Hacks

Arduino Etch-A-Scetch clock

Check out Angela Yuan’s Etch-A-Scetch Clock. An Arduino powers a few stepper motors that clear the screen once a minute and then draw the current time. It looks like there is a laptop that is sending commands, presumably time updates, to the Arduino via processing. Her site is a little scant on details, but there […]

CNC hologram

I posted earlier this week about abrasion holography, a hologram technique that uses a network of simple arc shaped scratches to encode a visible, 3D hologram into a chunk of plastic. Carl was the first to comment on exactly what was on a number of peoples minds: This is just crying out for someone to […]

N64 emulation: better than the real thing

Racketboy has a great article showing off some of the capabilities of the modern N64 emulator. If your machine is fast enough, most of the available emulators will really give you a noticeable resolution boost and better looking anti-aliased models. Using the Rice Video plugin with the Project64 emulator, you can even swap out the […]

SketchUp has a Ruby API

I guess it’s been available for a few months, but I just noticed that there’s a Ruby API for Google SketchUp. Looks like a cool tool for extending the building interface, integrating SketchUp entities with external software, and building procedural stuff, like making terrain or stairs. Here’s a video of SketchUp developer Mark Limber talking […]

Command line Twitter

You can easily update your Twitter status from the command line using cURL. The Tech-Recipes blog posted this handy command line hack: With cURL installed, you can post to Twitter from the terminal window by using the following syntax: curl -u yourusername:yourpassword -d status=”Your Message Here” http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml You will receive a response containing the XML […]

DIY hand-drawn holograms

Typically the creation of a hologram involves lasers and various other expensive equipment and materials. William J. Beaty figured out a low-tech way to create your own holograms using a simple abrasion technique that requires only a compass and a chunk of plastic. He came across the idea while walking through a parking lot, noticing […]

Run Linux apps in Windows with andLinux

andLinux is a Ubuntu distribution that used the coLinux kernel, a Windows port of the Linux kernel which allows andLinux to run natively inside Windows without any virtualization software. After downloading, you basically just run the install Wizard. When your machine reboots, an extra taskbar icon will be waiting for you to launch and install […]