Just a little public service message: If you've been drooling over [Ben]'s work and have plenty of loose change, his PS3 laptop is up for auction to benefit the National Cancer Coalition.
Buy Ben's PS3 Laptop
Just a little public service message: If you've been drooling over [Ben]'s work and have plenty of loose change, his PS3 laptop is up for auction to benefit the National Cancer Coalition.
24 core Ikea cluster
[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.
DIY iMac Mini
[Phyro-Mane] sent in his home built iMac mini. He based it on an old laptop with an install of
DIY PC gaming gun
[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.
laser-writing via vnc
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.
Bootable USB RAM capture
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.
Breaking disk encryption with RAM dumps
If you haven't gotten a chance yet, do watch the video of this attack. It's does a good job explaining the problem. Full drive encryption stores the key in RAM while the computer is powered on. The RAM's stored data doesn't immediately disappear when powered off, but fades over time. To recover the keys, they powered off the computer and booted from a USB disk that created an image of the RAM. You can read more about the attack here.
How can you reduce this threat? You can turn off USB booting and then put a password on the BIOS to prevent the specific activity shown in the video. Also, you can encrypt your rarely used data in a folder on the disk. They could still decrypt the disk, but they won't get everything. I don't think this problem will truly be fixed unless there is a fundamental change in hardware design to erase the RAM and even then it would probably only help computers that are powered off, not suspended.
The potential for this attack has always been talked about and I'm glad to see someone pull it off. I'm hoping to see future research into dumping RAM data using a USB/ExpressCard with DMA access.
Window unit turned PC Water cooler
I almost passed this one up because it was shotgunned across a few blogs, but it would be a shame to pass up on a good hack. [Mike] decided to use a standard window AC unit to cool the CPU in his rig. The A/C unit was modified to place the evaporation coil inside a fish tank filled with glycol/water antifreeze coolant. To cool the CPU, he used a normal water block, but insulated the coolant lines between the cooling unit and the machine. That should give you the idea. For more details, have fun deciphering his project in pictures. [via]
Bonus: [Johnny] sent in the NASA workmenship guide. It's pretty interesting to see what the space boys require for their electronics work.
eeePC inverse video scaling
[Tracker] sent in this handy software hack for the eeePC. The idea is to scale higher resolutions like 1024x768 down to the native 800x480 screen resolution. His post tells you how (but requires windows) and helpfully provides the required downloadable driver. I wonder if he's seen this video showing up 1600x900?
(update: fixed the missing video link.)
Replace your LCD power supply
[Computer Guru]'s LCD power supply went out, making it a useless pile of plastic. He used an old computer PSU to replace the defective one. After he identified the outputs on the built-in supply (The one's I've pulled apart were labelled) he stripped down the replacement PSU to provide the necessary voltages.
24th Anniversary Macintosh
[Dave] sent in his retro Mac project. Putting new guts into an old mac isn't really unheard of, but I liked his solution to use the original Mac 512k keyboard and mouse. He used an Atmel AT90USB162 to create his own standard USB HID device. The keyboard and mouse appear as a standard USB device, so the mac (or any modern USB PC) can identify use the keyboard and mouse without any additional software.
Holiday Hackit: Automated hard drive destruction
One of our recent posts took an interesting tangent: physical hard drive destruction. First, [wolf] wanted to use a 20ga shotgun shell on his hard drive. [brk] suggests an electromagnet applied to the drive while it's still spinning. Everyone thought thermite might be interesting... Finally, [wolf] noted this commercial auto destruction drive that floods itself with an acid mist. I'll suggest a few ideas and let you guys take it from there.
I'd suggest pneumatic injection of two part epoxy into the drive mechanism. Remove the top of the casing using the diy clean room method, add a port for the epoxy and use a cheap CO2 bike injector to force the liquid into the drive on demand.
So, got a better idea? Let's hear it.
Virtual Raid 5 internet storage
[wonder] sent in an interesting proof of concept how-to on setting up a virtual raid 5 drive that uses free ftp servers to store data. The technique is a bit round-about, but he says it works pretty decently. The shares are mounted under windows with netdrive, then raided by FreeNAS under VMware. I haven't tried it myself, but I'd probably try to do the same thing, but use LUFS and do everything under one operating system.
Wiimote head tracking desktop VR display
If you thought [Johnny Lee] was done making us all buy Wiimotes, you were wrong. Now he's back showing off a simple, but incredibly effective VR head tracker. He swapped out the LED's on a pair of LED light safety glasses with a set of IR LEDs and used his PC/Wiimote combo to do the work. The demo is just fantastic. As usual, you can download the software from his project page.
iPod Transmitter Radio Modem
[Eric] sent in his iPod transmitter radio modem hack.Given the short range of these FM modulators (and FCC rules) I'd call this an academic exercise. Combined with a few mods, it could be useful for bursting data from a micro-controller. (Think APRS)
Asus EeePC Bonus:About a week ago, [johnx] added a 16GB flash drive and a bluetooth adapter to his. Yesterday, [ta2cba] showed off how he squeezed a four port hub inside his - allowing a pair of devices to live in the extra min-ipcie bay and leave two ports to spare for later add-ons.
