January 2007 – Street Tech

January 31, 2007

New O’Reilly Hackszine

The image “http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/hackszine_tag.png” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors. O’Reilly has launched a new blog, called Hackszine, to coincide, and obviously to datamine, their growing line of Hacks books. Looking forward to visiting this site on a regular basis to find things like:

If you’re a fan of domain hacks like del.icio.us or blo.gs, you might be interested to know that getting a personalized domain of your own may well be within easy reach. Domain Hacks is a search utility that will help you find the combination of domain name and top-level domain that works for you.

And this one, thank Gopod!

Already tired of the relatively new Snap “feature” that pops up an annoying little preview balloon over every hyperlink on certain web sites? Well, it turns out it’s pretty easy to get rid of them, everywhere. Just click here to disable the feature using cookie technology (or, go to the Snap page that discusses deactivation and click the link from there).

January 30, 2007

Dorkbot Coming to Second Life?

I’ve been hearing from other Street Techies in other cities that they’re kind of jealous that we have a Dorkbot DC now and that they don’t think they have enough…er… dorks in their town to support a Chapter. If that’s the case, how about a virtual Dorkbot via Second Life? Regine at We Make Money… has a brief interview with artist Shintaro Miyazaki who’s trying to organize Dorkbot SL.

Shuffling Your Hipster

You got your Shuffle on my Hipster! You got your Hipster on my Shuffle! It didn’t take long for two techno-trendy obsessions, the iPod Shuffle and the Hipster PDA to be combined. It’s a natural when you think about it, given the clip on the Shuffle and the Hipster’s need for same.

Other Hipster PDA coverage on Street Tech:

[Via 43Folders]

January 30, 2007

Vid Demo of LG VX9400

I’m intrigued by the flip-screen phones that seem to be all the rage in Asia, and are coming to the States now. Here’s a link to a demo of the LG VX9400, showing off Verizon’s forthcoming live streaming service for broadcast TV. Broadcast TV? What’s that?

January 29, 2007

Steampunky Scanner Mod

Itr seems like every week now somebody is doing some crazy steampunk device, hack, or mod and getting a flash mob’s flood of attention as a result. This week starts off with Datamancer: Prestidigital Datamancery & Paraphrenalic Technofetishism’s Opti-Transcripticon, a.k.a. Rich Nagy’s scanner mod. He took a flatbed scanner and dressed it as a nifty-looking leatherbound book.

If you haven’t seen Datamancer’s site before, check out his other amazing pieces, such as the steampunk bass amp and his positively evil-looking ’64 Caddy and ’56 Ford pick-up. I just wish he’d finish the damn things.

January 28, 2007

How-To: Build a Simple iPod Shuffle Charger

Here’s a simple and cheap hardware hacks project to build an AC/DC adapter for a 2nd gen iPod Shuffle. Don’t worry, you’re not building the power adapter itself, just the adapter to the adapter, the parts that make an existing AC/DC adapter mate with a Shuffle.

[Via hackAday]

January 28, 2007

How-To: Buy A DMM

I changed my mind (hey, it’s a geek’s prerogative). I looked at the Thumbnail Guide to Digital Multimeters in my Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Building Robots and realized that it perfectly dovetails MAKE’s recent DMM how-to video and PDF because it focuses on what to look for when buying a multimeter. So if, after looking at the MAKE podcast, you’re anxious to add one of these essential electronics tools to your kit, here are the sorts of features you want to look for. So, here’s my Thumbnail Guide to Digital Multimeters.

January 27, 2007

How-To: Use a Digital Multimeter

We’re currently working on the next Street Tech Thumbnail Guide, on using a Breadboard. Our next one after that was going to be on Using a Digital Multimeter (DMM), but those loveable wingnuts over at MAKE beat us to it! So, while we put the finishing touches on the Breadboard guide, check out MAKE’s very nice video and PDF on using a DMM. We might still do ours, but maybe focus on buying the right meter for you, or something else that will complement MAKE’s materials.

January 25, 2007

Dorkbot DC Was SRO

Last night’s Dorkbot DC was wonderful, and jam-packed. There were some 70 people there! It was an amazing mix of artists, programmers, composers, engineers, museum curators, pirate/fringe radio operators, a nice range of ages, races, a lot of women. Really an inspiring mix of people.

Randall Packard did his faux gov’t dept rant showing very unsettling slides of our American slide into fundamentalism. And then for something completely different, I talked about and demo’d cute little robots you build from junk that run around and annoy your housepets. Wheeee…

The pic above is of me demo’ing my BEAMbots. A PDF of my talk can be found here. Thomas Edwards has a few more pics of the night up on Flickr.

The next Dorkbot is on Feb 20th, at Provisions Library. Mark your calendars.

January 25, 2007

Stream almost any video to your TiVo with TiVo.Net

There is a new open-source program for TiVo owners that emulates a TiVo GoBack server called TiVo.Net (wiki available here). It can open many video formats, converts them on the fly and streams mpeg2 to your TiVo. It uses ffmpeg to convert the video so it should be able to stream pretty much any video that ffmpeg can open. It’s written in C# so it should be portable to Linux and Mac using mono.

I’m personally excited to use this in conjunction with Democracy Player to provide extra programming on my TiVo like the Make: podcast and also downloading stuff like James Burke’s Connections to watch them again from the comfort of my couch.
via TiVo Lovers