The iPhone doesn’t have the market cornered on the use of accelerometers. The tiltphone project incorporates a three axis accelerometer into a set of headphones transforming them into a remote control for an iPod. A PIC16F690 reads in data from the analog sensor, translates specific movements into commands, and like the Arduino iPod Remote from last week, relays them to an iPod via the Apple Accessory Protocol. A quick nod left or right skips tracks, holding a sideways nod controls the volume, and setting the headphones down pauses.
This project is a bit older but we’re glad [anon] tipped…
Hack
Head bangers beware: motion sensing headphones
Facebook
Facebook Removes Ability To Browse Friends By Region (Updated)
Want to view which of your friends are located in Washington, D.C. or another city? Too bad because it appears as though Facebook has removed that feature. While the company previously announced that they’d remove regional network privacy settings, it wasn’t clear that they were eliminating the ability to browse by region. In a guide that I previously wrote about Facebook friend lists, I explained how useful the ability to browse by network was.
With over 4,000 friends, finding people in given regions has now become impossible. So is Facebook removing regional features all together? Not necessarily. According to a…
Facebook
Facebook To Release Ads API
Over the past month we have confirmed with multiple sources that Facebook is in the process of rolling out an API for their advertising platform. How that API will be rolled out is still not clear but they are currently testing the service with a number of partners. This step makes a lot of sense considering that Google has an AdWords API and an AdSense API. When Google ads were initially evolving, a number of companies built layers on top of Google AdWords that turned in to lucrative businesses.
Right now there are already a number of ways to hack…
Hack
Build a wireless keylogger
Hardware Keylogger solutions has released the plans and files for their wireless logger. It has a range of about 50 yard between the transmitting dongle and the receiver. It is based around an Atmel AT91SAM7S64 and the PCB is pretty tiny. In case you hadn’t noticed yet, they sell them as well. The cool thing about this is that key data is transmitted in real time, allowing you to see it as it happens instead of having to go retreive the log physically like you used to.
Facebook
All Facebook Is Now Available In French
Earlier this year I began receiving a lot of inquiries about translating the site into other languages. I’ve been forced to put off the launch since I was busy working on other stuff but last week I finally got around to launching the French version of AllFacebook. Right now I am being helped by the team over at KRDS. This is more of an experiment than anything else but I’m pretty excited to expand internationally.
We’ve also had a number of other people reach out about producing a translated version of the site. If you are interested in creating a…
Facebook
Facebook Friend Details Officially Removed, Converted to Friend Lists
Last week I wrote that Facebook was beginning to phase out friend details from the site. It now appears official and according to Facebook, “the friend details that were already established on your account have been converted to Friend Lists.” If you go look at your friend lists there will now be lists that you hadn’t created as the company tries to eliminate this feature all together.
While you can still enter the information after you’ve approved a friend, it may no longer be accessible in the near future. Facebook states, “any extra data you filled out after checking the…
Facebook
Face.com Scans 13 Million Facebook Photos Every Day
There’s well over 10 billion photos on Facebook, making it the largest photo-sharing site on the web. Now that’s a lot of people tagging each other. Face.com’s Facebook app, called Photo Finder, has taken on the task of tagging every last one of these photos, and a month after launching its beta version, Photo Finder has scanned over 400 million photos, getting through 13 million photos in a single day.
The purpose of all this scanning? To tag your beautiful mug. We covered Photo Finder’s launch on the Facebook application platform a few weeks back, and I noted how well…
Facebook
Interview: Victoria Ransom, CEO and Founder of Wildfire Interactive
When Facebook hosted the first ever governance vote a couple of weeks ago, one of the biggest winners of the vote was Wildfire Promotion Builder, the company that developed the Facebook Governance voting application. As soon as I noticed that Facebook hadn’t built the application internally I had to find out who was behind the company.
After doing a little digging I found out that the company was a winner in the last round of the fbFund, Facebook’s seed fund for entrepreneurs looking to build applications with Facebook’s social technology. The company appears to have perfect timing, offering a suite…
Facebook
Facebook Users Getting Annoyed With Captchas
Over the past few weeks I have been getting countless emails from users that have been increasingly prompted to fill out captcha forms when submitting wall posts and updating statuses. The reason for the increase is most likely because Facebook is trying to contain spammers. Unfortunately it’s making it more challenging for users to interact with the site.
When Facebook released their upgraded public profiles product, I had the same issue and reached out to Facebook about it. I heard back and was informed that it was a bug on my account and the issue was quickly resolved. If this…
