[Basil Shikin] was thinking about different types of locks, and was trying to come up with a locking solution that he had yet to see. It dawned on him that he had never come across a lock triggered by music, so he set off to construct one of his own. He ordered a wooden chest [...]

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[linux-works] picked up an old power supply from eBay, and as it was built back in the 60’s or 70’s, it was in need of a little TLC. One thing that immediately caught his eye was the condition of the knobs, dials, and banana plug receptacles – they were dull and faded, showing off 40+ [...]

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[Pete Mills] recently bought himself a motorcycle, and as people are known to do, they start trying to scare him with gruesome stories of cycling accidents once they hear about his purchase. While he tries to shrug them off as people simply not minding their own business, something must have resonated with him, because he [...]

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[Simon] had a Rockford Fosgate Punch 601s amplifier in his car, and while it was a great piece of equipment, he wanted a little more power behind his stereo system. It turns out that with just a handful of parts and a bit of soldering work, he was able to increase his amplifier’s output by [...]

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Whether or not you are a fan of the first installment of the Star Wars prequels, you have to see what [Lorenz Lnggrtnr] and [Renee Hoffmeister] have put together for the movie’s 3D debut. In an attempt to capture the essence of Star Wars in a new fashion, they constructed a large barrel organ from [...]

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Dr Richard Stallman says people who love their Freedom should stop using Facebook.

On a mailing list of the MIT CSAIL, when some students started a thread asking for more votes on their Facebook page, Dr Richard Stallman responded as follows -
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In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, Google announced Project Glass, a real life head-mounted computer that’s actually useful. Glass is one of the projects being developed by Google X, the super-cool R&D department inside Google. On board are [Babak Parviz], [Steve Lee] and [Sebastian Thrun] (a.k.a. the guy you learned AI from [...]

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Mutt is a free email client that you can run in your terminal. However, some people who would like to see more development take place in Mutt find the Mutt developers too conservative and not receptive to changes.
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If you’ve got a pet that roams freely in and out of your house, you may find yourself wanting to more closely regulate how they come and go. [tareker] was looking to keep his cat indoors at night when dangerous animals might be lurking in the neighborhood, but he didn’t want it to become a [...]

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If you’ve got a pet that roams freely in and out of your house, you may find yourself wanting to more closely regulate how they come and go. [tareker] was looking to keep his cat indoors at night when dangerous animals might be lurking in the neighborhood, but he didn’t want it to become a [...]

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Gentoo Linux has released a new edition of its LiveDVD – ver 12.1. It comes choke full of software and offers a chance for ordinary folks to try out Gentoo on their machines without making changes to their hard disk.
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It seems that more often than not, [Steffest] finds himself inspired to rock out on his guitar without a percussion section to back him up. Like any enterprising hacker/musician would be wont to do, he built a robotic drummer to join in when he got the urge to play. His DrummerBot is driven using an [...]

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Red Hat recently became the first open source company that could garner one billion US dollars in annual revenue. To celebrate this new milestone, Red Hat is offering $100,000 US dollars to the future of open source.
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DIP, SOIC, BGA, MLF or QFP?  None, so it seems. This morning I received an email from Texas Instruments. Normally, these things go right into the spambox but this one was a bit unique. You can now buy some of TI’s IC’s without any packaging. Yup, just trays full of silicon squares. From TI’s point of view miniaturization has reached [...]

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[Michael Ruppe] was working one day when a man named [Kevin] approached him for a bit of help with a project. It just so happened that [Kevin] was in the middle of constructing a DIY residential elevator and he needed assistance putting a control board together. [Kevin] had no problem casting a forklift ram into [...]

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According to our CMS calculations (we use WordPress), this is Hackaday’s ten-thousandth published posts. We meant to build a confetti cannon, but we were too busy looking for interesting projects to feature multiple times per day. We’d like to thank everyone who documents their projects to share what they’ve been up to in basements, garages, or hackerspaces [...]

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[Kyle Gabriel] moved into a house with a nice tract of land behind it, but due to his busy schedule he had yet to plant the garden he so desperately wanted. He worried that his hectic life and busy hours would lead to accidentally neglecting his garden, so he built a water collection and automated [...]

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When [Chris Nafis] built an addition onto his historical home he found that a Radon problem, previously mitigated with plenty of concrete, seemed to rear its ugly head yet again. He eventually resigned himself to installing a Radon fan and detector – the latter of which offered no way to store measurement data. He wanted [...]

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[Aaron Horeth] had a pair of headphones that had seen better days, and before he tossed them out, he realized that he could use them to build a set of custom cans. He had always wanted a pair of headphones with a detachable cord to prevent damage when tripped over, and thought that his old [...]

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GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) is a compiler system produced by the GNU project supporting various programming languages. It is the standard compiler used by most Unix-like operating systems such as Linux, BSD, and Mac OS X.
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There is no shortage of government and entertainment-related agencies chomping at the bit to shut down the Pirate Bay for good. While the group has not suffered a permanent service ending raid like [Kim Dotcom] and the Megaupload crew, they are always thinking up novel ways to ensure that the site can endure whatever law [...]

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We really love when friendly competition leads to excellent hacking. Not too long ago, we showed you a nicely done Sega Genesis portable put together by console hacker [Downing] who challenged fellow hacker [EVIL NOD] to a build off. The two were hacking Sega consoles, [Downing’s] for personal use, while [EVIL NOD] was working on [...]

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Linux kernel 3.3 has been released with a few new features. The significant among them being the merging of Android code with Linux. What this means is, in the future, you will be able to install and run Android Apps in Linux without needing any modifi…

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So what’s better than a battery gun? A full auto pneumatic battery gun of course!  [ukilliheal], decided to build one of these, and show us the results in his video after the break.  After turning the gun on, this contraption shoots at a pretty impressive rate of fire (although, apparently not as fast as some [...]

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DSLRs aside, the price of digital cameras these days can make it easy to consider just tossing your old one out when it breaks. [Leonidas Tolias] had another idea, and with a few broken cameras he had on hand he constructed a slick little pocket-sized projector. The project started out as a pair of lenses [...]

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While young children have the tiny hands and fingers that most hackers/tinkerers wish they possessed from time to time, their fine motor skills aren’t always up to par when it comes to operating complicated electronics. People are always looking for ways to make their home entertainment systems accessible to their kids, and [Humpadilly] is no [...]

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[Andrew] recently got the authorization to install Linux on his work PC, and he was looking for a way to control his music without relying on keyboard shortcuts to do so. Additionally, he wanted an unmistakable visual cue when he received messages in Pidgin, so he decided to build an external input/notification box. The control [...]

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[Troy Wright] acquired a lot of twenty broken Dell Axim PDAs. This type hardware was quite popular a decade ago, but looks archaic when compared to a modern cell phone. That’s why he was able to get them for a song. After a bit of work he managed to resurrect eight of the units, but was dismayed [...]

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Arch Linux is a rolling Linux distribution. This means you need to install Arch Linux only once, and your system will remain up to date forever. The target audience for Arch Linux are people who are comfortable in editing text files to configure their …

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One of the most important tools for any hacker or maker is organization. You might consider it more of a concept rather than a physical tool, but regardless of how you like to frame it, ensuring your tools and components are (nearly) always where they should be is key. As the odds and ends add [...]

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