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 »
Cinco de Mustache
May 7th, 2010AARP preys on the young!
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 »
Managing multiple Twitter accounts via SMS
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 »
iPod ears
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 »
Police know what your cellphone jammer looks like
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 »
Mega Force
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.
ALF magnets
March 30th, 2010
One of the birthday gifts I received was an unopened package of ALF trading cards a friend had picked up at a thrift store. It was a funny gift, but after opening them—ingesting the gum, YEARGH—I wondered what to do with them. I searched around for some magnetic sheets and found this package of 12 8.5×11″ sheets to be the best deal. They’re $10 (unfortunately $17 after shipping). I stuck the cards to the adhesive backing and trimmed them out with a hobby knife. It was really easy to work with and I think they’ll hold up great. I’m now looking around the apartment for other things to make fridge magnets out of; I found my Nevada license, old business cards, and maybe I’ll pick out some Magic cards.
Nintendo DSi headtracking and the 3DS
March 23rd, 2010The video above shows a clever use of the Nintendo DSi’s front-facing camera. It tracks the user’s eyes and redraws the scene accordingly. This is the same trick used in Johnny Chung Lee’s Wii display hack. He was using IR instead of facial recognition though. Read the rest of this entry »
StarCraft 2′s e-Sports future
March 15th, 2010
With the arrival of StarCraft 2, one of the major staples of professional gaming is in for a shake up. It won’t just be the way the game is played though. The way tournaments are handled and broadcast is going to change.
Birthday Hacker Drinkup
March 11th, 2010
Last night we celebrated my birthday at Hacker Drinkup. It was a massive turnout with a lot of fun surprises. I quipped on Twitter, “Things that should be denim: jeans. Things that shouldn’t: everything else. #denimbustiersrsly?!” Pictured above is the denim hat Pinguino made me in response (my mannequin is wearing it now). You may remember that this isn’t the first time a tweet has generated an unexpected gift. Erin and Pinguino decorated cupcakes with fondant so they looked like our crew (they’ve made hacker cookies before). The final treat was a pair of functional frosted laser boobs inspired by my flyer. In addition, I got a new tshirt, some ALF trading cards, and some sweet socks.
