With just a wire, a wood screw, and a drinking straw you can go MacGyver on your PC’s WiFi and make yourself an omnidirectional “range extender” antenna, similar to what you’d find in the store for $30. There isn’t a lot of talk about the reasoning behind the antenna design… it’s just a straight duplicate […]
What works well for a gaming input device also appears to be a useful tool for human robot interaction. University of Calgary students Cheng Guo and Ehud Sharlin performed a study in which participants tried to pose Aibos and navigate them through obstacles using both keyboards and a Wiimote-based gesture interface: For the navigation tasks […]
Dave Nance used an ordinary door peephole fitted to a lens cap to produce some whimsical looking images like the one above. Depending on the optics used in the peephole (many are made of plastic) and whether you choose to use a tripod to compensate for the decreased amount of light, you can really end […]
It’s not a simple decision, choosing on your next mobile device. There are a lot of different models with various features, built on several software platforms, and with hardware that works well for some carriers, but not well for others. It’s a total mess. One Hackszine reader wrote in on the subject, specifically asking about […]
Here’s a little howto on building a low-RPM generator from scratch. I assume that not all of you have extra hamsters lying around to power your night lights, but a similar design could be used for creating a small generator for wind or other energy sources. Though it’s hard for the hamster to make higher […]
MD5, the cryptographic hash function that’s often used to verify that files have not been tampered with, has been broken for a couple of years now. A lot of times when you hear about some algorithm being compromised, it’s not something that’s immediately practical to exploit… an encryption algorithm’s effective strength is reduced by a […]
Most people get around Actionscript 2.0’s lack of constant variables by just naming member variables in all capital letters and remembering not to alter their value. This works okay, assuming you obey the rules, but what if you want to enforce a constant value so that it cannot be changed during runtime. Edgar De Loa […]
