LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Watch out Britney, Octomom and Paris! Shows spoofing your fame are piling up faster than celebrity magazines in a hair salon, and they include a stage musical and animated TV programs.”Popzilla,” the latest show to declare open season on Hollywood celebrities and their reality TV kissing cousins, will premiere on cable television’s MTV on Monday.The acerbic newcomers are putting a new twist on the public appetite for celebrity news. Nearly 55 million Americans visited an entertainment news site in May, digital tracking firm comScore said.”Popzilla” was conceived to match the fast-paced, often raunchy celebrity TV news…
Business
Spoof shows turn tables on celebrity obsession
Hack
Steal the administrator password from an EEPROM
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…
Hack
Berlin Hack Day
This past weekend, Berlin played host to Music Hack Day – an event where attendants built and tested hacks, contraptions, and software all dealing with sound, music, or the distribution thereof. Some of the hacks are simply mind blowing to see built in only a day or two. Like the location based CitySounds.fm or Tracks on a Map – mapping out where your music is from. Or the music based games and composition tools, iLoveAcid squencer and MaschineFighter – adding some crazy fun to MIDI.
Oh, we almost forgot, we can’t go an entire post without mentioning something Arduino;…
Hack
Toilet and Figlet
We thought [Kristofer's] Tech Tip about using figlet with scripts was kind of fun. It’s a throwback to the days of logging onto a BBS and being greeted by a vertically scrolling ASCII art image that had been meticulously hand crafted (although a lot of the coolest stuff was actually ANSI art). No hand crafting here, just feed (or pipe) your text to figlet and it outputs the message in ASCII style letters.
When we went to try install this in Ubuntu, the toilet package was suggested. This one’s worth checking out too. It works in much the same…
Hack
Tweetidor, the tweeting humidor
As cigar aficionados will tell you, cigars should be stored in climate controlled humidors to keep them in best condition for smoking. Most of the time a humidor is just a simple air-tight box with a hygrometer attached, which measures the relative humidity inside the box. Feeling as though he needed more control over the environment he kept his cigars in, [Justin] created the Tweetidor, a humidor that tweets its current temperature and humidity. Yes, you guessed it; the project is built around an Arduino. It’s a simple, useful project that is well documented and would be fun to…
Hack
BlokClok – Abstract time display
Clocks made from blinking LEDs always make for fun projects. [Earthshine] built a clock that displays time abstractly using an 8×8 RGB LED matrix. The video embedded after the break illustrates how to read the time but here’s the gist of it: One LED is illuminated in the outside box of LEDs and moved in a clockwise motion to approximate seconds. Inside of this, there are four quadrants; upper left indicates hour-tens digit, upper right hour-ones, lower left minute-tens, and lower right minute-ones. This certainly makes for an interesting conversation piece!
There is no schematic and no code available…
Hack
Stop light for HotWheels
[Paul] wrote in to show us this little project he did for his kids. His children love playing with their toy cars. In an effort to give them even more fun while playing, [Paul] built a stop light for them. He’s using an ATtiny13 to run them and has the source code available on his site. Not only did the kids get a new toy, he got an excuse to go build something in his workshop.
Hack
Wacom light graffiti
[Jon] wanted to have some fun with the Graffiti Research Lab’s LASER Tag. Unfortunately his computer wasn’t quite up for the challenge of detecting the laser pointer with a webcam. Not to be discouraged by this hardware limitation, he purchased a used Wacom tablet and threw together some code to make it work with the GRL display software. Now designs can be scrawled on the pad and the projector displays them with the familiar dripping paint effect.
Internet
What Is A Blog? – A Beginner’s Guide to Understanding Blogs
A blog is short for weblog, which simply means a website that isupdated frequently with new information and is organized by dateand submission. Blogs are typically a way of journalizinginformation whether it be personal, business, or what have you.It’s like an editorial and a journal all mixed together andavailable online for constant updates and submissions.As a beginner, you probably want to know more about blogs andwhy people are using them.Blogging started out when the Internet was new and theindividuals who were technology savvy found it fun andentertaining to post different things they found on the web forother people to visit…
Hack
Are you human? Then type out this book
Google has acquired reCAPTCHA and plans to use the system for digitizing books. Wait… what? CAPTCHA is the method of requiring a user to type in a visually obscured word to prove they are human. How can this digitize books? The answer is a bit obscure and takes some time to discover, but you’ll have fun along the way.
The Google blog links to a Google TechTalk video on Human Computation as an example of how they plan to use their new acquisition. It’s embedded below but at 51 minutes we figure most won’t watch it all so we…
Tech Support
Searching For A Fantastic Present? Try A Remote Controlled Toy
When you enjoy spoiling your son or nephew or cousin, you will want to get some wonderful radio controlled toys for his birthday. These are forever treasured gifts and are lots of fun. No matter what age the boy is, even if they are 18, they will always love a radio controlled toy.
When it comes to remote controlled toys, there are many things that you will be able to choose from. Now, we all know about remote controlled cars, but they have been around for many years, and almost every boy in the world has one of those.
This…
Tech Support
Ebay is Boring Compared to New Electronics Auction
Burbank, California – Muulu (muulu.com) is growing in popularity as a cheaper alternative to eBay. Why? Because the average winning bid for new electronics items, like iPhones, game systems, and iPods, is substantially lower on Muulu than on Ebay. People pay for bids. These payments buy down the possible winning price of the item being auctioned until it is won for well below wholesale price. Other electronic items include HDTVs, laptops, desktop computers, and GPS systems.
The biggest thing that draws people to Muulu is the insane deals. People can win a new Apple iPod Touch for $90, a new…
