NYC Resistor

So, the folks over at Fubar Labs made a challenge to themselves and anyone else who wants to participate. Basically, write one program every day throughout the month of march. Any language, any function, but be creative. I doubt I can keep up the entire month, but it sounds like a really fun way to expand ones coding horizons and do some neat stuff. So anyways, here’s my first code for March Madness.

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Edit: Thanks everyone who came out for the hackathon!

Here’s a semi-live shot of the hackathon at NYCR this weekend! Say hello internets.

NYC Resistor is saying goodbye to our old space, and what better way to wrap things up than with 48 hours of nonstop hacking?

Ok, maybe the real impetus is that we don’t want to have to move all this Club Mate to the new space. But regardless of our true intentions, it’ll be a great time to come and hack. We’ll have a plethora of electronics bits and bobs for scavenging, demos, and even a soldering lesson or two.

The awesomeness starts at 6pm on Friday, February 12 and goes until Sunday, February 14. We’ll end the event with a brief show and tell as well as PRIZES for the best hacks.

Participation in the hackathon is TOTALLY FREE, although donations are always super appreciated. Due to limited space, we are asking that folks RSVP, so click here to sign up for the hackathon.

Stay tuned for a more information! Additionally, we’re looking for a few good sponsors to help us provide snacks and other hacking necessities. If you or your business would like to be an event sponsor please contact Kellbot!

So at the end of last year and into the beginning of 2009, the folks at the extreme craft blog were soliciting for submissions for their 1000 ideas for creative reuse book. And since creative reuse is the very essence of hacking, I decided to submit my ( at the time new ) mp3 grenade project. It got into the book! So my idea is idea number 579 of 1000 fairly amazing ideas. Review and more after the click!

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Bill, Alicia, Hilary, Diana and the Cake

NYC Resistor made a huge showing at Yahoo Open Hack Day NYC this year.  Team Makerbot showed up with the New York Toast, featuring their latest “Frostruder” prototype, an amazing attachment which turns the Makerbot 3D printer into a confectioner’s dream.  And in the spirit of edible technology, Alicia, Bill, Diana and Hilary gathered to create the “Delicious Cake.” The cake was, in fact, NOT a lie.

The Cake represents the sentiment – positive, neutral or negative – of a keyword as represented on Delicious.com, Yahoo’s social bookmarking service. The cake was made to look like the Delicious.com logo, and LED “faces” were used to indicate the sentiment. Hilary wrote the code for the sentiment analysis, Bill wrote the code that drove the Arduino controller, Diana soldered the LED faces, and Alicia assembled the electronics and decorated the cake itself.

You can see more of the cake at Alicia’s Flickr Stream or at Bill’s. We were also featured on CNN: http://bit.ly/ddNm3

Find out more at Diana and Hilary’s blogs:

Diana’s blog: http://fashionnerd.com/2009/10/yahoo-open-hackday-nyc/

Hilary’s blog: http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/yahoo-openhacknyc-the-del-icio-us-cake/

So way back in the 2.4 Linux kernel days I operated a shell server. It was kind of like a “proto honeypot”. We set it up to portray a bunch of fake information about itself. We then released it into the wilds of IRC claiming it was a “machine we just owned here have a free account.” Then we monitored the systems use via ttysnoop applications and pulled copies of anything uploaded.

The result was we pulled about 4 gigs of exploit archives. And a bunch of logs of people trying to figure out why their x86 exploits weren’t running on the DEC alpha that was pretending to be the wopr.

Anyways, one of the neat side effects of my playing with the proc file system was finding a limit on the upper bounds of top. By setting up procfs to displays stats for 1048 processors I managed to get top to collapse after one iteration of showing cpu usage stats. Added a fun screenshot to the gallery.

Among the fun easy things you can do to tweak your kernel, upping your jiffy count to present 16 years of uptime, and customizing your HZ values are the most fun. I remember running HZ at 1024 back when the rest of the world was rocking it at 100 and slowing themselves down massively. Kernel tweaks are fun, relatively easy, and a great way to learn. Be fearless, be stupid, and be prepared to watch stuff explode catastrophically. But, don’t be afraid to slash and burn and start anew.

I bought these fantastic Apple In-Ear headphones for my iPod 80GB several months back for $79, and found that they worked well with my Macbook.  I’ve since moved on from both the iPod and the Macbook, settling on a Nokia n97 mobile phone.  I found that the Apple headphones don’t work with these devices naturally and distort the sound. Read more