Hacker Friendly

Somebody just asked me which, out of all of the free Web 2.0 services I’ve ever signed up for, has proven to be the most useless.
Why, Useless Account, of course! (While it was a close race with Twitter, the really spiffy twittervision hack blew the curve…)

Last week at CanSecWest, Andrea Barisani and Daniele Bianco demo’d an interesting GPS hack: sending bogus data over the RDS-TMC channel. In English: You can send fake traffic updates, alerts, and other data to GPS systems that update over FM radio. Looks like we’re one step closer to GITS.
There is a brief write-up [...]

Meet the Monster Smart Car: an unholy mashup of a Smart ForTwo and Unimog.
“DaimlerChrysler has always had an unusually large range of off-road vehicles - from the M-Class to the G-model and the Unimog. One look at the smart forfun2 (pronounced smart forfun to the second) and you see straightaway that it is based on [...]

The title says it all.

John W. Cornwell writes from his project website,
Have you ever gotten up off the couch to get a beer for the umpteenth time and thought, “What if instead of ME going to get the BEER, the BEER came to ME???” Well, that was how I first conceived of the beer launching fridge. About 3 months [...]

This past weekend, I helped to establish a 101 Km (62.7 mile) wireless link from Trieste to Piancavallo, Italy. This was part of my work at the 2007 ICTP school on wireless. The gory details of the shot are up on the wiki, but here is the executive summary:

For the Trieste end of [...]

Q: What do you get when you cross a Tesla coil with a keyboard?
A: I’m not sure, but I’m sure somebody has done it on YouTube…

Details of last April’s 279 km world record wireless link have been published by Silicon Chip Magazine in Australia.
If you’re not a Silicon Chip subscriber, the original write-up is still available in English and Spanish.

I’m sitting in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, looking for a wireless network.
Oh noes! Teh Free Public WiFi virus is here!!!11!1!
KPN wants € 6.00 for a half hour. But fortunately they are kind enough to allow DNS and ICMP before authentication.

Here is an interesting thread on the libsecondlife forums, posted by Michael_W:
I’m currently writing a basic server which uses libsecondlife.
It is currently at the stage that the official secondlife client can log into it (using a proxy for returning a xml-rpc response to the client so that it uses my server as the sim [...]