5V connector, so I made an adaptor for the front of my PC. I then removed the original 200V adaptor and simply connected the power lead to a plug that fits in the PC. Viola, my MP3 player now charges nicely and plays tunes while I'm on the go.

RFC 2324: Coffee Pot Protocol

Does this version of the protocol support RFC 2423 [faqs.org], the HTCPCP (Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol)?

I hack my building's elevator

Bear with me here, this is legitemate and not a joke.

After hours, the desk attendant is replaced by a rent-a-cop. These rent-a-cops, to make things convinient for themselves, are in the practice of comandering one of the elevators so that it only moves when they put their key in.

Similarly, the cleaning people, when moving from floor to floor, leave their wheeled carts on the elevator and disable the movement of the elevator to save them the trouble of waiting on an elevator and moving their carts out of the elevator.

This has, at times, annoyed me. So I figured out that if I enter the elevator and [b]hold down[/b] the floor button, the elevator door will close and I will move to my floor.

This mischief of mine is mostly directed at the rent-a-cops because when I enter the building it is easist for me to just grab their elevator and ride it up, leaving them thinking that they didn't set it right.

However, the bigger impact is on the cleaning people, for when I take their elevator, I'm also taking their wheeled carts, and it must be a pain in the butt to try get back that elevator (one of three). I mean, they push a return elevator button, and it's 1:3 chance that it will be the right one.... every time! Because of this, I'm much less likely to hax0rz their elevator.

My MuVo2 for a 4GB Microdrive

For people in digital camera circles this is likely old news, but my latest hack was last night. I removed the 4GB Microdrive that came in my MuVo2 (total was $198 including taxes and shipping), formatted it appropriately, and shoved it into my 10D. Now I've got room for 588 RAW images on a single card.

The other half of the hack was to get my old 1GB microdrive working in the MuVo. It required a reformat of the drive, and a re-flash of the firmware to get the magic files back on the drive.

silly putty timers

I used silly putty to create "timers" for instance to turn off a light switch. By dragging a wire through a blob of silly putty, using gravity or a rubber band, you can trigger lots of things. Silly putty by its nature makes for a relatively constant rate of travel and you can pretty accurately time things.

Answering machine

I hacked a cheap Radio Shack answering machine that used standard cassette tapes to never rewind the outgoing message tape. I could then put multiple outgoing messages on the tape that would play a different message to each caller. Gave my friends some variety and me an easy way to tell how many calls where received while I was out.

Until the night when I got someone who just kept redialing the phone to hear all the outgoing messages. (Back in the day when telemarketers did their own dialing, would note interesting answering machines, and then call them up again outside work hours and share them with friends.)

Speak like the Devil

I saw a comedian the other day on Comedy Central who made fun of the good ol' Speak & Spell. He could almost duplicate the voice from that wonderful learning tool and said things demonically like, "A, B, C, D, E, F, G... I will eat your family." Very funny skit, but it also reminded me of a "hack" I did to my Speak & Spell when I was 6 or so that awakened the true demon of the dictionary.

I had one of the original Speak & Spells with the raised-button letters (unlike the later models that were completely flat). On all Speak & Spells there is a "Code" mode where up to 8 letters can by typed and transposed into a code that only people with other Speak & Spells could decipher (ROT13, or something else very weak). One day I grew bored with this mode and leaned on all of the buttons at once. This caused the multi-directional character LEDs to all light up like 8 little boxes. I then started pressing the apostrophe key. Each box would turn into an apostrophe. Boop... Boop... Boop... Boop... Boop... Boop... Boop...

As I pressed the apostrophe key one more time to erase the last malformed chaacter, I awakened the demon within the Speak & Spell. All of a sudden the Speak & Spell went into the "Say It" mode where it would teach particular words. Normally, it would show a word like "OCEAN" and the speaker would state, "Say it... OCEAN." But in this crazy mode I had put it into, the speaker would shout incoherently. "Say it...HUGAXCKHUAAAHRETA!!!" It would keep on doing this, screaming incoherently until the enter key was pressed, at which time it would pick a random word and shout it out. "MOTHER!"

It definitely made my parents laugh, and the same Speak & Spell works to this day with the same bug. Keep in mind that the Voyager space probe also had less memory than a Speak & Spell, too...

Some other hacks I have done..

I have done a few "less interesting" hacks - back in the day...

* Hacked into the school PA system on the last day of my senior yearof high school. Took an old Peavey 400 amplifier, tied it directly into the 70v speaker line for the schools PA system (having unquestioned access to the theatre at school really helped). 5 minutes before the end of first period, weird noises start coming out the school PA system. Best part was the school principal approaching me later that day and asking HOW I did it, not IF I did it! THAT was fun!

* Probably doesn't count under the PC limitation, but I also hacked TRSDOS on an old TRS-80 Model 1. I discovered an undocumented command in the Disk Basic Interpreter (CMD"#"# if you wanted to know). Not being content with this - and TRSDOS Disk Basic had no way to pull a directory of a disk drive, I took the disk directory command from the TRSDOS system library and grafted it onto the code for the above found command. Result, I had a version of TRSDOS Disk Basic that could do something that Tandy/Radio Shack said was impossible to do - I could call a disk directory from BASIC without exiting the BASIC interpreter.

That was back in the day - truely fun times!

Car LED clock module becomes coffee maker

About 20 years ago I 'hacked' a car LED clock module by wiring some ribbon cable to the relevant parts of the PCB and mounting the unit with a 12V transformer+PSU, programming switches and a 10A mains relay in a small case - the end result was a unit into which I could plug my coffee percolator and have it 'brew-up' at the pre-set time in the morning! Because it also had a 59min count down timer, I could also set the coffee brewing at other times knowing that the timer wouldn't let the percolator boil dry!

My most recent hack was to make up a short lead that runs from a universal (90-250v) multi-voltage 2A DC power supply. On the 'output' side of the lead is a 12V car 'cigar lighter' socket into which I can plug a Belkin 12V 'car' to 5V USB socket adaptor - now with the relevant leads I can charge my phone or PDA or use anything else that normally takes power from a USB port - this means I only have to take one power unit with me on holiday or on business rather than one PSU for phone, another for PDA, another for digital camera, NiMh battery charger etc.

Microwave Oven

When I was growing up, we had a microwave oven in our kitchen whose clock could be set by punching in the time on the number keypad, and hitting the "Clock Set" button. Pretty standard, realy.

So one night, with more free time than is strictly healthy, my friend Steve Roche and I were sitting around microwaving things, when one of us decided to set the time on the clock to "6:66", just to see what would happen.

Fortunately for us, the programmers of the firmware didn't include any validation code, because it let us set the time to 6:66. We sat there for a minute, debating what would happen next. Would it change to 7:07? 6:67? 6:07? 6:67 it was. What would happen, then, after 6:69? Again we debated -- would it go to 6:70? By that time we sort of assumed it would.

Well, it fooled us but good -- after 6:69, it invented a new number . The display read "6:6^", or something like that. We watched with fascination as it made up five more brand new digits, before changing to 6:70.

Damned if it wasn't using hexadecimal.

Then we microwaved some wormy flour, which stunk up the house in some awful, indescribable way, and ended the microwave experiments for the evening.

Ultimate hacker

Wow. Heloise could totally own this thread.

More of a practical joke, but could be hacking

Back when I was in high school, I had a friend who always left his old 1970's Mercury Capri parked at his place of work unlocked with the keys in it. He had just installed a new stereo, but didn't complete the job, so there were all sorts of loose wires hanging from under his dash board. One day when I drove past his place of work, I saw his car there and remembered I had an old ahoooooogah horn sitting in my trunk. I decide to stop by and see what kind of evil things I could do to him. I worked for about 20 minutes sticking the horn under the drivers seat, grounding it to a seat bolt, and connecting the positive lead to a switched terminal on his fuse box. When he got out of work that night and started his car, things got pretty amusing. At first he couldn't figure out what was going on, then once he realized what was happening, he started banging around on the horn to shut it off. He finally managed to get the horn to shut off by knocking the ground wire loose, unfortunately, since power was still running to it, it went off everytime he hit a bump. He drove about 5 miles home with that horn going off under his seat, needless to say, he didn't think it was nearly as funny as I did.

Oh, the things you can do with a Grand Caravan...

All right... I know I'm probably going to be giving my web server a Slashdot-class load test by doing this, [bluefeathertech.com] but whattahey... If it crashes, I know I didn't build it right to begin with.

In short: The page is one I wrote up detailing the efforts I've put in, over the last three or so years, to "hack" our minivan into a heavy-duty comms vehicle. Can you tell I take my amateur radio hobby pretty seriously? ;-)

It also has an onboard computer with GPS and mapping software, which has saved me from getting hopelessly lost in new territory more times than I can count.

Yes, I have been "first responder" in a couple of traffic incidents. This is why I keep a trauma kit in the back. Haven't had to dig into it seriously yet, and I pray I never really have to, but it's nice to know it's there.

Chapter 2 in the book is my aquariums!

I was contacted by the author of this book last year and gave him permission to use my plans for building a Macquarium. So, I am chapter 2 of the "Hardware Hacking Projects For Geeks" book

Woo Hoo!

Anyway, my aquariums are here [techquarium.com].

The plans Scott used for his book are here [techquarium.com]. They are kind of old and busted (there's no link to them any more on my site) and I think the author did a great job.

Explosives

Back when I was about twelve, I found a book on fireworks.

My first try at making black powder, I used a peanut butter jar to heat the charcoal, sulphur, potassium nitrate and rubbing alcohol. I found out what "pyrex" means when the bottom fell out of the jar.

My next attempt worked. I had a nice, big pile of dry powder. I wet a piece of cotton string and rolled it in the powder. When it was dry, I lit it to see if it would burn. It did, FAST! I dropped the fuse...in the pile of powder. Luckily, my eyebrows are very white, so my parents didn't notice they were missing.

I was telling this story to my 10 year old son today, as an explanation of why it was a bad idea to try to make a flamethrower out of bic lighter. Instead, he thought it was cool and wanted to know why I didn't try a third time.

Damn genes!

OK, really long time ago...

Let's see if I can remember this. I must have been around 14 at the time, and my goal was to make a burglar alarm for my bedroom which would keep a record of unauthorized entries but not be too annoying (so as to avoid pissing off my parents if they triggered it).

First step was the sensor. I taped a wire to a small piece of aluminum foil on the inside of the door near the doorknob, then another wire to the doorknob itself with a wadded ball of aluminum foil at the end of the wire. I bent the wire so that the two pieces of aluminum foil would touch as long as the doorknob was in its normal position, but if you turned the knob the contact would be broken.

This and an AC adapter that produced 9vDC were connected to the relay in a Radio Shack 200-in-1 electronic project kit, and wired such that the relay would remain on as long as the circuit was closed, but switch off and remain off once the circuit was broken.

To the other side of the relay I connected a battery pack holding four C-cell NiCd batteries, and the tape recorder for my Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 laptop computer, such that when the relay switched off, power would be applied to the tape recorder.

On the computer (with its own AC adapter) was a BASIC program I wrote. The first thing it did was attempt to read a file off the tape. To do so, it would switch the tape player on, wait until it found the file it was looking for, read the file, and switch the tape off.

Let's review. Normally with the doorknob in its normal position the relay remains on. When someone turns the knob, the circuit is broke and the relay switches off (and remains off until it is reset, regardless of the knob). When the relay switches off, power is applied to the tape recorder. The computer has been waiting to read a file off the tape. The first thing recorded on the tape is the the file the computer is looking for. The volume is turned up on the tape recorder so that when the tape is played, it makes a really obnoxious screeching sound for a few seconds - this serves as an alarm. Think of the sound of a modem handshaking; same idea.

As soon as the computer has finished reading the file off the tape, it logs the occurrance and displays a message on the screen with a timestamp. It then switches the tape back on. After the file on the tape is a recording of my own voice saying something - I don't recall what. The computer waits an appropriate amount of time for the message to finish playing, then switches the tape off. The computer then beeps, and keeps beeping every few seconds for awhile, then shuts up.

So there's the alarm. Now I just have to be able to get in and out myself without triggering it. Getting out is easy - since the relay circuit is only broken by turning the doorknob, I simply open the door, reset the alarm, and close the door behind me without turning the knob. To get in, though, I need a way to deactivate the alarm from outside (before turning the doorknob).

So, I make a keycard. I use a small piece of cardboard, with more aluminum foil and masking tape. I tape non-touching strips of aluminum foil over one edge of the cardboard, connecting two of the strips together and leaving the others not touching. I now have my keycard. The card reader involves more of the same materials, mounted on the wall outside the door with a piece of telephone wire running to it. When the card is pressed against the reader properly, each strip on the card should touch a strip on the reader. The two contacts on the reader that correspond to the two that are wired together on the card are wired in parallel with the doorknob sensor, so that holding the card in place will maintain the relay circuit while opening the door. Some of the remaining contacts on the reader are wired in parallel with the other side of the relay so that if they are shorted together, the tape player will come on - the idea being, if you try to forge my keycard by shorting random contacts, you'll trip the alarm instead of disabling it. I

Opel Display

Hello, I hacked the Opel display. Normally it shows the RDS information of the carradio. Now it shows the revolutions per minute of the engine. I used a PIC processor to measure the rpm and talk to the display. www.eelkevisser.nl/display.htm [eelkevisser.nl]