[Hack a Day] 3 New Entries: Messing with barcodes

Messing with barcodes

[nico] just received his credentials for an upcoming conference. On each badge, there’s a 2D barcode with the participant’s bio and contact info. These are meant to be scanned by vendors for future contact. [nico] isn’t so interested in that and plans on updating his personal info by generating a new barcode. To this end, he’s collected a number of links to help out barcode hackers. He used the SWIPE toolkit to identify the format and decode (it has an online component too). There are also several online encoders you can use, like this one from [Terry Burton]. If you’re wondering what sort of shenanigans you can get into faking barcodes, check out [fx]’s presentation from 24C3.

[photo: seanbonner]

      

The EFF's privacy agenda

With a new administration coming into power, the Electronic Frontier Foundation feels that it’s time for a change (see what we did there). They’ve posted an agenda that covers fixing privacy issues that have come to the forefront in the last eight years. It involves repairing amendments that prevent corporations from being sued for warrantless wiretapping. They would also modernize the Electronic Communications Privacy Act so that it would cover modern technology. The heavily abused State Secrets Privilege needs reform as well. Their final issue is with REAL ID and datafarming that many state governments have already rejected. If even a bit of this gets fixed, we’ll be happy. In any case, it’ll be good to have a more tech focused administration that doesn’t need the internet explained to it in terms of dumptrucks and tubes.

[photo: Jake Appelbaum]

      

Easy high voltage power supply

[rocketman221] wrote up one of the simplest ways to build a high voltage power supply. This one in particular was used on his coilgun. Instead of building a custom circuit, he’s using flash charging boards from disposable cameras. Six 450V 470uF caps are wired in parallel to make up the bank. Two of the charger boards are wired to one switch to initiate the charging process. Four additional boards are wired two a second switch for the second charging stage. The part cost on this is incredibly cheap and it only requires a 3.3V input to reach 450V. The writeup has plenty of warnings about the dangers of high voltage; you need to clean off all flux residue to prevent arcing across the circuit boards. Embedded below is a video of the bank being discharged through several objects.

      

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[Lifehacker] 3 New Entries: Create a Contract Even When You're Working for Free [Freelancing]

Create a Contract Even When You're Working for Free [Freelancing]

There's nothing more frustrating than volunteering on a project to help out a friend or a worthy cause only to end up resenting the organization when it bleeds into your paying work. In a guest post for the Shifting Careers blog, longtime freelancer Michelle Goodman offers a number of tips on when to and when not to give away the milk if you're a self-employed cow. For instance, a simple contract can help reinforce boundariess when volunteering:

Although you're doing the job gratis, send the client a short, informal contract clearly stating what you will and won't do, and when.

The designers over at No Spec draw a hard line when it comes to delivering work which may not be renumerated, but I've been known to give away my labor in exchange for another byline to add to my CV. What might convince you solo entrepreneurs out there to put the "free" in "freelancing?" Let us know in the comments.

When to Work for Nothing [NYT]

Google Reader Now Translating Feeds Automatically [RSS]

Google Reader and Google Translate have teamed up to bring a neat new feature — you can choose to have feeds in Google Reader machine-translated on the fly. For instance, if your Google Reader language is set to English under Settings > Preferences, a subscription to a blog in Japanese will appear (more or less) in English. It doesn't seem to have been rolled out for everybody quite yet, as some of us at Lifehacker could access the option on the Feed settings drop-down menu and some couldn't. A neat trick, but the automated translations still have a tendency to be unintentionally hilarious. Users of the new Reader feature are promised that as Translate gets better, so will the translations of the feeds.

Is Your Web Truly World-Wide? [Official Google Reader Blog]

Microwave an Instant Chocolate Cake in a Coffee Mug [Food Hacks]

Sate your afternoon sugar cravings with a dead-easy chocolate cake recipe that only requires hot chocolate mix, flour, an egg, cooking spray, and oil (all stuff you've got in your pantry anyway). Grab the biggest microwavable coffee mug you've got in your cupboard, and cover the inside with cooking spray. Mix up four tablespoons of flour and nine tablespoons of hot chocolate mix, then throw in three tablespoons of water, three tablespoons of oil and one egg. Once it's thoroughly mixed into an even batter, microwave the whole shebang for three minutes on high. Watch how high it rises from the cup in the video below:

When you hear that BEEEP of completion, you'll have yourself a piping hot, single-serving cake in a cup. In the name of research (ahem), I gave this a try myself this afternoon, and the result was—well, not the best cake I've ever had.

Actually, it was kind of gross. The texture much less cake-y than one would expect and much more gummy than you'd ever want. I also made the mistake of using some fancy-pants hot chocolate mix from Jacques Torres back in Brooklyn that clearly wasn't meant to be microwaved with an egg. That said, I'm going to give this a try once I get ahold of some plain old Swiss Miss and see what happens—the result was indeed instant, hot, chocolate cake, and even the worst chocolate cake is better than no chocolate cake. See also no-knead bread and omelets in a bag for more wacky DIY recipe shortcuts, and hit the link below for more cake-in-mug details.

Make Cake in a Mug [Wired How-To Wiki]

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[Hack a Day] 7 New Entries: Autonomous Cookie Monster

Autonomous Cookie Monster

[DJ Sures], who built the autonomous Wall-E, is back with another creation. His new autonomous Cookie Monster is certainly an interesting build. He had the cookie monster plush toy already so the first step was to flay the blue beast and insert a skeleton. He used another robot for that. There are two servos for the wheels plus one for each arm and one for the neck. There’s a distance sensor in the mouth. He built a custom board for the PIC18F4685 microcontroller which is running the same 2D mapping code as his previous bot. Check out the video of it in action below.

      

Best new science inventions 2008

Not to be outdone, Popular Science published their Best of What’s New 2008 and packed it with videos and photo galleries. Inspiring inventions include the Pipistrel Taurus Electro, the longest-flying two-seated electric plane, the Intel Core 2 Duo Small Form Factor, which you can thank for the thinner laptops like Apple’s MacBook Air, and the GroundBot, a spherical robot that can roll through the mud, sand, and snow. It’s not even the end of the year yet, but with all these great inventions, we can’t wait to see what’s in store for 2009.

[via io9]

      

Neon light Christmas tree

Everyone always complains about the Christmas season coming earlier and earlier, but we think when we can have Christmas trees like the one pictured above, it’s not such a bad thing. Created by English fashion designer [Gareth Pugh], the tree features sixty white neon tubes, and is supported by a freestanding metal rod. It reminds us of the light sabers in Star Wars, which is probably why we like it so much. The tree is just a carrier for the decorations anyway, right? You can check out the tree in person at the TOPSHOP in Oxford Circus, London.

      

Hacking the MINI Cooper

[war6763] sent us this hack to power an amplifier in a MINI Cooper. Apparently, aside from being unconventionally handsome, they’re also unconventionally wired. Amplifiers are generally wired to the ignition or stereo and turned on when the car is turned on. Due to some strange wiring, this just isn’t possible in the MINI Cooper. Some people use the cigarette lighter to power on their amplifier, but [war6763] wanted something that left his cigarette lighter free for other things. He built a circuit that monitors the cars built in USB input line and turns his amp on and off accordingly. The entire unit cost around $10.00. You can see the video demonstration after the break.

      

Impressioning at LockCon

[Steffen Wernéry] has published a video of the impressioning contest at LockCon. We learned about key impressioning at this year’s HOPE conference. You start the process by inserting a key blank into the lock. By turning the lock until it stops and then moving the key up and down you create marks on the blank’s face. Take a file to those marks to remove the extra material and then repeat the process. Once the pins are set properly, they’ll stop leaving marks on the blank. It takes a lot of skill to do this right, but you end up with a perfectly functional key. [Barry Wels] managed to win the competition in 5:30 with second place coming in at 6 minutes.

      

Kill A Watt teardown

Come on, folks. If we keep tearing apart everything that’s handed to us, we’ll never get nice things. SparkFun got their mitts on two Kill A Watts and proceeded to plug them into everything and then dismantled them to see how they work. The Kill A Watt keeps track of how much power is used over time. The largest load they found was their soda machine using 500W (should probably add a motion sensor to that). They plugged a meter on either side of a UPS and found out that it uses 5W just to charge. On the inside of the meter, there isn’t anything too substantial. One unlabeled IC runs the whole show.

      

WaldFlöte: midi controlled pipe organ

Members of Dorkbot Edinburgh have done what most of us would do if we had a 19th century pipe organ. They hacked it to be midi controlled. The organ is located above a cafe owned by the university of Edinburgh. Students have been repairing and modifying it to get it back in working order.

The electronics are composed of an Xilinx Spartan-3E Starter Kit as the brains and a Microblaze processor converting midi events for the solenoids.  The cool thing is that none of this required any permanent modification to the organ itself.  It can all be removed to put the organ back in normal playing condition. Check out the video after the break for some classical Van Halen.

[thanks Jonas]

      

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