Tech news – Page 2337 – Blancer.com Tutorials and projects

Roll Your Own 3D Video For Under $300

You’ve gone out and seen Avatar and now your ready to summon your inner Cameron and shoot the next blockbuster 3D movie but you just can’t seem to come up with the millions of dollars needed to purchase the camera gear you would need, fear now more because you too can now create a super-duper 3D film for under $300 (how was my infomercial pitch there?).

Some great weekend hackers have put together a shopping list of materials needed to pull this off.

A couple Kodak Zx1 Digital Camcorders
L-Shaped bracket
Some nylon washers, wingnuts and screws
A basic tripod

I’m sure you could use other cameras and adjust the bracket to suit, but the concept is pretty simple. They have a full write up on how the pulled it off including all the editing that is needed to produce the stereo image. Check out the video after the break of some home made 3D footage.

Roll Your Own 3D Video For Under $300 originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2010/02/22.

Brushduino – Arduino Meets Toothbrush

You knew it was bound to happen. We have seen Arduino’s used in everything from toasters to coffee machines and now we see the Brushduino. The cool hacks knows when you are brushing via an accelerometer that you attach to your toothbrush. By knowing what your doing the unit will tell you when it’s time to move to the next section of your mouth.

“It’s basically all LED’s. There are 6 white LED’s that correspond to the six regions of the mouth that I want to highlight, there are four green LED’s for showing progress and there’s a speaker I pulled out of some broken toy that’s there to entertain the children while they brush. The multi-strand wire connected to the three analog inputs on the Arduino also supplies 3.3v and ground to the accelerometer. The cable itself is an old ADB keyboard cable from my old Mac SE/30 from back in the day. It’s been laying in my junk box for ages. There are also some current limiting resistors for the LED’s and a bunch more of that lovely AWG30 solid core wire I like so much.”

Link to Brushduino

Brushduino – Arduino Meets Toothbrush originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2010/02/23.

Nintendo DSi LL Here On March 28th

Nintendo fans rejoice, you too will be able to cash in on the DSi LL on March 28th of this year. The fuller DSi comes at you with a larger 4.2-inch screen and a full-size pen stylus as compared to the is original brother.

Nintendo has also added support for eBooks. Although you will be able to flip the unit sideways and use it in a traditional book format you won’t be able to read those book unless you plugin a special DS cartridge.

The new DSI LL will hit store shelves on March 28th for $190. The eBook system will come at a later date with a 100 Classic Books title shipping around June 15th.

Nintendo DSi LL Here On March 28th originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2010/02/24.

WiFi Door Opener

We have seen our fair share of door opening hacks. Remember the secret knock door lock? That was pretty awesome, but what if I tell you that you can unlock your door from any wifi device?

The guys over at Sunlight Labs have done just that. By using a WRT54GL and some creative hacking that have wired up their wireless router to buzz open their front door.

So how does this all work? Well, let’s start with the router. It’s a Linksys WRT54GL, a still-Linux-friendly descendant of the WRT54G, the router which jump-started the custom firmware scene. There are a lot of custom router firmwares available — DD-WRT, Tomato, Gargoyle — and they can all make your consumer-grade router do some professional-grade things. For this project I used OpenWRT, the system on which many of those other projects are based. It’s got a much steeper learning curve than those other distros — you definitely need to be comfortable with the command line — but it lets you build a custom firmware with exactly the components you want. With some tweaking I was able to create a firmware that included a stripped-down version of Python, but which still fit into the WRT54GL’s meager 2MB flash memory. (Like the Arduino, Python turned out to be overkill, but at the time I expected to need it — and it’s always nice to have it handy.)

Link to Door Opener Science Project

WiFi Door Opener originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2010/02/24.

Create a RJ-45 Cable Tester

DIY RJ-45 Cable Tester

Cable testers can be super expensive, but if your trying to trouble shoot a cable drop or run then you know how valuable one can be.

Our favorite kids over at Instructables have a great how to on building your own on the super cheap. A quick trip to your local big box home improvement store and your favorite electronics store (hell even radio shack should it all) and a few bucks is all you will need to build this.

Besides your basic DIY hacking tools you will also need the following …

8 LED’s
20cm of Cat5 Cable
9V Battery Clip and Battery
Wall Mount Box
2 RJ-45 Female Jacks
220ohm Resistor
Female RJ-45 Mount Plate

Once you have all your components assembled head on over to Instructables and make your way through all the sets.

Photoshop On Your iPhone

10 years ago most of us would struggle with not only the cost of Photoshop but the cost of the hardware needed just to run it let alone do anything with it. Amazingly enough in todays day and age you can now carry Photoshop in your pocket.

Alright, alright, it’s not CS3 or anything it’s actually 1.0, but it’s still super cool on the geek factor scale. This demo was released to about 50 people who recently attended the Photoshop 20th anniversary event and will never see the light of day on the app store. Doesn’t mean that I want it, I want it bad!

Check the video out after the break of Photoshop in action on an iPhone.

Photoshop On Your iPhone originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2010/02/21.

Boxee Set To Roll Out A Set-Top Box

Boxee Set-Top

Ohh you Americans with your awesome ability to watch full episodes of TV shows via Hulu and Boxee. Us Canadians are only stuck with the ability to watch our Canadian programming in some crappy player on some crappy Canadian broadcasters website. Actually it really isn’t all that bad, but then again, you have Boxee, we have awesome beer. You can always use a VPN is you really wanted to use it.

Boxee just announced that it will be releasing a set-top box that will run their fantastic software. There really isn’t much details on the upcoming device but then again all it really has to do is have a hard drive inside and HDMI out, no? It’s what’s inside that counts, the Boxee software.

Hopefully one day we will see Boxee up here in Canada with having to go through hoops to use it and with a connected device that costs oh let’s say under $200 to power it, you might never need cable or satellite again.

[Link to Boxee Box]

Boxee Set To Roll Out A Set-Top Box originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2009/11/13.

Turn Any NAS Drive Into A Time Machine Drive

NAS Time Machine

Time Machine is a great built-in feature in OS X. When Apple first announced that they would be offering the ability to backup and restore your files and system with the ease of use that we have come to know and love from Apple I was ecstatic. Then I found out that you had to have a physical drive connected to your machine to utilize it, or you’d have to purchase an expensive Apple made NAS product (Time Capsule) to use it without a physical drive connected to the machine.

Many hacks have been released that allow you to use any NAS drive as a Time Machine drive. All you really need to do is some shell code and create a sparse image, but now someone has taken all of the dirty work away from you and released a simple AppleScript that will get you up and running with any headache’s.

[Link to Time Machine NAS AppleScript]

Turn Any NAS Drive Into A Time Machine Drive originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2009/11/13.

PSP GO FW 6.10 Hacked?

PSP Go

A video that has been flowing around the inter-tubes shows a PSP Go running firmware 6.10 running a Genesis Emulator. This can only mean that the Go’s 6.10 firmware has been hacked, no?

According to PSP Hacks ….

Good News! – Well Neon says it is and if this video is anything to go by then we may be inclined to believe him. The video shows a PSP Go running a Genesis Emulator and the hack is apparently a kernel level exploit.

Now for the bad new, Neon says he has no plans on releasing the hack, whether he is just playing hard to get is not yet apparent but it will no doubt lead to many pessimists insisting that the cake is a lie.

Does this mean that we might soon be able to use the internal 16 GB of memory in the Go for custom firmware goodness? I sure hope so.

[Via PSP Hacks]

PSP GO FW 6.10 Hacked? originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2009/11/13.

The C64 iPhone Emulator Is Back Baby

C 64

People in their 30’s rejoice, you may now relive your youth on your iPhone, again. The Commodore 64 emulator is available again in the iTunes App Store. (Check the video of it in action after the break)

If you don’t remember, back in June Apple removed it from the app store claiming that it violated the rules on launching executable code (Uhmmm, isn’t that what all emulators do?).

The only downside to this new version is that it can only play games that are downloaded from the App Store itself, no uploading of your own ROMs. I’m hoping someone out there will whip up a hack so that we can get such classics as “California Games” and “Bards Tale” back on. Oh the memories.

[Link to iPhone C64 Emulator]

The C64 iPhone Emulator Is Back Baby originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2009/11/13.

Vega Tablet With Android 2.0

Vega Tablet

With all the hype surrounding the “maybe possibily” release of the Apple tablet, other possible tablet like devices have been over shadowed. Take this uber sexy looking Innovative Converged Device called the Vega.

The Vega will be offered in 7, 11 and 15-inch models and will all run Android 2.0 software. The largest of the bunch will have a 15.6-inch resistive screen that supports a resolution of 1366 x 768, come with a Tegra processor, 512MB DDR DRAM, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi (no N), and Bluetooth 2.1. The built-in 512MB NAND Flash storage can be expanded via MicroSD cards. It’ll weigh about 45 ounces and have a battery life of around 4 hours.

Look for them to hit tier one cell phone carriers sometime in early 2010. No pricing is available on them yet, but the company does say that they intend to let them go for little cost, so it looks like the carriers might be subsidizing them.

Vega Tablet With Android 2.0 originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2009/11/13.

Happy Birthday BBS

Just a few days ago, Feb 16 to be exact, in 1978 Ward Christensen and Randy Suess launched the first ever Bulletin Board System in Chicago.

Many people belive that the BBS was the predecesor to the modern internet, a crude form I will agree but a much more enjoyable form of social interaction online per say. If your not familiar with how a BBS works let me give you a crash course. Back in the day we use to have these devices connected to our computers called modems. They allowed us to connect phone lines to our systems so that we could call other computers and interact in a message based way. BBS’s offered the world of information; files, messaging and even games (called door games).

Many people think that the BBS is dead, they couldn’t be more wrong. BBS’s are still quite active and alive with thriving communities and best of all, no spam or trolls (alright, so there are still stupid people in this world, even on BBS’s). bbs-scene.org is a great place to find out more about BBS’s and how you can participate.

Come join us in Web 0.2, I still love it (and run a system myself!)

Happy Birthday BBS originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2010/02/20.

Windows Phone 7 In Action

Earlier this week at the World Mobile Conference Microsoft announced the Windows Phone 7. Microsoft, the once high and mighty in the smartphone market looks like it’s getting serious about taking back their smartphone crown.

I have never been a Microsoft fan but I must admit I was a heavy user of the Windows Mobile environment a few years back and I quite enjoyed it. Development and improvements in their mobile os quickly fell to the way side and they were quickly overshadowed by the like of RIM and Apple.

The OS looks clean and simple, following the Zune’s UI but it is already suffering from some bad play like the fact that there will be no backwards compatibility with older WinMo software, no multi-tasking and no Flash (could this finally be the death of flash?), and a super late roll out date (Q4 of 2010).

Check out the video after the break of the new shiny OS.

[link to Windows Phone 7]

Windows Phone 7 In Action originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2010/02/20.

Solar Powered Cellphone

Ever been caught with a dead cellphone and no source of juice anywhere to power that puppy up? Come on now, you know you have. Well, Sharp is ready to settle that problem once and for all.

By dropping your conventional backlit LCD and using a passive matrix LCD screen the SH6230C will use a lot less power than a conventional phone. The passive matrix screen can display the time and SMS/e-mail all the while using an incredibly small amount of power. Don’t count on too many features either. Besides offering your standard dumb phone features the only extra bell you get is a 5-megapixel camera, but if you spend a lot of time outdoors this phone should never leave you high and ~~dry~~ dead.

The phone will run on GSM networks and is set to make it’s debut in China sometime this month with a $500 price tag.

Solar Powered Cellphone originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2010/02/21.

DIY: Cool Arduino Clock

People build all sorts of cool things with Arduino. Take the Twittering Doorbell or the Bedazzler but how about something as simple and useful as a clock? And an eye catching one at that!

The clock build requires a few simple materials; a laser printer, some LED’s and a few connectors. The instructions are super easy to understand and the only artistic skill you will need is knowing how to use a stencil (as you can see from the picture above).

Being an Arduino project, you will also get the source code from the project website to get you clock going. Along with the code you’ll also get a detailed PDF schematic and a template for the stencil. With the holiday season right around the corner, making a few of these and giving them to your geeky friends might just be the perfect gift idea.

[Link to Instructables]

DIY: Cool Arduino Clock originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2009/11/12.