Tag Archives: hacks

YouTube is great for entertainment, but quality is a whole other bag of marbles. When I have a video I plan on uploading, I don’t want it compressed to all hell and back for the purpose of streaming. Because of this, I usually use Vimeo for those vids. But thanks to a hack involving the URL of YouTube videos, you ...

Building a car from a kit is nothing new. Open any modern auto magazine and you’ll find plenty of that crap in the classifieds. But when one man goes above and beyond to turn a 2001 Mercury Cougar into a fully-functional, stylish Audi R8, well, that’s magic. While there’s just some things that can’t be copied, overall this car looks ...

Listen, dude. Forget everything you heard about the iPhone. Forget the apps, forget the voice recognition calling, forget everything because all of its capabilities and features have just been outdone. A Japanese software engineer named Kazu Terasaki has given his iPhone the ability to walk. Yes, he’s turned his iPhone into a kick ass robot that takes baby steps. Because ...

Anyone interested in DIY, energy or our ecosystem should most definitely check out the Alternative Energy Gift Guide from MAKE. They cover some key issues that we as Americans must confront head on, such as our dependence on foreign energy and oil. There’s a bunch of a kits you can browse through that will have you using the Sun as ...

Sony has gone on the record saying that the piracy is affecting PSP game sales. That’s a givein; if it’s free, take it. This time around, a peripheral manufacturer called Datel has cracked the PSP 3000 by forcing it into service mode. Datel did some silicon hacking on a chip level to find out how it could force the PSP ...

Earlier, Ryan spotted some DIY speakers made from paper cups and a pair of headphones. Now Arms22 is one-upping designer Dimitry Zagga with speakers made from Starbucks cups. They actually use a power amplifier, meaning they’ll crank your tunes out at a respectable volume. If you want to make your own, go for it, as the instructions are available online. ...

Retro computer enthusiast Bill Kotaska has successfully built a replica of Busicom’s historic 141-PF printing calculator using vintage Intel chips. It’s the 37th anniversary of the world’s first single chip, customer-programmable microprocessor, the tiny Intel 4004. It was the Japanese calculator maker known as Busicom which later introduced the first product ever built around an Intel microprocessor. So, in light ...

Here’s a decent mod, albeit not a beautiful one. Take an iPod Touch and strap a cardboard box to the back with a ghetto speaker inside it. Poke out a few holes, wire up a headphone jack and boom, instant portable speaker. It also does a decent job of keeping the iPod upright. Genius? No, but the ability to blast ...

We’re bug crazy. We might be called Gearfuse today, but tomorrow we’ll be called Bugfuse. What happens when a radioactive mutant goes berserk on a stairwell in an abandoned and destroyed hotel? Nothing, really. I stumbled upon this guy while feverishly searching for a fusion battery. I took some potshots at him and went for a pick pocket, neither one ...

Nothing is more fun than taking a broken video game console and putting it to good use. Years ago, I turned a Dreamcast into a guitar amplifier, which was one of my favorite DIY projects. Now we have some hardware hackers turning NES and SNES systems into bedside clocks. Hollow out some cartridges, turn ’em into a clock and lock ...