I'm a fan of my Etymotic er6i (which have mysteriously vanished...) headphones, so this simple hack caught my eye. [James C] sent in this simple method of upgrading the more affordable apple in ear headphones. The idea is simple, use a small hole punch to cut out the center of some cheap foam earplugs. Then replace the soft surrounds on the headphones with them. I'm guessing that this trick would work for quite a few in ear headphones that I've seen lately.

[Alex] sent in his clone of [Crispin Jones]' tengu. The tengu is essentially a funky visual sound meter that looks like it's lip syncing. [Alex]'s version is built around an ATMega48 microcontroller, an electric mic with a LM386 audio circuit and the required LED matrix display. There's an example tengu video here - but I'm not sure what to say about the song in the demo. It's not dependent on USB - it actually works better with the clean power provided by batteries anyway.

It looks like this one's been out there for a while, but it doesn't make it any less awesome. [Andrija] built this combination portable DAC/headphone amp. It takes optical audio input, feeds it through an analog devices AD1866 16bit/96khz decoder. After that, the audio is brought up to volume by an op-amp style headphone amp circuit.

Side note: I wrote up a few short notes on the Sidekick LX I got today, if you dig that sort of thing.

Yesterday, I was standing on a tropical island off the coast of Belize. Vacation rocked with lots of SCUBA diving, spearfishing and snorkeling. I'm back home, shaking off the jet lag and clearing up my inbox. Thanks to [fabienne] for filling in and letting me unplug for a while!

[Darkrom] has set a new standard for Hack-A-Day readers... I haven't seen it in person, but that looks like a legit Hack-A-Day tattoo.

[null] sent in a new use for a frequency generator, a spare car amp, a sub-woofer and a plastic coffee can - brass cartridge polishing.

[LoopyMind] sent in this Game Boy Advanced Movie Player IDE hack. It's pretty much a direct CF to laptop drive cable with an external battery supply.

[Dingolishious] sent in a POE UPS/remote power control solution. Could be handy if you're using many POE devices, or if you're having power issues. He added an inexpensive remote power monitor/switch solution behind his UPS. It senses power outages and kicks out an email - and allows remote power cycling of his POE devices. Of course, if you've got a linux box behind the UPS, it can monitor the output from the UPS and send notifications.

[William] added a preamp stage to his iKEY usb recorder. looks like an interesting toy - it'll record audio directly to a USB flash key. The pre-amp allows him to record in more challenging environments.

[Andrew] noted a simple mod to increase the deadly fire power of the ubiquitous airsoft pellet gun. It's just a matter of reducing some extra space in the spring compression area.

Last but not least, [VIPER] modded his projector to use a 12v halogen headlight bulb. Not a bad idea - at one point I was pondering a 550 watt source four halogen as a possible replacement.

When you need a rigid, vibration-free chassis for your amplifier, look no further than a roasting pan. I've used cast cement for subwoofers, but using a cooking pan bolted to a heavy wooden chopping board is a cheap way to get a rigid surface on which to build audio gear. The amp circuitry used by [Mark] is not complex, but it gets the job done. The "oxygen free copper cable" and "pure silver wire" are not needed, just make sure you have a solid mechanical connection. In other words, just tin your wires, bend small "u" shapes at each end, hook them together, and apply solder to the heated ends. Alternatively, hold the ends of stranded wires parallel to each other and twist the ends together before tinning, then solder. Test everything with a multimeter while moving wire joints to make sure you have no weak connections. Now you won't waste your money on hyped-up cabling materials.

Thanks to [Gio] (who seems to have some personal audio projects as well) for the tip.

In a fit of apparent oddity, the Zune doesn't support non-US characters. [Mike] sent in this how-to on modding the Zune software to speak other languages. We haven't seen much on the Zunes, so it's about time for something to come out.

[Jesse] sent in this headphone amp. It's really just a board with a dedicated smd headphone amp chip(MAX9725) and a pair of smd caps recycled from an old hard drive, but it does job. I think the goal is to boost low signals rather than the usual audiophile quest for cleaner tunes.

[sprite_tm] made my morning by sending in his latest work. After opening up his new SMC WSKP100 (Skype wifi phone) to identify the hardware differences, he managed to shrink a flash image from the SMCWSP100 to fit on his new toy. Then he spent some time hacking the kernel from the former to work on his phone. The result? A SIP operational phone that'll connect to his asterix server at half the price of SMC's official SIP phone.

Every so often, I like to check out the headphone amp scene at [headwize]. The headphone lovers there never seem to stop. This little amp is one of the latest creations. The latest is the mini v3 - it reflects a trend I've been seeing on homebrew hardware: SMD core chips and through hole components for support hardware. A 9 volt supplies power, and a pair of linear regulators. It's a nice simple, solid design - and you've gotta love the thumb screws. (I'm not sure how a more efficient PWM regulated power source would affect the audio output)

[formathirn] sent in his latest project, his Beatbox 2.0. He was kind enough to write up an instructable (Don't whine about it, they're giving away a friggin $6k laser etching machine.)
It features a 600 watt amp, four internal mid/fullrange speakers and it'll run external subs, if you don't mind carting them around. He used some p3 heat sinks to reduce the space needed by the amp and fit everything into an old 'Grundig Bandmaschine' case. For extra bling, he put used fiber optics in the side.

[dk] sent in the DVX project. It's a complete D-STAR implementation that's built around a digital transceiver chip, an ATMEL mcu and a digital voice compression chip. Compared to most digital radio's I've seen, this one is pretty simple. The really complex action lives in the main chips with a bunch of caps and resistors to support them. Watch out for Digikey's pricing - it looks like a major gouge after looking at the tx/rx chips on Analog Device's site. If you get them at a decent price, they could make great rf links for your projects. The link to the paper seems a bit broken, but here's the correct one.

It wasn't [Ben Heck] this time. [Owen] sent in his modded iPod. Once the warranty was voided by some breakage, he decided to make sure it was *really* void. The fold is limited by the length of the wires - but I can't tell from the description or pictures if he actually hinged it.

Update: I'm re-posting this thanks to some funky cms bug...

[lgbsneak] found a good source of pre-amps to fill his needs. Some older receivers, like his old Kenwood KA-305 have modular pre-amps. So it's just a matter of ripping out, powering it up and tossing it into an enclosure. Now he's got a handy 9v battery powered pre-amp for field work.

[Dyer13] sent in his Zune antenna mod. It's a simple one, but we haven't seen too many Zune mods yet. It's really just a matter of adding more surface area to the transmitter. I'd suggest adding a wire that's actually tuned to an appropriate wavelength. If you want something with a bit more power, check out this Belkin Tunecase power upgrade.

[Ben Heckendorn] put together this little beauty on engadget. It's not quite as over the top as the XBox 360 laptop, but there's a reason for that. He'll be putting up a How-To series covering the construction. If you've been pondering building a portable yourself, it'll be a nice jump start for your hardware hacking skill-base.