[Hack a Day] 6 New Entries: Daft Punk helmet timelapse

Daft Punk helmet timelapse

[Casey Pugh] with the help of a few friends constructed a Daft Punk style helmet for his Halloween costume. Embedded above you can see a timelapse of LED matrix construction. The 16×5 display is driven by an Arduino.

[via Bre]

      

Wiimote finger tracking music controller

The Evolution Control Committee has been doing live mashup performances for many years and recently upgraded their hardware. Inspired by [Johnny Lee]’s Wiimote whiteboard, they built a rear projection display they could use during performances. It displays a dense collection of samples in Ableton Live. On each of the performer’s hands is an IR LED mounted to a thimble. By touching the thumb to the forefinger, the LED turns on. Two Wiimotes watch for these IR flashes to trigger mouse clicks. [TradeMark G] found the Ableton display too complex to navigate quickly and accurately with a mouse; this new display make things much easier and enjoyable.

[via Laughing Squid]

      

TGIMBOEJ robot edition

Since we last reported about The Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronic Junk, several of these boxes have begun circulating in different areas of the world. Team Hack-a-Day launched three themselves. Robots.net decided that there was a need for a specialized box just for those who hack robots, and have launched their own.

The box contains lots of things that will appeal to roboticists, such as servos, various sized motors, RC car parts, and even a small microcontroller board. Plus hackable items like old CD drives, a trackball, and miscellaneous electronic and hardware parts. Everything fits in a standard sized shipping box, but it is full. A complete list can be found on the robots.net site, and they also have pictures of the contents.

Those who wish to track the box can follow it under the name robots.net-box1 on the TGIMBOEJ wiki. There is also a place to get your name added to the list of potential recipients. The wiki contains information about the whole process, including how to start a new box.

      

Sound activated christmas lights

Christmas is coming up pretty quickly. [tinkernut] shows us how to do a quick and dirty music activated Christmas light setup. Simply crack open a pair of old computer speakers and wire the speaker leads to a relay. Use that to power an outlet and you have music controlled lights. The section at the beginning of the video is a bit misleading as that kind of choreography would be rather difficult with this setup. This may look familiar as we mentioned an almost identical project back in 2006.

      

Stop wasting your air freshener

Airwick air fresheners come with an amazing feature. They spray air freshener every once in a while no matter what. It is extremely wasteful and obviously a marketing plan to force you to buy more. There is a solution though. You can hack them, to turn them back in to a manual release like they used to be.  Two cuts and two soldered wires is all that is necessary.

yes, we know you could just buy an aerosol, but many of us just come home and find them in our bathrooms since someone else in the house bought it. If you’ve already got it, why not hack it? This is also a great project for teaching beginners how to improve hardware.

[thanks Asmor]

      

Point laser, get beer

Simply tag something with a laser and El-E will go get it for you. We know this is for the disabled, but we can’t help but think of how nice it would be to have around the house. The system is programmed to recognize the illumination from a green laser and is constructed to be able to reach things from the floor as well as tables and shelves. I wonder if they have programmed El-E to go get the laser for you if you leave it somewhere, kind of like when you leave the TV remote across the room.

[via Gearlog]

      

You received this email because you are subscribed to the real_time feed for http://hackaday.com/feed/. To change your subscription settings, please log into RSSFWD.

[Download Squad] 6 New Entries: Windows market share reaches new low - 89.6%

Windows market share reaches new low - 89.6%

Filed under: News, Windows, Macintosh, Linux

If you gauged the market share of various operating systems by counting the number of Macs vs PCs you see in the typical urban coffee shop, you'd probably believe that Apple and Microsoft were duking it out like Republicans and Democrats in a close US presidential election.

But the truth of the matter is that Microsoft is the dominant company when it comes to consumer oriented computers. In fact, according to Net Applications, a company that tracks these things, Microsoft had more than 90% of the market share. Until last month, anyway.

In November, 2008, Microsoft's market share dipped to 89.62%. Which is to say, Microsoft's Windows operating systems still dwarf the nearest competitors, Mac OS X and Linux. But a slightly smaller percentage of people who visited web sites tracked by Net Applications in November were using the operating system.

Net Applications reports that OS X has also seen a slight jump in usage, and that Windows Vista use is up while Windows XP use is down. More than 20% of computer users were running Windows Vista for the first time in November.

[via Computer World and Slashdot]

Windows market share reaches new low - 89.6% originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Ask DLS: Vista SP2 Beta released: Does the public care?

Filed under: OS Updates, Windows, Microsoft, Ask DLS, Beta

While most people probably don't care what Microsoft does to patch or improve Windows Vista any more, Service Pack 2 is now available to Technet and MSDN subscribers and is slated for public release on December 4th.

Could SP2 actually take care of some of the irritations that have plagued other Vista users? Perhaps more importantly, does anyone really care? Vista has been taking such a beating in the media that it seems as though no one will. Prevailing sentiment seems to be that Vista should be ignored and left to die while development on Windows 7 continues.

While enhancements like Windows Search 4.0, native Blu-Ray media burning, improved wireless, and Bluetooth 2.1 support are great, I've yet to see any perception-altering features mentioned.

Personally, I've never hated Vista, and I've been able to work through or disable any of the annoyances I've encoutered (like UAC). I recently installed Ultimate x64 and I've been enjoying quite a bit. Photoshop CS4 runs like a dream, and Eset recently released a beta of my favorite internet security suite.

My Vista install is running just fine right now, but if SP2 can tweak my system's performance or squeeze a few more minutes of battery life out of my laptop, then I'm all for it.

What are your thoughts? Do you think Vista SP2 will do anything to really improve the OS, or does it stink of a last-ditch effort to "salvage" the experiment?

Ask DLS: Vista SP2 Beta released: Does the public care? originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Songbird 1.0 released

Filed under: Audio, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Mozilla, Freeware, Open Source

Just over a month after the first release candidate made its ways to the masses, Songbird 1.0 is available for download. Songbird is an open source music player built on Mozilla code.

The cross-platform music player comes in Mac, Windows, and Linux versions, and can handle playback of most music formats. Like most Mozilla-based software, Songbird supports plugins, including a QuickTime Playback plugin that adds the ability to play music purchased from the iTunes store. There's also a plugin that allows you to sync your music with portable media players including an iPod.

Songbird is much more than a music player. It's also an online music browser. You can visit web sites using the built in browser and automatically stream or download MP3 music from those pages. And thanks to the Last.fm integration, you can get additional information about songs and artists you're playing, or stream related songs from Last.fm.

Songbird 1.0 released originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 02 Dec 2008 14:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

A few days later, a better notifier: Ding, It's Up

Filed under: Productivity, Web services

It seems like only yesterday that I was writing about Notify Me When It's Up, a site that lets you know by email when a website comes back online. Actually, it was a few days ago, but someone has already built a fancier version of Notify Me. It's called Ding, It's Up, and it adds SMS and Twitter notification options, and tells you when a site goes either up or down. Despite my praise of Notify Me's minimal approach, I am forced to concede that Ding outdoes it.

I previously commented that it was nice that Notify Me keeps things simple, even though it could have added more features, or incorporated the functionality of Down For Everyone Just Me. I guess the creators of Ding, It's Up are basically sticking their tongues out at me, because they've done just that, and it's actually pretty neat. Just don't use it to sign up to receive updates by Twitter about when Twitter is down. You might want to use Is Twitter Down? for that.

A few days later, a better notifier: Ding, It's Up originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Microsoft adds similar images feature to Live Search Images

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Microsoft, Search, Web

When you're using a search engine to find what you're looking for, you're probably used to typing a query, looking at the results, and refining your query. Every now and again you might even click a button that says it will show you similar results. Now Microsoft has added a button with exactly that feature to the company's image search engine.

When you conduct a search using Live Search Images, you can hover your mouse over any image and click the "show similar images" button. To be honest, it's a bit tricky to tell exactly what this does. Because if you've searched for something like "stick" you're probably already looking at a window filled with pictures of sticks. If you click the similar images button, you'll wind up on another page with images filled with sticks. That said, when I said I wanted to see similar images to a stick bug, I did get another picture of an insect - and several pictures of deodorant, glue sticks, and stick figures.

If you're looking for a more advanced image comparison service, check out TinEye, a beta site that allows you to upload a picture and find images on the internet that are compositionally similar.

[via Google Operating System]

Microsoft adds similar images feature to Live Search Images originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 02 Dec 2008 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Burn downloaded videos easily with DVDCoach Express

One of the most frequent questions I get asked by retail customers is "Where can I get a program that burns my movies?" Nine times out of ten they actually mean "the movies I downloaded with Limewire."

If you're in the same boat and need a nice, simple app to convert and burn your downloaded video files to DVD, take a look at DVDCoach Express.

It's a free application for Windows that utilizes ffmpeg to handle conversion duties. The process is straightforward: drag your videos onto the file pane, set your encoding options, and start your task. Options are kept to a minimum: you can select PAL or NTSC, 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio, and the encoding quality.

DVDCoach's simplicity is key, because I've already got enough software support calls to answer.

On the high setting, four 150mb clips converted and burned in about 40 minutes. It runs on XP and Vista, and didn't have any issues on my x64 install.

Burn downloaded videos easily with DVDCoach Express originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

You received this email because you are subscribed to the real_time feed for http://www.downloadsquad.com/rss.xml. To change your subscription settings, please log into RSSFWD.