Functional Etch A Sketch costume
We love all of the creative Halloween costumes that have started trickling in now that the holiday is finally over, and people have found time to document their last minute projects. Take this functional Etch A Sketch costume made by [mazinbenny]. The knobs are lawnmower wheels. The pulley system is strung with 1/16″ wire rope to move a carrier for a dry erase marker. The marker draws directly on an acrylic screen. HowStuffWorks has a post on how a real aluminum powder based Etch A Sketch works.
We’ve covered more technical Etch A Sketch projects in the past. We’ve seen them hooked up to computer mice, drawing portraits at Maker Faire, and commenters have even suggested turning mechanical dry erase boards into giant Etch A Sketches.
Dean Kamen's Stirling engine car
[Dean Kamen]’s company, the people behind the Segway, have created a hybrid car that uses a Stirling engine instead of a standard internal combustion engine. Stirling engines are closed cycle, meaning heat is applied to the outside of the cylinder walls. They are generally more efficient than standard car engines, but haven’t been used much outside of industrial applications. We suspect that the drivetrain arrangement is similar to the Chevy Volt where the engine is used to charge batteries which are in turn driving an electric motor. This is different from modern hybrids that can have either electric motor or gas engine driving the wheels. The article is unfortunately full of classic [Kamen] hyperbole and minimal detail. He calls the Stirling engine “an insurance policy” for the electric car since it can recharge the battery. That’s right, folks. If you run out of juice, you can put gas in the car. I doubt many Prius owners will fall out of their chair over that. Being a Stirling engine, we’d be more impressed if you could charge the thing by rubbing warm toast on it.
[via Make]
TIME's Best Inventions of 2008
Attempting to put our past behind us as quickly as possible, TIME has released what they feel are the best inventions of 2008. While there’s some pretty wishy-washy lab-only stuff on the list, we’re glad to see a lot of cool hardware made the cut. Some of our favorites are: The Tesla roadster proving electric cars can be fun. IBM breaking the petaflop barrier with LANL’s Roadrunner. The Large Hadron Collider for getting everyone scared about physics all over again. Have a look at the list for many other tech highlights from this year.
New WPA TKIP attack
[Martin Beck] and [Erik Tews] have just released a paper covering an improved attack against WEP and a brand new attack against WPA(PDF). For the WEP half, they offer a nice overview of attacks up to this point and the optimizations they made to reduce the number of packets needed to approximately 25K. The only serious threat to WPA so far has been the coWPAtty dictionary attack. This new attack lets you decrypt the last 12 bytes of a WPA packet’s plaintext and then generate arbitrary packets to send to the client. While it doesn’t recover the WPA key, the attacker is still able to send packets directly to the machine they’re attacking and could potentially read back the response via an outbound connection to the internet.
[photo: niallkennedy]
[via SANS]
Weasure, a scale that weighs and measures
[John Peterson] created this postal scale device for a Renesas design contest. The Weasure not only calculates the package’s total weight but the dimensions as well. He built it using a SKP16C62P evaluation board that had an LCD, pushbuttons, and indicator LEDs. The original DigiWeigh parcel scale was modified to provide PWM output and tare control. He embedded photoresistors every inch along each axis. They were angle slightly upward and the surroundings were painted black to minimize reflection. The Weasure outputs everything via a serial connection so it can be used with shipping software to generate postage.
How to destroy a filesystem
The G1 ‘execute every command you type‘ bug naturally spawned ‘rm -rf /’ jokes. rm is the Linux command for deleting files. The -r and -f flags will cause it to remove files recursively and ignore confirmation. Executed as root it will annihilate the entire filesystem. Won’t it? [Jon Hohle] decided to test exactly how destructive the command was to *nix systems. How functional would the system be afterwards? He tested it side by side with the Windows equivalent, both ‘format c:’ and ‘del /F /S /Q’. He wanted to see what protections were available and what would be left working. Linux ended up completely broken while Windows, thanks to file locking, actually shutdown cleanly… and never came back. Some OSes, like Solaris, refuse to run the command ‘rm -rf /’ to prevent accidents.
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.
Sometimes you need to stop yourself from over-thinking your long-term ideas, pondering a better topic or angle, and just throw down and write something. Write or Die, a clever webapp from Jeff Printy, gives you both a stripped-down web space to write your text in and a bit of negative reinforcement if you let your mind, or your fingers, wander too far from the task at hand. Set a word count and time you want to write for. Then, set how you want the app to "remind" you if you stop writing—"Gentle" pops up a text box, "Normal" plays a harsh sound file, and "Kamikaze" mode slowly deletes back from your stopping point until you get back to it. Can't tell if "Electric Shock" is a joke or a feature in development. A bonus feature of Write or Die is that once you close the writing window, it asks to copy all your text to your clipboard—a serious salvation if you're the type to accidentally close browser windows. No sign-up required. 
Windows/Mac/Linux (All platforms): AlwaysVPN, a free virtual private networking service, is promoted as a safer way for anyone to browse the web or trading files over a public net connection. It works for that purpose, sure, but it also lets anyone on the disappointing side of a U.S.-only service like Hulu, Pandora, or Fancast get around that often arbitrary restriction. We've 
Exercise your mind with the challenging problem sets at Project Euler. Designed to provide a fun way to introduce new concepts , the frequently asked questions section of Project Euler has this to say about the nature of the project:
It appears to handle the problem of multiple mice by shifting the focus to the "real" windows cursor for actual actions. For example if you attempt to close two windows simultaneously with two mice you can see how TeamPlayer activates and inactivates the cursors as the command is executed. Under normal circumstances it shouldn't present much of an issue. The other issue that popped up: on my triple monitor setup TeamPlayer locked the cursors to the middle and right monitor, leaving the left one out in the cold. This should present even less of an issue, given that in most situations TeamPlayer will be used by multiple users it will be with a larger monitor or a projector. If you need to control multiple computers with a single mouse and keyboard as inputs, check out Adam's excellent