What really makes television what it is? Is it the fact that it’s sitting in some dedicated space in your living room? Or is it the fact that it’s probably one of the larger monitors in your apartment or house? Maybe it’s not connected to a computer, and that’s what makes it a television (although they’ll all soon be computers). Whatever it is, Facebook is going head on with television not only through their new Brand Lift service but also through their numerous Ustream partnerships lately.

I’ve written numerous times about how social networks have rapidly become the new television…

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Wireless headphones can be a wonderful way to help clear up the clutter inherent in most desktop PC systems. However, after plugging a wall wart in, and the headphone jack into the computer, the number of wires used has actually doubled. After [Parker] found an old set of JVC 900 Mhz wireless headphones (and a generic 900MHz transmitter), he cracked open the case to see what he could do with them. Realizing that the transmitter used a 12V DC source, he powered it with an unused floppy connector (which provides +12V, +5V, and two ground lines). He also wired…

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Symantec Client Security includes antivirus and firewall programs that protect your computer against viruses and unwanted network intrusions including Trojans worms spyware and pop up windows

micro Torrent is an efficient and feature rich BitTorrent client for Windows sporting a very small footprint micro Torrent was designed to use as little cpu space and memory as possible while offering all the functionalites expected from advanced clients With BitTorrent you can download files faster and contribute by sharing files and bandwidth Most of the features present in other BitTorrent clients are present in micro Torrent including bandwidth prioritization scheduling RSS auto downloading and Mainline DHT compatible with BitComet Additionally micro Torrent supports the Protocol Encryption joint specification compatible with Azureus 2 4 0 0 and above BitComet…

Hot on the heels of our post about reading passwords from EEPROM, [n0th1n6] tipped us off about a similar hack used to resurrect an Eee PC from a bad bios flash. After discovering that a factory repair for a dead bios costs about $200, [CutenaCute_7] took on the challenge herself. She disassembled the computer and desoldered the bios chip from the board. After writing a program to flash the chip using C#, she temporarily soldered jumpers to make sure the flash worked. Looks like this is a zero cost hack, plus the time savings from not having to ship…

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Did you forget your hardware-based password and now you’re locked out? If it’s an IBM ThinkPad you may be in luck but it involves a bit more than just removing the backup battery. SoDoItYourself has an article detailing the retrieval of password data from an EEPROM.
The process is a fun one. Disassemble your laptop. Build a serial interface and solder it to the EEPROM chip where the password is stored. Connect this interface to a second computer and use it to dump the data into a file. Download a special program to decipher the dump file and dig…

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Do you remember the magnetic card spoofer in Terminator 2? It was a bit farfetched because apparently the device could be swiped through a reader and magically come up with working account numbers and pin numbers. We’re getting close to that kind of magic with [Jaroslaw's] card spoofer that is button-programmable.
Building off of a project that allows spoofing via an iPod and electromagnet, [Jaroslaw] wanted something that doesn’t require a computer to put together the card code. He accomplished this by interfacing a 20-button keyboard and a character LCD with an AVR ATmega168 microcontroller. Card codes can be…

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Sunday we saw robots playing pool and an augmented reality pool game. Today we’ll complete the pool trifecta: virtual pool using a real cue stick and ball in another vintage video from Hack a Day’s secret underground vault. The video is noteworthy for a couple of reasons:
First is the year it was made: 1990. There’s been much buzz lately over real-world gaming interfaces like the Nintendo Wii motion controller or Microsoft’s Project Natal. Here we’re seeing a much simpler but very effective physical interface nearly twenty years prior.
Second: the middle section of the video reveals the trick behind it all, and it turns out…

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