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Archive: hacks
February 17, 2009
Invisible watermark
Watermarking images can sometimes be a decent way to allow posted content to make the rounds online, while ensuring that the source of the content is correctly attributed. One thing that's always bugged me about watermarking, however, is that the original source site becomes all peppered with ratty attributions or logos that detract from the quality of the posted image. In this scenario, the watermarked image makes the content owner's site look shoddy, and this is a bad thing.
AJ sent in this nifty idea for making invisible watermarked images, where the watermark only appears when the image is downloaded or copied:
With about 10 lines of HTML and CSS, you can have an image on your site, watermark free. Then, when it's pulled off, a watermark suddenly appears like magic! A precisely positioned DIV with an image background that cancels out just the watermark is placed over the watermarked image, and when they overlap, you (mostly) see the un-watermarked original image. Tada! It's not cross-browser tested, so stay aware.
I tested this with a slightly easier alternative. Just cut out a whole rectangle of the source image where the watermark will go, then place a relatively positioned div with that background over the watermarked output. It's completely imperceptible until the image is copied.
Try dragging the image above to your desktop and you'll see what I mean.
The only downside is that it's a bit tedious, but there's no reason this feature couldn't be automated in the image upload facilities of most blogging software. Also, this isn't going to keep someone from screen-grabbing the whole thing, or carefully reassembling the two images manually. It does, however, make it easy for honest people to easily attribute the source, all while improving the look of the creator's site. Anyone going to the trouble of subverting this would probably be cropping off your watermarks anyway.
Posted by Jason Striegel |
Feb 17, 2009 03:00 AM
hacks, Photography |
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February 16, 2009
Street With A View - Google Maps art hack
Sampsonia Way is a 9 block, one way alleyway in Pittsburgh, PA. It also happens to be the most exciting street in the world when viewed through Google Street View, thanks to the efforts of a neighborhood, two artists, and a conspiring Street View team.
On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh's Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more...
If you knew when the Street View car was coming through your neighborhood, what would you do to welcome it?
Street With A View
Sampsonia Way In Street View
Posted by Jason Striegel |
Feb 16, 2009 03:00 AM
Arts, Culture jamming, hacks |
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February 15, 2009
Get Smart shoe phone
Of all Maxwell Smart's ridiculous gadgets, the shoe phone has always been my favorite. Paul Gardner-Stephen decided to make this fantastic piece of spy tech a reality, with an Instructable that shows you how to make your own with a pair of wooden-heeled shoes, a Bluetooth headset, and a Motorolla V620.
This shoe phone works by having a bluetooth headset in one shoe, and a mobile phone in the other. The reason for this is that when you see a mobile phone in the shoe when opened, it kind of ruins the magic of it being a shoe phone, rather than just a piece of consumer electronics wedged into a shoe.
Posted by Jason Striegel |
Feb 15, 2009 08:00 PM
Cellphones, Culture jamming, hacks |
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February 14, 2009
Nabaztag rabbit and Pandorabots AI mashup
Johnny Baillargeaux sent in a fun mashup that allows the Nabaztag programmable wireless rabbit to communicate with a Pandorabots AI bot service. With his software, you can write an AI script using AIML, publish it on Pandorabots, and then the output of the bot will be sent through the rabbit. Neat stuff.
Nabaztag/Ubiquity/Pandorabots integration
Pandorabots
Nabaztag wifi rabbit
Posted by Jason Striegel |
Feb 14, 2009 09:00 PM
Gadgets, hacks |
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February 13, 2009
Gain admin rights in OS X Leopard
It's happened to me more than once that I've needed to configure something on a managed Mac laptop at work for which I have no admin access. Normally you can just track down your network administrator, but if it's after hours or you are traveling, there's another option: escalate your own account privileges by adding yourself to the admin group.
To add yourself to the admin group, you'll need to reboot into single user mode and run a couple commands. Here's how:
First, boot the machine and hold down Command-S until it boots into single user mode. Then, mount the hard disk in read-write mode (and check it for errors) with the following two commands:
/sbin/fsck -fy
/sbin/mount -uw /
We'll be using the dscl command to add your username to the admin group, but first you need to start directory services or it will return an error:
launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.DirectoryServices.plist
To list the users in the admin group, use the following dscl command:
dscl . read groups/admin users
You won't see your username, of course, because you aren't an admin. To add yourself, run the following:
dscl . append groups/admin users yourusername
You can double check that your username is in the list now, then type reboot to restart the machine. When you log in, you'll see that you're now in the admin group, with permission to install apps or change any system settings.
Posted by Jason Striegel |
Feb 13, 2009 03:00 AM
hacks |
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February 12, 2009
iPhoneDisk - your iPhone is a mobile drive
Sometimes you need a handy mobile storage device to move files around between locations. You could use a flash drive or an external disk, but why not make use of that 16GB phone that you carry with you all the time?
iPhoneDisk is a MacFUSE based filesystem for the iPhone. Simply install MacFUSE, then install iPhoneDisk, and your iPhone will be usable as a general storage device. When you connect it via USB, it will show up on your desktop just like a USB drive would. You'll always have a convenient external disk on hand, and it's one less thing you need to carry around with you.
Posted by Jason Striegel |
Feb 12, 2009 03:00 AM
hacks, iPhone |
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February 11, 2009
Wacom pen(dulum) art
This clever fellow suspended his Wacom pen above his Wacom tablet and made a cool drawing pendulum with it.
Posted by Gareth Branwyn |
Feb 11, 2009 12:00 PM
Arts, hacks |
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Amish Hackers and Early Adopters
Homebuilt gas powered ice cutter to make ice for non-electric icebox.
Kevin Kelly wrote an essay about the Amish's relationship with technology, which is really quite different and much more interesting than many people think.
The Amish have the undeserved reputation of being luddites, of people who refuse to employ new technology. It's well know the strictest of them don't use electricity, or automobiles, but rather farm with manual tools and ride in a horse and buggy. In any debate about the merits of embracing new technology, the Amish stand out as offering an honorable alternative of refusal. Yet Amish lives are anything but anti-technological. In fact on my several visits with them, I have found them to be ingenious hackers and tinkers, the ultimate makers and do-it-yourselfers and surprisingly pro technology.Kevin visited some Amish and wrote about their pneumatic system:
The boss, Amos (not his real name: the Amish prefer not to call attention to themselves), takes me around to the back where a huge dump-truck-sized diesel generator sits. It's massive. In addition to a gas engine there is a very large tank, which I learn, stores compressed air. The diesel engine burns fuel to drive the compressor that fills the reservoir with pressure. From the tank a series of high-pressure pipes snake off toward every corner of the factory. A hard rubber flexible hose connects each tool to a pipe. The entire shop runs on compressed air. Every piece of machine is running on pneumatic power. Amos even shows me a pneumatic switch, which you can flick like a light switch, to turn on some paint-drying fans.The Amish call this pneumatic system "Amish electricity." At first pneumatics were devised for Amish workshops, but it was seen as so useful that air-power migrated to Amish households. In fact there is an entire cottage industry in retrofitting tools and appliances to Amish electricity. The retrofitters buy a heavy-duty blender, say, and yank out the electrical motor. They then substitute an air-powered motor of appropriate size, add pneumatic connectors, and bingo, your Amish mom now has a blender in her electrical-less kitchen. You can get a pneumatic sewing machine, and a pneumatic washer/dryer (with propane heat). In a display of pure steam-punk nerdiness, Amish hackers try to outdo each other in building pneumatic versions of electrified contraptions. Their mechanical skill is quite impressive, particularly since none went beyond the 8th grade. They love to show off this air-punk geekiness. And every tinkerer claimed that pneumatics were superior to electrical devices because air was more powerful and durable, outlasting motors which burned out after a few years hard labor. I don't know if this is true, or just justification, but it was a constant refrain.
Posted by Mark Frauenfelder |
Feb 11, 2009 09:02 AM
hacks |
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Build a Wiremap
Last August, Marc wrote about Albert Hwang's Wiremap display. It's a 3D display technology which uses a standard projector to illuminate an array of vertical strings. The strings are carefully spaced so that a vertical row of pixels on the projector can illuminate a single string. This allows objects to be rendered in a three dimensional physical space and as you can see from the video, it's pretty amazing to look at.
The whole project is released under the Creative Commons license. Even better, Albert recently posted an Instructable which guides you through the finer details of making one yourself from scratch. Aside from the projector, the cost is fairly negligible, and it would be an easy way to go about producing your own three dimensional artwork.
How to Build a Wiremap
Albert's Wiremap Resources
Posted by Jason Striegel |
Feb 11, 2009 03:00 AM
DIY Projects, hacks |
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February 10, 2009
HOWTO - make a compiler
Most hackers can spend their whole careers creating amazing software without ever needing to write a compiler or design a programming language. Like many professions, a lot of useful work can be accomplished with the established tools, rather than focusing efforts on the invention and craft of the tools themselves. Most carpenters purchase their tools at a hardware store. I'd probably raise an eyebrow if my doctor tried to measure my blood pressure with something she cobbled together in the garage (on second thought, that'd be pretty cool).
Unlike most other professions, however, the software developer has a unique advantage: the tools of the trade are made using the trade itself. A compiler is software that builds other software. I think that's what intrigues programmers and simultaneously scares them away from language and compiler design. It's magic.
Joel Pobar exposes a bit of this mystery in an introduction to compiler design for MSDN Magazine:
Compiler hackers are celebrities in the world of computer science. I've seen Anders Hejlsberg deliver a presentation at the Professional Developers Conference and then walk off stage to a herd of men and women asking him to sign books and pose for photographs. There's a certain intellectual mystique about individuals who dedicate their time to learning and understanding the ins and outs of lambda expressions, type systems, and assembly languages.
The article is a walkthrough on the creation of a simple programming language and a corresponding compiler that targets the .NET CLR virtual machine. It's a nice introduction to compiler design, and you can download the C# source for the sample compiler that's discussed. Perhaps this will be the starting point for the creation of your own programming language.
Create a Language Compiler for the .NET Framework
Posted by Jason Striegel |
Feb 10, 2009 03:00 AM
Computers, hacks |
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February 9, 2009
Haptic Compass
You've heard of magnetic orientation in migrating birds, the theorized "sixth" sense that allows them to see the earth's magnetic field using deposits of magnetite in their beaks. To see what this experience might be like for a human, you can build a north-sensing feedback device into a belt using some pager motors, an Arduino, and a digital compass.
Last night I built a haptic compass, also known as the Clown Belt. This is a belt which features twelve vibrating pager motors equally spaced around the perimeter of the belt. The control box uses a digital compass to determine which way is north, and continuously buzzes the appropriate motor. The effect is subtle but noticeable. I feel like I've been granted a strange new sense of direction.
The belt has additional features: it can be connected via serial to my iPhone which delivers up a bearing to an arbitrary destination. I have a first generation iPhone, which means my current location is highly approximate, but for distant locations it works great. It can also be controlled wirelessly over an XBee RF link, but the peculiar application of that is the subject of a future post.
I first heard of this hack in a March 2007 Wired article, titled Mixed Feelings, which describes a few experiments that show how our traditional 5 senses can be tricked into proxying data from external extra-sensory devices:
The world is full of gadgets that detect things humans cannot. The hard part is processing the input. Neuroscientists don't know enough about how the brain interprets data. The science of plugging things directly into the brain -- artificial retinas or cochlear implants -- remains primitive.
So here's the solution: Figure out how to change the sensory data you want -- the electromagnetic fields, the ultrasound, the infrared -- into something that the human brain is already wired to accept, like touch or sight. The brain, it turns out, is dramatically more flexible than anyone previously thought, as if we had unused sensory ports just waiting for the right plug-ins. Now it's time to build them.
Vibrating belts can give you the ability to sense direction. Rare earth magnets, implanted in your fingertips, can enable you to detect the electromagnetic field surrounding live AC wiring. If you could choose to sense anything beyond the typical 5 human senses, what would it be, what device could you build to detect it, and how would you jack your existing senses into that new data feed?
Posted by Jason Striegel |
Feb 9, 2009 03:00 AM
Arduino, Electronics, hacks |
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February 8, 2009
Grow your own fresh air indoors
It's no surprise that indoor plants help to reduce carbon dioxide and increase oxygen in the buildings they inhabit, but this TED presentation discusses a particular indoor planting strategy that is being used by a business park in New Delhi specifically to improve air quality above industry standards, while also sealing all external fresh air and exhaust.
We have tried and tested these plants for 15 years at Paharpur Business Centre and Software Technology Incubator Park (PBC™ - STIP) in New Delhi, India. It is a 20 year old, 50,000 ft2 building, with over 1,200 plants for 300 building occupants.
PBC™ - STIP is rated the healthiest building in Delhi by the Government of India.* Their study found that there is a 42% probability of increasing blood oxygen by 1% if one is inside the building for 10 hours.Also, compared to other buildings in Delhi, the incidence of eye irritation reduced by 52%, lower respiratory symptoms by 34%, headaches by 24%, upper respiratory symptoms by 20%, lung impairment by 10-12% and Asthma by 9%. As a result of fewer sick days -- employee productivity also increased.
They suggest that a typical living environment needs only three plants for this purpose. The Areca Palm is used for the general purpose of increasing O2 during the day in most living areas. Mother-in-law's Tongue serves a similar purpose but for the bedroom, as it converts CO2 to O2 in the evening. Finally, the Money Plant can be used to scrub Formaldehyde and other volatile organic compounds from the air.
The recommended number of plants per person in a living space varies from 4-8 depending on the size of the plant. It's not a huge amount, but it's definitely more than I have in my own home (and I have a lot of plants), and grossly different from most offices I've worked in. Imagine everyone in your office bringing in 4 shoulder high palms on Monday!
Do any readers have a living or work space that resembles this? Please share your story in the comments.
How to Grow Your Own Fresh Air - TED 2009
Posted by Jason Striegel |
Feb 8, 2009 03:00 AM
Green, hacks |
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February 7, 2009
Pure Data - open source audiovisual processing environment
Pure Data is an open source patch programming language, similar to Max/MSP, written by Miller Puckette. It's a high-level visual programming environment, where you add input and data manipulation objects to a stage and drag connections between them to define how messages are passed through the system when it is running. With a minor amount of effort, it's possible to create applications that perform complex real-time manipulation of audio and video data.
I was introduced to Pure Data (Pd) this afternoon by my friend Vince Veneziani. He's working on creating a tutorial for Pd and sent over an introduction to the programming environment, including a sample application patch that plays video on the faces of a bunch of spinning cubes, which can be controlled in real time as the application runs.
About six months ago, I was reading up on music creation and the program Max/MSP, a graphical workflow environment for creating and manipulating audio and video. Very complex, but powerful stuff. The author of Max/MSP, Miller S. Puckette, later created a piece of similar, open-source software called Pure Data (pd). Pure Data is similar to Max/MSP except that it's free for anyone to use and make stuff with.
In this post, we'll go over what exactly I managed to do with PD. It involved using an M-Audio MIDI controller to manipulate videos in a real-time graphical environment. Sound too complicated or scary for you? It's really not. C'mon, I'll show you how it works.
I mentioned that Pd is a graphical programming environment, but like any language, there's a steep initial learning curve, and you'll need to figure out a lot about the types of objects that are available and how they function. I've only started playing with this, myself, but thankfully there are a number of helpful tutorials in the Pd documentation.
Have you used Pd before? If you have any tips, tricks, tutorials, or a cool patch you'd like to share, add it to the comments!
Pure Data
Vince's Pd Introduction - Video MIDI Mixer
Pd Tutorials
Posted by Jason Striegel |
Feb 7, 2009 03:00 AM
hacks |
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February 6, 2009
FLARToolKit - augmented reality for Flash
I recall being pretty impressed with this augmented reality demo created by Boffswana last November. The basic idea is that you can use a webcam to track the real-world location and rotation of a special printed symbol. With this information, you can overlay a virtual object on top of the video stream and render it to match the position information of the symbol card. Called "augmented reality," the technique gives you a way to interact with digital entities as if they were physical objects.
You can create your own augmented reality programs without having to roll your own tracking code. There's a library called FLARToolKit that takes care of the heavy lifting of symbol recognition and spatial tracking. The code for the Boffswana demo is also available, and you can see how they used FLARToolKit along with Papervision3D to pull their demo off.
I should also mention that the FLARToolKit code could be used for purposes other than augmented reality. I'm sure there are other applications for a webcam-based input mechanism that can deliver accurate 3D location and orientation info.
What would you use this for?
FLARToolKit
FLARToolKit Examples At Tarotaro.org
Boffswana AR Papervision3D Demo and Source
Posted by Jason Striegel |
Feb 6, 2009 03:00 AM
hacks, Virtual Worlds |
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February 5, 2009
Make 3D stereo charts in Excel
If you make a 3D surface plot in Excel 2007, there's an extra option in the chart properties that allow you to adjust the view angle. Don Sauer noticed that you can use this property to enhance 3D plots by turning them into stereo images. It's a simple matter of making two charts and tweaking the angle for each eye. Just cross your eyes with the photo above to see the Matterhorn!
Make Stereo Graphic Images in Excel
Posted by Jason Striegel |
Feb 5, 2009 03:00 AM
hacks |
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February 4, 2009
Flashback: Urban Camouflage
Back in February of 2005, when DIY still had periods in it, we came out with the first volume of MAKE. What struck me most working on the premiere issue was how awesomely renegade it was (and still is). This spread from the Urban Camouflage article is a thing of sly beauty. Author Todd Lappin shares his knowledge that "With the right accessories, your vehicle can always be on 'official business'." His clever how-to gets down to the nitty-gritty of adding a fleet number, hazard striping, and even concocting a company name:
The funniest part of all was that Todd wrote to us after the magazine hit the newsstands and said: "When I went out to my car this morning, there was a MAKE magazine subscription card tucked under the windshield. Telstar Logistics has been outed." We ran his feedback and this picture in the Reader Input section of Volume 02.
Years later, I still enjoy that first volume, with all of it's great projects like building your own magnetic stripe card reader, making a kite aerial photography rig, fashioning a $14 camera stabilizer, and putting together a 5-in-1 network cable.
Knowledge never goes out of style.
In the Maker Shed:
More: Watch Todd talk about the Urban Camouflage project in Episode 102 of Make: television!
Posted by Goli Mohammadi |
Feb 4, 2009 06:00 PM
Culture jamming, hacks, Make: television, Mobile, Transportation |
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UTF-8 lets you Tweet funny characters
Back in the day, the internet ran on ASCII, and we liked it that way. If you couldn't find it on a keyboard, why, it just wasn't a character and that was that.
Back before the day, we had Commodore 64s, and while communication could involve all sorts of crazy glyphs and wingdings, at least these strange abominations were available on the keyboard. Rules were rules.
Today, nobody feels :) and no one is :/ or :o with that. Instead, today's netizens express themselves in single UTF-8 characters, never before seen on a keyboard, which to me is :(, but I guess it makes them ☺. If you tilt your head to the left, you can see that people's moods now live sideways—there's no way to really balance one's mood with a single character. It does, however, allow you to squeeze an extra emotion or two in edgewise in Twitter.
Our brave new 140 character world may have lost its soul, but it's gained a ♥.
If you're ready to let go of your keyboard and move beyond the past, TwitterKeys has a number of handy UTF-8 characters that you can paste into your Tweets. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Posted by Jason Striegel |
Feb 4, 2009 03:00 AM
Computers, Culture jamming, hacks |
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February 3, 2009
Watch commercial-free TV in Front Row with PyeTV
If you're a Mac EyeTV user, you can bring your recorded shows into Front Row, commercial-free, with PyeTV and ETVComskip:
This plugin allows access to EyeTV from within Front Row on Leopard, adding a EyeTV item to Front Row's top level menu. The plugin gives access to EyeTV's recordings (grouped by series), along with an image preview and recording metadata.
PyeTV also integrates with ETVComskip, a Mac OS X port of comskip (https://www.kaashoek.com/comskip/) designed to work with EyeTV. ETVComskip allows users of EyeTV to enjoy commercial-free recorded television. PyeTV provides capabilities of turning commercial skipping on and off from within Front Row, as well as starting a commercial search for recordings which do not have commercial markers already.
PyeTV also allows you to watch live television within Front Row, though you'll have to deal with the commercials.
What's your favorite way to view television on your computer?
Posted by Jason Striegel |
Feb 3, 2009 07:00 PM
hacks |
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Filipino rice cooker
Make columnist and kayak builder George Dyson sent us these photos (click to make big) from Wipke Iwersen, his boatbuilding friend who is on an extended visit to the Phillipines. George says: "This re-evolution of the electric rice cooker is brilliant, and new to me. Have you seen this? I love it!"
The rice cooker is filled with concrete apart from a hole in the middle, with a perforated bottom. In the hole they make a fire from coconut charcoal, and on top of the rice cooker the pan is placed. And what do they cook there? Yes, rice. Now you may think, oh, that's for the people who have no electricity - but not at all! There is a new switch on the rice cooker, made from wood - and a fan installed in the bottom! When you put a piece of burning wood from the normal fire (next to the rice cooker) into the hole, and fill it up with charcoal, and switch "ON" , it takes about 20 seconds to have a perfect fire... really amazing. They call this thing "pressure cooker".
Posted by Mark Frauenfelder |
Feb 3, 2009 04:29 PM
hacks |
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February 2, 2009
1 terabyte RAID in a MacBook Pro
Damien Stolarz, co-author of the upcoming iPhone Hacks and author of Car PC Hacks, has crammed two hard drives into his MacBook and likes to live on the edge:
I bought two nominally 500GB hard drives (amusingly, each enclosure contained a different manufacturer - one Hitachi and one Samsung).
Then I purchased an adapter from MCE Tech, which has the same internal shape as my MBP's DVD drive, but adapts the DVD ATA connection to take a SATA hard drive...
1 Terabyte raid in my 17″ Mac Book Pro
Posted by Brian Jepson |
Feb 2, 2009 06:00 AM
Computers, hacks |
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