Like any technophile, I was quite excited for the DTV transition to finally hit the U.S. I mean free digital and HD signals over the air? What downside could there possibly be? I was on cloud nine, until I realized that my beloved Sony Watchman, the first gadget I ever skimped and saved for, would become useless once the analog broadcasts stopped transmitting.
And unfortunately, all of the DTV converter boxes currently on the market are AC powered, which totally negates the ‘portable’ aspect of a portable TV. But over on Instructables, Kipkay has posted a tutorial on how to hack one of those converter boxes to run on battery power. Besides making your portable TV portable again, the hack is also useful for camping or in the event of emergencies when there’s no power and you have to rely on a portable set. Now if I could just find a way to splice the signal from a DTV converter box into my Watchman, I’d be all set.
And if you’re curious, after the jump I’ve included a few more glamor shots of my Watchman that I had sitting on my drive.
And speaking of calculators, what better way is there to take advantage of that powerful graphing calculator you bought for university than by installing Bill Nagel’s custom Super Mario game. It’s not a port of any of the actual Super Mario games from Nintendo, but a recreation that includes 13 unique enemies, 64 unique background tiles, fast scrolling, power-ups like a growth mushroom and fire flowers and even a “somewhat-challenging” boss.
The game can be downloaded from ticalc.org, and if you need instructions on how to install it on your own calculator head on over to Brown-Eyed Albino’s Blog for a brief write-up and a link to a YouTube video.
Remember the Nerf Vulcan? Of course you do. It’s the belt-fed, fully automatic chain gun that just happens to fire squishy little Nerf darts instead of something more, uh, significant. And it’s only $40, which means that you can definitely afford one. The only downside is the somewhat lackluster 3 darts per second performance. Not so hot.
Some guys from ManaPotions.com were unimpressed, and decided to perform a little unauthorized modification. With the addition of a 9.6 volt power source, they managed to bump the rate of fire up to something comparable to an actualM60 machine gun, at 500 (!) darts per minute. They also added an LCD shot counter and gave it a sweet paint job. The cost of the modifications (which are not at all complicated) was about $80, although you’re highly likely to melt the motor and gears of your Vulcan if you do it. Totally worth it, obviously.
Over on Ars Technica’s Infinite Loop, Erica Sadun has a post about developer Steven Troughton-Smith who updated his port of Doom to use the iPhone’s undocumented TV-out functionality. As you can see in the photo, the iPhone itself is then used as a touch-based controller for the game, with large, easy to locate buttons. Very cool. And as for why he decided to hook it up to a monochrome Apple II monitor for this photo; “this is what passes for ‘fun’ around me.” Fair enough.
At this point Steven has no plans for adding the TV-out feature to his public build of Doom, but Erica has provided the necessary steps for you to do it yourself since the Doom source is available as an open source Google Code repository. You just need to be a registered iPhone developer, and of course know how to program.
They say the best gifts you can give at Christmas are the ones you make yourself, but from my own experiences, that probably only applies to people who work in factories that produce cellphones or HDTVs. However, even if there’s someone on your list who’s a techno-snob, I think they’ll appreciate getting something like this DIY Wearable Toy Piano shirt. It was designed by Instructables author ‘mikamika’ who actually created it for the diy* Festival that was held in Zurich this past weekend.
Not surprisingly, most of the electronic components are scavenged from a kid’s toy piano, but the shirt also features conductive fabrics and threads so that the keys end up all over the place, which makes playing it more fun I guess. What I like most is that the shirt ends up looking pretty slick, with the various components being arranged in a rather pleasing design. I’ve included a YouTube video of the shirt actually being worn and played after the jump, and the only suggestion I have for improving it is to maybe use a louder speaker.
In order to get smooth and stable video, the pros use several thousand dollar Steadicams. After watching this video, I think a chicken might be more effective. While Steadicams rely on high inertial mass to keep them from jiggling around, the chicken possesses superior technology in the form of a gyroscope (probably its inner ear) and compensating motors (the muscles in its neck). It’s able to instantaneously compensate for any movements of its body to keep its head just about perfectly stable. So all you really need to vastly improve your spastic videography is a willing chicken, a little helmet with a camera mount, and something to keep the chicken looking where you want it to look. Something like, I dunno, a girl chicken in a bikini or something. Brilliant.
I’m going to file this one under ‘things I wish I’d thought of when I was in high school.’ I can’t tell you how often I relied on a graphing calculator to get me through a boring class, whether it was high school french, or even university-level script writing. But Mark Bowers has taken things one step further by sticking an old Game Boy Color into a broken Texas Instruments TI-83 calculator. (Even though that’s actually a TI-84 in the photo.)
What’s particularly cool is that he actually mapped the TI-83’s 4-way directional pad and various other keys to the directional pad and A, B, Start & Select buttons on the Game Boy Color. While the screen on the final product suffers from a bit of letterboxing on the sides because of the smaller GB display, and the underside features an unfortunate bulge because of the batteries, from the top I doubt of any of Mark’s teachers would discover his clever ruse.
Kids, listen closely: just because you’ve mashed the caps lock key down when typing something on the internet doesn’t mean that your comments have any more relevance, or that anyone is more likely to pay attention to you. It’s just really, really, REALLY ANNOYING.
SEE?
If you can’t help yourself, here’s a gentle suggestion: bolt a couple fourteen-gauge 10mm lebret spikes onto the caps lock key, and see how long it takes for you to cure yourself of your affliction. Not recommended for laptops.
My favoritest little netbook, the MSI Wind, has just gotten a substantial speed boost thanks to an official BIOS update from MSI. The latest 1.09 BIOS endows the Wind with the “Turbo” mode that was included in the review units but absent from the production models. You can overclock the 1.6ghz Atom processor by 8%, 15%, or 24%, yielding a speed boost of up to 30%, according to reports. You’ll get the most out of this if you have 2 gigs of RAM installed, but it works just fine with the stock 1 gig (which is what I have).
Once the BIOS is updated (a slightly complicated but by no means impossible procedure), you can set your overclocking speed in the BIOS menu at startup. Then, simply pressing Fn+F10 engages Turbo mode (with an accompanying flaming turbo graphic). This only works while the Wind is on wall power; pressing Fn+F10 while running on batts instead underclocks the processor down to 1.2 ghz to save battery life.
A 30% speed boost is quite significant, and although the Wind was of course overclockable before this, building the option into an official BIOS release makes it not only easy, but also (I assume) keeps your warranty intact should you melt your processor into a sad little puddle of silicon goo. So far, though, even at 24%, I have only noticed a slight warming of the computer, nothing more. Oh, and you can also download a hacked version of the 1.09 BIOS which swaps the locations of the Fn and Ctrl keys, another one of my little gripes.
Now all they have to do is update the driver for the Sentelic touchpad to give it slide scrolling (and why not multitouch gestures, while they’re at it), and the MSI Wind will be completely flawless.
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