Opensource Boat Block

 

Max at Reversing Entropy, has created an open source boating block because he was tired of expensive, not so strong boating blocks.  He came up with the design for a 5 in 1 "modular sailing block designed to replace snatch blocks, triples, sheeve blocks and more".  

He describes what he came up with on a YouTube video.  If you don't want to make them yourself, he has a page where you can purchase them.   Or, you can download the step files to make them yourself.  

Water Cooled 72,000 Lumen LED Flashlight!!

Hats off to Samm Sheperd for making the coolest flashlight ever!  (so cool as in water cooled and beyond crazy bright!)

Monitoring your Utilities

HackaDay has a nice piece on how to monitor your utility usage via wifi.   As a natural followup, slashdot points out that the FBI says that smart meter hacks are on the rise. 

More Coffee Shop Hackary!

I love my N900!  There is a great pen tester that can run either on it or a plug-pc running Ubuntu.   Its called pwnieexpress! Both the plug-pc and (obviously the n900) will let you pen-test  wired, wireless, and 3G networks.

Thermal Imaging

New Scientist has a cool little project that lets you record the lack of insulation in your home.

Make a simple thermal scanner with an Ardunio card, and then record the observed temperature not with a number (in Fahrenheit) but with a colored flashlight that is pointed on to the surface that you are measuring. Thus, hot surfaces get red light shined on them, and cold surfaces get blue. Then use some time-lapse photography to compile all the readings into a single photo.

Things you will need:

Arduino Card

Photo thermal scanner wiring diagram:  Circuit diagram for 5v Melexix Sensor

Code for Arduino Card: (Have not found yet)

Time-lapse (long exposure) app: Glow Doodle, iPhone app guide, 

Helmet Cams

With the availability of low cost and very rugged helmet cams, we are seeing some very interesting (and some well produced) youtube videos popping up.

Some notable videos:

1. Biking somewhere in Europe. (note the lovely rock formations!) ...Least you be inspired to do this, please note this video.
2. SF* Fireman rescues person in house fire (*San Leandro, not SF but close enough)

Hobbit Home

Simon & Jasmine Dale have built a fantastic Low Impact Woodland Home in the Wales. It took him (and friends) four months to build and a total of 3k in cash! Fantastic job, and wonderful place (I only wonder how the site will age over time. Things like rotting, sagging walls/ceiling, etc.) His site is fantastic with a very good writeup on how he put everything together.

Printrbot

PCWorld (and Kickstarter) has a nice brief on Brook Drumm's Printrbot, a low cost ($200), DIY 3d printer.

Lightning Foundry

Here's an idea: build two 10 story tall Tesla Coil towers and watch them go off! That's exactly what Greg Leyh and The Lightning Foundry wants to do and he needs your money.

Its a cool idea, and what could go wrong?!?!!!

more lego goodness

Lego CD/DVD Ripper: See Engadget (Nov 1, 2011)



Robot CubeStormer II record breaking 5.66 second Rubix's Cube Solver! (See slashdot Oct 19, 2011)

Derek Deville's Qu8k

Derek Deville, built a 8" diameter, ~14 foot rocket, that went 121,000 feet (~23 miles) up into space to capture Carmack's $5k "100kft Micro Prize".

Top speed of the rocket was 3,200ft/s (2,181 mph) and it's all on video:


(BTW, it landed only 3 miles from the launch site.) More on this at HuffPo and Gizmo.

War Flying

geek.com has a writeup about Mike Tassey and Richard Perkins who built a very cool remote RC plane that scans the airwaves below it, tracks wifi nets, and pen tests them. It runs the full backtrack suite on the plane, and can be remotely managed, but it can also do everything (fly and sniff) on its own.

Kevin Mitnick shows how easy it is to hack a phone

cnet security has an article/interview with Kevin Mitnick about how easy it is to listen/hack into to others voicemails. (use asterisk, dial up your cell# and in caller id, say your coming from your cell#)

Fun things to do in a coffee shop...

Well... More related to Wifi, how to troubleshoot it, and maybe to hack it too.

• inSSIDer and ekahau for coverage maps
• Nice writeup on how to crack WEP, and another howto
• NeoPwn to let you crack from your cell phone, or how to get backtrack on your phone
  

Another good game

Yea! More cool "brain races" this time to the moon!
Here's a history of some of the coolest:

• DoT supported SunRayce (build a solar powered car and race it across the US) and World Solar Challenge, (do the same but race it across the Australian continent).
  
• Then there was the DARPA Grand Challenge: to build a car to race on its own
  
• The Ansari X Prize: Launch a reusable manned spacecraft
• And now the X Prize Foundation is starting the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize.

Home Power Monitoring

I've been wanting to install a string of shunts in my basement to then monitor current usage on all my circuits.

Bill Porter has another idea: Clamp sensor power monitoring. Interesting project.

Antikythera Mechanism + Legos

Engadget Points to a lego built replica of the Antikythera Mechanism, a computer to predict when solar ellipses would occur.

"Andrew Carol, who has lovingly pieced 1,500 Lego Technic blocks together, creating 110 gears and four gearboxes in total."

Free Schooling

Top Marks:
These are really great, high quality training m

• Khan Academy: (Math, Sciences, and growing) BEST YET. See some background on Salman Khan and why we should worship him.
• Marketplace Whiteboard: Senior Editor Paddy Hirsch explains all the different kinds of financial topics from Quantitative easing, to short selling, to Shadow banking and very much more.
• MITOpenCourseWare: Free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MIT. No registration required.
• Stanford Engineering Everywhere: some free engineering classes from the left coast. (and their AI Class) 
• Coursera : Online classes from many different universities.
• UCLA: and their Science, Magic and Religion Corses.
• Getting started in Electronics (by Forrest D. Mims III.) A Classic RadioShack Into to electronics book.
• Nerdkits: icrocontroller kit, with fantastic tutorials on how to build stuff and how it works.
• Norm Wildberger's YouTube videos on Geometry: "WildTrig"

Getto versions:

• Arduino Tutorial: LED's. It's no EE11 (RLC) but has some good overviews

(more to come later...)

RC Goodness!

Much goodness in the remote controlled aircraft with movable video cockpit display and weponary department:

From the HackADay website:

"An unemployed electrical engineer can be a very dangerous thing. [Cybrown] has turned his skills toward darker, more awesome applications by building an armed unmanned aerial vehicle. This is a remote control airplane that has a movable camera mounted in the cockpit. Video and GPS data are sent back to the pilot who views the picture via a wearable display. "

Clayton Boyer Gears & Clocks

I first stumbled across Clayton Boyer's youtube entries on odd shaped gears. But when I checked out his website, he has some fantastic wooden clocks (showing the gears), and some great sculptures.