Posted Jun 27th 2008 3:40PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, pcs hacks, peripherals hacks
[Jipa] over at MetkuMods put up an
original re-use for old hard drives: make em into power tools. The tiny servo motor that drives the spindle doesn't generate much torque, but once the drive is spinning fast enough, the inertial force of the platter is enough to make it usable for small grinding/sanding projects. The platters are re-stacked directly on top of each other to increase strength - we'd suggest a few dabs of epoxy to make em even stronger. Once stacked, a piece of sand paper is cut to size and held on by the center platter washer. [Via
hacknmod]
Posted Jun 24th 2008 7:30PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: pcs hacks, security hacks
InformationWeek has great article on
open source data recovery tools. What type of tools you use will depend on the severity of the situation. You can use live Linux distros designed for recovery like
SystemRescueCD or
Partedmagic (the latter being more user friendly). Security tools distrubutions like
BackTrack can also be helpful;
Helix in particular was designed for forensics work. dd is a standard *nix tool for imaging drives, but something like
TestDisk can help you repair partition tables for whole disk recovery. Most deletion operations don't overwrite the data which means you can use file carving to capture the lost files.
PhotoRec is able to find files in a number of common formats. Finally, if you've got some serious forensic work ahead of you there's
The Sleuth Kit and many other command line tools.
As an addendum, OStatic put together a list of
5 freeware tools for protecting your system.
Posted Jun 22nd 2008 11:55PM by Juan Aguilar
Filed under: pcs hacks
The people at TweakTown completely
disassembled a new Eee PC 1000H and documented the entire process. Aside from showing you the side effects of too much tech fetish and not enough regular fetish, the article reveals all the parts of the new Eee, with a few surprises inside. Although it's an Eee PC, it's very different from all of its predecessors.
One of the things the teardown shows is that several parts are far more modular than previous Eee PC models. The hard drive, for example, is a standard Seagate Momentus which is made for desktop systems; it can easily be swapped out. Another easily swapped component is the 1GB SIMM from ASint.
Although their (ahem) stripping process was a bit unconventional, a lot of interesting information was yielded from this teardown. Keep 'em coming, TweakTown, just be sure to clean off your tool when you're done.
[via
Gizmodo]
Posted Jun 17th 2008 9:55PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: pcs hacks
The folks from bit-tech have done us a great service by
tearing open the Eee PC 901. Under the keyboard is a large metal plate that acts as the processor's heat sink. The 4GB SSD card is not soldered to the board this time around. There is some empty space labeled IDE3 and solder points that say 3GCard, which definitely deserve further investigation. The oddest thing they found was a button with no indication to its purpose. It looks like a good machine and we hope to see
more Eee PC hacks in the future.
[via
Engadget]
Posted Jun 13th 2008 2:30PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: pcs hacks
With the
imminent release of Firefox 3 and
Opera 9.5 being finalized this week, Lifehacker decided it was a
good time to run the browsers head to head to see which was the fastest and least resource intensive. The testing system was a 2GHz 2GB Vista machine. The timing system used wasn't directly hooked to the browser, so tests were repeated multiple times to improve accuracy. The cold start winner was Opera, but most browsers opened in about a second if they had been run recently. Safari did well loading content in multiple tabs at the same time, probably due to its short render times for JavaScript and CSS. The final test was memory usage; we're sure many people will be happy to know that Firefox 3 RC3 only used 66% of the RAM required by the other three browsers.
Posted Jun 12th 2008 11:40PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: macs hacks, pcs hacks
On June 23rd, EFiX is planning on releasing a USB dongle that will
let any PC boot and install OSX from a retail DVD. The commercial device is supposed to take care of all patching and other woes OSX86 enthusiasts have had to deal with. Very little information is provided other than a statement that the development process took a lot of time and that they overcame "sabotage"... so, it's got that going for it. Major OSX86 contributor (and
Psystar hater) [Netkas]
received a device to test and was pleased with the results. We're just going to wait and see what happens. Not that it matters; they have no plans of releasing it in the US.
[via
InsanelyMac]
[photo:
Mario Seekr]
Posted May 21st 2008 3:00PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: pcs hacks, daily
The Open Graphics Project has started
accepting preorders for their OGD1, a graphics card with a completely open source design. This initial release is billed as a high-end FPGA prototyping kit specifically designed to test computer graphics architectures. The card has two DVI connectors, S-Video, 256MB RAM, and a 64bit PCI-X connector. The core of the system is a Xilinx Spartan-3 XC3S4000 FPGA. A nonvolatile Lattice XP10 FPGA is used to bootstrap the Xilinx at power up. Here's the
layout of the specific components.
An open design like this could prove very beneficial to the free software community. The open hardware makes driver development much easier; binary drivers from traditional graphics manufacturers have been very hard to work with in the past. The OGD1 could also be used with CPU architectures that wouldn't be unsupported by normal graphics cards. An FPGA based design means that CPU intensive processes like video decoding could be offloaded to the video card without needing a dedicated chip. There is still a lot of work to be done and at $1500 we're pretty sure most of you won't be buying the first generation. It's still exciting to see traditional PC hardware getting reinvented and opened up. Check out the
OGD1's FAQ for more info.
Posted Apr 23rd 2008 9:11PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: pcs hacks
[Janne] does freelance animation and wanted something with
a bit more CPU to get his rendering jobs done. He picked up an Ikea 'Helmer' cabinet and refitted it to hold six Intel quad cores, six Gigabyte motherboards with 8GB of ram each and six 400 watt power supplies. He seems happy with it - I think it just needs some custom power wiring and an integrated Gig-E switch to achieve perfection. What? I'm not jealous at all.
Posted Apr 14th 2008 5:10AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: laptops hacks, macs hacks, pcs hacks
[Phyro-Mane] sent in
his home built iMac mini. He based it on an old laptop with an install of
OSX86 XP with a mac theme. The forum is in German, but the photos in the thread speak for themselves.
Posted Apr 10th 2008 11:59PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks, pcs hacks, peripherals hacks
[rustlabs]
put together an interesting looking gaming gun for FPS games. He wrote up his build and how to use a webcam to provide gun tracking for games like Half Life 2. He gutted a keyboard to provide the button interface, and infrared LEDs on the gun body are tracked by the cam. Surprisingly, no USB game pads were sacrificed in the build, just a USB keyboard and mouse.
Posted Mar 11th 2008 3:40PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: laser hacks, pcs hacks
Writing with a laser pointer has been done, but [Chris]'s
roll your own version feeds the data the display pc using VNC. He's got some speed issues, but I'm giving him points for most original use for remote desktop software.
Posted Mar 3rd 2008 10:17PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: pcs hacks
Inspired by some research done at
princeton (looks like the original site is down), [Wesley] sent in
his version of a bootable RAM dumping USB drive, complete with a how-to on rolling your own. He put together a utility that runs under
syslinux to capture the data, installed it to a USB thumb drive and managed to create a device that will boot on a machine and copy the contents of the RAM before it's overwritten by another utility.
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