Even though we’ve seen dozens of Kinect hacks over the years, there are a few problems with the Kinect hardware itself. The range of the Kinect sensor starts at three feet, a fact not conducive to 3D scanner builds. Also, it’s not possible to connect more than one Kinect to a single computer – something that would lead [...]

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Part of the fun with old computers is playing some old school games, and while you could play them with a keyboard it is much more fun with a joystick. You can get old joysticks all day long on auction sites, but you have to watch out. Some are digital, which wont work for many [...]

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[Nerdindustries] had a interesting idea; “what if you could just flip a switch and call someone?”. This happens a lot, especially in companies where your trying to catch a certain someone who is always swamped in phone calls. The Phone Box is a basic Nokia cellphone that has a number stored into its speed dial. [...]

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In case you were asleep at the wheel, here are our top stories of the week. Our most popular post was one that shows you how to make your own ‘personal assistant’ using Wolfram Alpha, text to speech software, and the phone network. It still won’t get your coffee though. You’ll just have to do [...]

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[Ladyada] has been working on FLORA, her wearable electronics platform, for a few months now. Even though it has just been announced the specs look much better than the previous queen of the hill, the Arduino LilyPad. Going down the spec sheet for both the FLORA and the LilyPad, we see that FLORA has twice as much [...]

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It doesn’t take much imagination at all to see what a horrible effect this censorship could have on sites like Hackaday. Please do your part to stop internet censorship. Imagine how many companies would rather us not share with you how our brilliant readers have hacked their hardware to do bigger and better things than [...]

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Flashlights are so 20th Century. Be it the incandescent type that popped up very early on, or LED models with came around in the 90′s, there’s not much excitement to the devices. But [Sriranjan Rasakatla] is doing his best to change that. This is his WAY-GO Torch, an intelligent flashlight (a Smart Light?) that will [...]

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Samsung will be merging their homegrown Bada OS for smart phones with Tizen. No time frame has been set for the merger however, it is expected that Samsung will be releasing at least two new smart phones this year(2012) itself running on the Tizen pla…

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PC-BSD 9.0 (Isotope edition) has been released. PC-BSD is a FreeBSD variant operating system that is targeted specifically at desktop users / end users. One of the uniqueness of PC-BSD is its PBIs or Push Button Installers that allow you to install an…

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FreeBSD engineering team has released FreeBSD ver 9.0. This is the first release from the stable/9 branch, which improves on stable/8 and adds many new features.

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For more news, tips, and reviews on all things Linux, Open source and Free …

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For those of you who haven’t been paying attention in class, here is the best of what has hit our blog this past week: In the #1 spot is a post about a project where some pretty ambitious hackers found a way to run Linux on a digital picture frame. Bravo! Next up is a [...]

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[John Zitterkopf] is in the middle of restoring a vintage Sega Star Trek Captain’s Chair arcade game for the upcoming 2012 Texas Pinball festival, though one prerequisite for the show is that the game supports some sort of free play mode. At this point he doesn’t have the option of tracking down a freeplay ROM [...]

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[Thomas Renck] recently picked up a 1000mW wireless video transmitter that he ultimately planned to mount in an RC plane. Before he strapped it on a plane to potentially kiss it goodbye for good, he wanted to play with it a while to see what it was capable of. After a friend helped him determine [...]

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[Eric Gregori] recently spent some time messing around with a Hexbug Spider, and wrote in to share some modifications he made to the toy. In its unaltered form the robot can be controlled remotely, and while it’s fun to play with, the excitement is short lived. Using a TI MSP430 along with a small motor [...]

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[Rob Spanton’s] house is equipped with a rather cheap oven, which was discovered while his roommate tried using it to bake part of a wedding cake. If someone took a shower during the baking process, a large portion of unit’s gas pressure was diverted to the boiler, causing the oven to shut off completely. This [...]

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[Ian Cole’s] son is learning to play the drums on an electronic drum set, and he wanted a way to continue practicing during his frequent visits to his grandparents’ house. [Ian] had picked up a Spikenzielabs “Drum Kit Kit All-Inclusive” (DKKAI) earlier this summer, and set out to build an easily transportable drum set. The [...]

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Hackaday regular [Mikey Sklar] is no stranger to body modifications. He enjoys tweaking his body in ways that help him with day to day tasks, including a ruler tattoo on his arm and an RFID chip embedded in the web of his hand. Lately, he has been toying around with a less invasive means of [...]

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The folks at The Quad Cities Collaboration and Hackerspace (QC Co-Lab) were trying to find something to build for their first big project, and had to look no further than the wall for inspiration. The north end of their facility is home to a huge 15×17 glass block wall that happens to face a well-traveled [...]

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2011 was an interesting year here at Hackaday. We have about 24% more viewers now than we did last year. We started producing our own video content and we have shown some pretty interesting projects in our daily posts. In this post, we are gathering together the best of the best. Our #1 post for [...]

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[Duncan Murdock] received a Canon DSLR camera for Christmas and wanted a remote shutter release to go along with it. Since nary a store was open on Christmas, he was pretty much out of luck. Scrounging around in his parts drawer, he found all sorts of goodies waiting to be reused, including a knockoff Wii [...]

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As winter is officially upon us, we’re pretty sure that the last thing most of you are thinking about is mowing your lawn. We would argue that it’s actually the ideal time to do so – that is, if you are interested in automating the process a bit. [Robert Smith] has spent a lot of [...]

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A new version of GIMP – the free graphics suite par excellence – has been released. GIMP ver 2.7.4 , which is termed as an unstable release leading to a stable version 2.8 sometime in January next year, brings a lot of new features.
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For m…

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HP has contributed webOS to the open source community. webOS is a mobile OS  originally created by Palm. It uses HTML, CSS, and JavaScript heavily in the application layer of the stack. This is an obvious advantage for developers as applications can …

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[Jim] wrote in to share some work he did with GE Color Effects LED lights in an effort to create a light display for his boat. He saw our coverage of the Color Effects G-35 hacking efforts by DeepDarc last year, and knew that they would be prefect for the boat. He did some careful [...]

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[Andrzej] loves his Nokia N900, noting that it makes a great portable gaming device. Since it supports a wide array of emulators, it’s perfect for indulging his gaming nostalgia on the go. He says that the one downside to the N900 is that its keyboard doesn’t make gaming easy, nor comfortable. To make gaming a [...]

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The folks over at Adafruit had this idea to make “merit badges” for different achievements. One of the major achievements they mentioned was having your project posted to Hackaday. They asked our approval and got it. The badges have finally come in, so we are happy to announce them. You can purchase them directly from [...]

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Although Todd Harrison could be one of many of our readers (and most of our writers), it was nice to see one of “us” featured in [EEWeb]. [HAD] has featured him before in posts such as this recent one about replacing solder tab batteries. What may be interesting to many is that soon after [Todd] [...]

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In case you missed them the first time around, here are our most popular posts from the past week. In first place was a repeat from last week of how you can make a privacy screen from an old LCD display. We want to serve up fresh stuff in this post though so we’ll add [...]

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[Chris] says that he’s been pretty busy lately, leaving little opportunity for hacking. However he did manage to find a little time to put together a small project that has occupied his to-do list for a while – a floppy drive music controller. We have seen hacks that use microcontrollers to actuate floppy drive motors [...]

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It’s been a little while since we talked about HDCP around here, but recent developments in the area of digital content protection are proving very interesting. You might remember that the Master Key for HDCP encryption was leaked last year, just a short while after Intel said that the protection had been cracked. While Intel [...]

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