Hacker Friendly

This week proved to be a fun, mellow, Pho-filled hack night. Hilights:

• Ame-Link 1900MHz phone experiment. Have you ever had a cordless phone that sends SMS? All it needs is a bigger antenna.
• At almost the seven week mark, I finally got my replacement PowerBook battery. The old one is now the USPS’s problem. Being the nice guy I am, I discharged it before putting it in the mail. I achieved this in about 20 minutes by simultaneously playing the Lord of the Rings DVD, running a recursive md5sum of all of the files on the same DVD, sync’ing my phone over Bluetooth, continually scp’ing a bunch of random data over the WPA wireless network, firing up Google Earth (zoomed in and spinny) on the second display, launching Second Life, and cranking the backlight. I guess I could have just hooked it up to a 100 Watt light bulb, but this was more fun.
• Speaking of exploding batteries, apparently some LED flashlights (like the Fenix P1) become pipe bombs when you use them with rechargeable lithium cells. Neat.
• Eric recapped various toorcon exploits (like the MacBook saga and the Firefox stupidness…)
• Plus the usual assortment of caffein-induced chatter (apparently, I’ve gotta see Hustle, Zeppelins are cool, everyone should run ptunnel, Eric is gonna fork Firefox to include universal translation support and write a book about it, etc…)

Oh, and speaking of books, the book is done. Contact me for a review PDF. If you have to ask “which book?” then check this space again in about a week. =)