July 20th, 2010
Yesterday I was firmly entrenched in my couch when I heard my phone chime. It was on the table and I wondered what was available to view my phone’s display remotely so I could read and send text messages.
I found a few references to the RFBserver in Android 1.0. You could attach to the VNC server remotely by forwarding the tcp port over the Android Debug Bridge. This would work but I was hoping for something less involved. I’d need to setup ADB over wireless to make it useful too. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Gadgets | 2 Comments »
June 22nd, 2010
The boss handed me a new-in-box Google Nexus One today leftover from a launch project they did. My G1 has been showing it’s age so I decided to take the new phone and update it to the most recent leak of 2.2. I did the following:
- Unlocked the stock bootloader
- Rooted it
- Flashed the Amon_RA recovery image
- Flashed the Froyo radio image
- Flashed the FRF50 test ROM
- Flashed the FRF72 update
- Updated the kernel (to fix wifi)
Posted in Hardware | No Comments »
June 20th, 2010
Posted in People | 1 Comment »
May 27th, 2010
Last night was the 100th Hacker Drinkup. We’ve been meeting almost every Wednesday in Santa Monica for the last two years. For the centennial, Chris and Pinguino decided to build a fun demo: augmented reality mustaches. We had all seen Mike Clare’s AR Cookies last week so we started by making fiducial cookies. Chris wrote a processing app that would identify the image of the marker and then place an image of a mustache over it in the live video feed. Right before you took a bite of the cookie, one of the mustaches Pinguino had drawn would appear. I’m actually holding an onigiri (rice ball) in the photo above. Pinguino carved the fiduciary marker into a piece of nori (seaweed) on its face. It was a neat toy and it captured photos in the background which you can find here.
Posted in People | 1 Comment »
May 7th, 2010
No, it’s not a real holiday; just a fun excuse to grow a stupid mustache once a year. Here are photos of years passed: Read the rest of this entry »
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May 4th, 2010
I, and I’m sure many people under 30, received a letter from the AARP today encouraging membership. I’ve received many of these letters telling me to “get the most out of life over 50″. The AARP is apparently so opposed to ageism that they encourage young people to join their 50+ organization. In 2007, at the age of 26, I joined. Read the rest of this entry »
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April 24th, 2010
I have a handful of twitter accounts associated with specific events or websites. They’re often updated automatically with no regular intervention by me—I usually don’t even know their passwords. Everything works pretty smoothly until I need to do a manual update. Take the @hackerdrinkup account: It updates automatically with the week’s location, but if something unexpected comes up, I need to update it with the new venue. Many pro mobile twitter clients support multiple accounts and Brizzly supports up to five. I do these updates so rarely that it doesn’t feel worth the expense or setup time… and even if they were setup it still relies on my phone’s sometimes flakey data connection. I set out to build a simple solution that would work with a bare minimum connection. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Hacks | No Comments »
April 22nd, 2010
The idea of threading earphones through stretched lobes has been haunting me for several years. I’m sure I would have squashed this fascination by now if I actually had pierced ears. But it continues and yesterday I found myself searching again to find a photo of someone who had done it. I came across a MacRumors:Forums post from 2005 about putting stock iPod headphones through stretched earlobes, but unfortunately the pictures were missing. A quick search of the username turned up a Flickr user of the same name. I contacted Michael Dyer, the original poster, and he happily took two new photos. Here are his comments on the mod: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Ideas | No Comments »
April 12th, 2010
A couple interesting documents have recently appeared on Public Intelligence related to electronics hobbyists. Pictured right is a doc circulated by the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center “Radio Frequency Jammers Used to Disrupt Communication Devices“. It features one of the most widely available cellphone jammers on the market (here it is on Deal Extreme). SFPD recovered this one—it was on at the time—from a car during a drug bust. These particular units are sold with a cigarette adapter, but as the article notes, the range is only ~15 feet. With such a short range, I’m not sure what the point of using a jammer is outside of say, an elevator. Read the rest of this entry »
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April 10th, 2010
Memories of the Mega Force toy series by Kenner recently popped back into my head. Premiering in 1989, the line had two different warring armies and didn’t specify which was “good” and which was “evil”. I’ve always been a fan of giant sci-fi vehicles (mechs and whatnot). I think that’s what the real draw for me was; I mean this thing had planes… that you could land planes on! The smallest units were diecast metal so they had a nice weight to them and didn’t feel cheap and plasticy like many toys from that era. Pictured above was my favorite vehicle of the four we owned. Its helipad is spring loaded and would pop up at the push of a button. The mechanism withstood a lot of abuse and all of the large vehicles featured some sort of action like this.
Of course, I couldn’t remember the name of this series the other day so I IM’d my parents to check the toy box. They actually found the checklist that used to be included with each toy and sent me a scan: front and back. You can find more pictures of the toy line on Toy Archive and here’s one of the commercials.
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