DIYs & Mods

Found on the second floor of the Hotel Pennsylvania. A group of hackers were selling old phone equipment and patronizing me for taking pictures. I’d rather be a photographer than a group of fat fucks selling old junk!

So I got my very first Arduino in the mail two nights ago. In less than one day, I was able to create a simple program and circuit that plays back any set of musical notes I want. I can then modify pitch, frequency and delay time all with potentiometers I have rigged up to the Arduino. Coding is extremely ...

Check out the AMD Project going down at The Last HOPE this weekend. I’d type up an original piece but the official website does it so, so well: This weekend, the Attendee Meta-Data (AMD) project will introduce a new location-aware social networking system to track and bring together hackers based on a huge array of matching interests. Conference goers will ...

Making your own arcade unit? What about some other DIY project that uses buttons? Buttons that don’t glow are mundane and unattractive, so why not make your own illuminating buttons? Playing arcade games in the dark is tough without being able to see what button you’re mashing down upon. Thankfully, Hacknmod has written up a great how to guide on ...

It would be cheesy to call this case-mod “cheesy” just because it resembles a cheese wheel in both color and shape, but the Holland-native creator “always wanted a PC that looked like a wheel of cheese,� so he made one himself. He packed a hollow cheese display prop full of electronic goodness and even has included some fans on the ...

Here’s a great way to eavesdrop on an unknowing sap’s conversation. Objects in Flux’s Scott Mitchell has turned a vintage lamp into a parabolic microphone for recording. It’s got volume control and a headphone socket mounted in the lamps base. This way, no one other than the headphone wearer gets to hear the goods. And by goods I mean the ...

The Chinese are incredibly smart and tactile. My roommate must be the one exception to the rule, though. I went to brush my teeth the other day and found him building a server rack inside our shower. After some frustration, I skipped that and went straight for the coffee. Sure enough, the coffee maker was rigged with an Arduino and ...

There are few things we love more in this world than Star Wars. But, if we were forced to choose one, it’d have to be baked sweets. So, instead of finding something greater than Star Wars, why not get the best of both worlds? Star Wars-themed baked sweets, such as these highly-detailed Yoda and Millennium Falcon cakes, are about as ...

Apple knows cloning. It dealt with it throughout the 1980s and 1990s until it realized it just couldn’t work out. Apple killed the clones and today, it’s going strong with OS X and an assortment of hardware. This year, a company called Psystar started shadily selling Mac clones with a hacked version of Mac OS X on it. Caught up ...

Sometime in March, Blizzard filed a class action lawsuit against Michael Donnelly, the creator of the MMO Glider program, which performs key tasks in the game automatically, such as fighting and looting. Well, Blizzard “pwned” the shit out of the software bot’s creator, claiming it infringes the company’s copyright and potentially damages the game. Donnelly says his tool does not ...