Hot Hacks, Mods & Circuitry Posts

How To: Make a motion triggered spy camera

Kip "Kipkay" Kedersha is known for his intriguing and clever how-to and prank videos, even when he teams up with MAKE Magazine. He will show you how to tweak, hack, mod, and bend any technology to your hacking needs. No electronic device, gadget, or household item can stand the test of Kipkay's hacks and mods.

How To: Make LED-enhanced anti-paparazzi glasses

This video teaches us how to prevent those pesky paparazzi from invading our privacy. It suggests buying a pair of safety glasses that have lights attached at the sides. Then, remove the lights, and replace the existing resistors with higher-powered ones, and the lights with infrared LEDs. When the press tries to film you while you're wearing these at night, the cameras will see bright, menacing lights where your face should be. This how-to is presented as a joke, but it would be hilarious to...

How To: Make an infrared home alarm system

Kip "Kipkay" Kedersha is known for his intriguing and clever how-to and prank videos, even when he teams up with MAKE Magazine. He will show you how to tweak, hack, mod, and bend any technology to your hacking needs. No electronic device, gadget, or household item can stand the test of Kipkay's hacks and mods.

How To: Measure current, voltage, resistance, and continuity using a multimeter

If you own or have access to an auto-ranging or manual-ranging multimeter you can measure several different aspects of circuits, resistors, and the like. For example, you can determine the resistance, voltage, continuity, and current with the multimeter to help you determine the precision of a resistor. This guide will help you learn how to use a multimeter to perform these tasks.

News: Analog Video Cam + Thermal Printer = Slowest Instant Camera Ever

Sometimes an "analog" result is highly satisfying when the means for producing it is just the opposite. Enter Niklas Roy's "Electronic Instant Camera" project. The endeavor combines an analog black and white videocamera with a thermal receipt printer. The outcome is something in between a Polaroid camera and a digital camera. Like the olden days, the subject must sit still for a quite a while—3 full minutes—as their image is recorded and printed directly on a roll of receipt paper.

News: Super Tiny (And Cheap) DSLR Intervalometer for Time-Lapse Photography

If you're lucky, your digital camera has a built-in intervalometer that lets you operate the shutter regularly at set intervals over a period of time. Why would you be lucky? Because you can create some very awesome time-lapse videos, like the horribly beautiful eruption of a volcano or vivid star trails in the night sky. You can capture the stunning display of the northern lights or even document the rotting of your favorite fruit.

News: Holy Pac-Man! DIY Light Painting Saber Is Pure Awesome

A few months ago, we showed you a pretty awesome light painting project that visually captured invisible Wi-Fi signals around town using a Wi-Fi detecting rod filled with 80 LEDs. With some long exposure photography, the results were pretty amazing. This project was inspired by those crazy Norwegians, but this build lets you do something even more amazing—capture pictures of colorful written text and drawn images, frozen in midair.

Cocktail Couture: Robotic Booze Generating Dress

Meet DareDroid: sexy nurse, geek couture and mobile bartender, engineered into an all-in-one technologically advanced garment. Created by fashion designer Anouk Wipprecht, hacker Marius Kintel, and sculptor Jane Tingley, the team calls themselves the Modern Nomads (MoNo), and their series of garments fall into Wipprecht's invented family of "Pseudomorphs". Pseudomorphs are tech-couture pieces that transform into fluid displays—which is exactly what DareDroid does.

News: Digital Picture Frame Snatches Photos from Public Wi-Fi Networks

You're sitting in your favorite café enjoying a hot cup of joe, then you open up your laptop or turn on your tablet computer to get to work, but as always you get sidetracked and head straight for Facebook. Someone just tagged you in a photo, so you check it out, then you see it out of the corner of your eye—your Facebook picture digitally displayed on the wall in a nice, neat digital photo frame.

Inventables: A Store for Superheroes & Hackers

Founded by Zach Kaplan, a "serial entrepreneur" with a B.S. in mechanical engineering, Inventables is a futuristic online hardware store based out of Chicago. The company sells innovative materials at much smaller quantities than typically available—largely to artists, inventors, developers, and researchers. If you've got a brilliant idea and cash to spare, careful, you just may go hog wild. My premature "Dear Santa" wishlist-in-progress:

News: MyndPlay Gives Mindf*** Movies a New Meaning

Were you horrified when Gwyneth Paltrow's head ended up in a box in Se7en? Do you share Harrison Ford's opinion that Han Solo should have died in Return of the Jedi? Think Kurt Russell could have handled aliens better in The Thing? Well, sorry—you're out of luck. There's nothing you can do to prevent William Wallace's beheading or Carrie's mayhem. But thanks to MyndPlay, controlling the plot to future films is totally possible.

Altruistic Hacking: The Rise of the DIY Radiation Detector

Understandably, the tragedy in Japan has substantially risen the level of worldwide radiation-related hysteria. So much so, as an alternative to stampeding health food stores for iodine tablets, crafty individuals and organizations are hacking together personal radiation detectors. Rather than relying on the government, the creation and modification of handheld Geiger counters provides a self-sufficient solution to today's questions regarding radiation. Profiled below, three admirable organiz...

News: Become Your Own Souvenir

As a kid, my favorite thing to do at the Natural History museum was a midday stop, when my family strolled past an antiquated looking vending machine in the museum's musty basement. The Mold-A-Rama machine was oddly shaped, George Jetson-esque, and spewed out made-to-order, brightly colored plastic dinosaurs. There was such joy in watching the liquid wax pour into the mold, and then eject a warm, custom toy—well worth the dollar or two demanded. A version of this tradition was recently elevat...

News: Truck Driver Reverse Engineers Atom Bomb, Rebuilds Little Boy

You're walking down the street, minding your own business. Then you see it—a large, bright fireball in the near distance. A tremendous heat wave speeds towards you at one thousand miles an hour, and before you can think, before you can even blink, the extremely heated wind pushes right through you. Your skin melts, your eyes liquefy—your face disappears into the wind. Before you know it, your pancreas collide with what’s left of the person next to you, your duodenum is dissolving faster than ...

News: Creepy Theremin Utensils Howl the Pain of Slaughtered Ghost Chickens

One of the creepiest musical instruments ever is undoubtedly the theremin, a device originating from the early 20s that emits eerie sounds with a just a wave of the hand. If you've seen the original movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, you know what I mean—freakishly creepy. Playing the theremin can be off-putting for some, since it's a relatively pricy gizmo, but a new geek gadget called the EaTheremin aims to make all of us professional, dinnertime theremists.

How To: Hack Frequent Flyer Programs

Screw the airplane man. Ticket prices are too high. Competitive consumer choices are pretty much nonexistent. And need I go into the pain of being crammed into those tiny seats, elbow-to-elbow, thigh-to-thigh with a perfect stranger? Even your average Richie Rich winces at the astronomically high prices for a First Class seat.

News: 3D LEGO LikeLight Shows You Facebook Likes in Real Time

Matt Reed, a web developer at Nashville interactive ad agency Redpepper, built a massive, real life Facebook Like "button" out of Legos, which lights up whenever someone clicks Like on his Facebook page. The programmer loves LEGOs, and draws an affinity between the legendary building blocks and engineering: "[Legos] are great for prototyping physical objects. I don’t manufacture things, but I do click blocks together. Plus, most things I deal with on a daily basis are pixelized. Legos are som...

News: Hacked Wristwatch Connects to Facebook

Too lazy to take your phone out of your pocket? If so, then here's a must-have: a customizable inPulse wristwatch that can check into Facebook Places. Created by inPulse designer Eric Migicovsky, the hacked watch uses Bluetooth to pull Facebook Places from a connected Android smartphone. The app sends real time latitude and longitude stats from the smartphone's GPS to Facebook, which then transmits nearby places to the watch, navigable by a one button interface.

News: Control a Video Game by Swapping Spit

Once there was Spin the Bottle. Then there was the embarrassing adult version of Spin the Bottle—on Wii. And then there was artist Hye Yeon Nam, who decided to skip all pretenses and go straight for the spit-swapping, no foreplay necessary. Hye Yeon Nam devised a method for controlling a bowling video game by French kissing. It works like this: "One person has a magnet on his/her tongue and the other person wears the headset. While they kiss, the person who has the magnet on his/her tongue, c...