GeekLimit

I’ve seen a few of these around the web, and they still continue to fascinate me. It’s amazing how easy it is o crack a safe these days. With parts commonly found in junked printers, this student took a half-brute-force, half-algoritmic approach to creating a robotic safe cracker.

The end result? Instead of a brute-force attack on the combination, which could theoretically take weeks, the safe was cracked in just a few days. Not bad!

Congrats to Kyle Vogt on using a bit of forthought in his algoritm to cut out 90% of the time cost. Am I cheering on the idea of making theft easier? No. Better cracking methods make better locks.

The speech recognition function in Vista seems to be exactly the same as every other speech recognition product I’ve encountered: absolutely worthless.

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edit: whoops! fixed the video

In 2003, IBM began releasing ThinkPad laptop computers with integrated accelerometers and associated software to protect the hard disks when the unit is dropped. Enterprising hackers from IBM and elsewhere have worked to develop modules for the Linux kernel to take advantage of these sensors. On-screen display orientation, desktop switching, even game control and real-time 3D models of the tilt of the laptop are now available. This article presents a new twist — knock codes — and a simple program to run commands when specific knock codes are detected.

For the first time, you can hit your computer and get a meaningful response! Using Linux® and the Hard Drive Active Protection System (HDAPS) kernel drivers, you can access the embedded accelerometers on Lenovo (formerly IBM®) ThinkPads, then process the accelerometer data to read specific sequences of “knocking” events — literally rapping on the laptop case with your knuckles — and run commands based on those knocks. Double tap to lock the screen, and knock in your secret code to unlock. Tap the display lid once to move your mp3 player to the next track. The possibilities are endless.

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More here on how to accomplish this on your Thinkpad.

Well, now doesn’t that just freak you out…

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Next step: Enter in the combined works of Einstein, and put him back on the lecture circuit, complete with interactive Q&A. (Just don’t lose the head, Philip K. Dick-style!)

I was actually lucky enough to hang out with ol’ Phil’s robotic head at Wired’s NextFest show when they were in Chicago. Pretty lifelike, except for the access panel on the back of the head being off and all…

If you’ve ever had to adjust the timing on an engine, you should already know how the timing strobe works. Basically, you have an engine that is turning over 1000 times per minute, or at 1000 RPM. There is some writing on one of the pulleys of the engine, but when it is rotating at over 16 times per second, there is no way a human can read the writing.

The solution to this is to have a “timing gun”, which is basically a strobe light that is able to change it’s strobe frequency to match the engine. When you’ve got the strobe light flashing at the same rate as the pulley, (1000 flashes per minute) an interesting thing happens: time stops. No, this isn’t an invention by Professor Farnsworth of Futurama fame.

What is happening is that the strobe light is highighting the exact same part of the pulley, 1000 times per second, so all you see is the exact same part of the revolution, 1000 times per minute. For all your brain knows, the pulley is standing still. (Until you touch it, then you lose your fingers)

What does this have to do with anything?

This concept has been applied to a neat little gadget (via MAKE) that enables a person to “pause” reality and study the effects of falling water droplets. Best of all, it’s something you can do in your own home. I saw this a while ago, but just realized how cool it really is.

This may not sound incredibly exciting, but check out the video and you’ll be looking for the parts to build your own. I’d like to build one just for the sake of being able to measure the accelleration of gravity – with a ruler!

I was playing Texas Hold Em poker on XBox Live last night and out of the 10 or so people that were playing, only 2 others (apart from myself) were chatting via the headset and mic.

It transpired that the two people, who I shall just call “Mr A” and “Mr B” worked for a computers games company and were quite relaxed about what they were saying. Games testing, new titles, new hardware and internal Gamertag based score leaderboards were all discussed – but the stuff that caught my ear the most was about the Playstation 3.

Mr A: “I have a tech-demo of working I can show you tomorrow if you want. It’s just basic geometary stuff at the moment with bad clipping and error handling, but the effect is there.”

Mr B: “Is that on 360 or PS3?”

Mr A: “Both. The PS3 dev kit is also online too – it took me about 40 minutes just to get a login [to online] to test the online bits for our games. is testing on our PS3 dev kits at the moment and is due to go to Alpha in September.”

Mr B: “So, you got the PS3 Test kits then?”

Mr A: “No way! Still only Dev kits! Sony have’nt even released the proper test kits yet and is due to go alpha in September! The Dev kit is real jumbled anyway – no user interface – hardly anything. We will struggle to alpha by September.”

They also chatted about various other games in development and test phases which was quite interesting. But not as major as them admitting (without them knowing i was listening) that the PS3 is still in a real mess. They did mention which company they work for but I shall not mention which one – but they are a major player. For them not to have anything near a PS3 to test their upcoming games on was a bit of a shock!

A PS3 launch this year? I think not!

I have been using Skype for some time now, and the only grudge I have is that the Linux version of Skype is not keeping up with the latest release for Windows platform, lacking newer functions and quality enhancements. Plus as we all know, Skype is based on proprietory VoIP protocol. (if I am wrong, let me know)

So I decided to look elsewhere, and an application that complies with SIP. The answer for me lies with Gizmo Project, which has an excellent VoIP client, supporting Linux as well as Windows and Mac. The only major thing that lacks for the time being is the mobile platform support, which I would love to see in future being developed and released, as I am currently running Skype on my HP hw6510 communicator. The exception being the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet support.

Gizmo is based on common principles for VoIP clients, using your internet connection to make calls to other computers. And now with Gizmo the new All Calls Free plan makes calls FREE between registered, active Gizmo Project users in 60 countries around the world. I was really happy to see that Russia is supported for landlines as well as mobiles, but sad to not notice India in the list. I guess the reason lies with the rules in Indian telecommunication industry, regulated by DoT. Another feature missing is the Video support, which latest Skype has, but for me it’s not the main criterion.

When I tried installing Gizmo around six months ago on SUSE 10, I wasn’t able to run it for some strange reason. After noticing an info on Gizmo from Moosy’s blog, with little tip, I was able to install Gizmo flawlessly on SUSE 10.1 using the OSS library provided by Gizmo Project. Unfortunately, with ALSA I had problems. Here are simple steps that you need to follow for Gizmo to be up and running on SUSE 10.1

I am running SUSE 10.1 x86_64 platform, with Gizmo 1.0.0.18 being the latest available version.

1. Go to download section and download two files provided specifically for openSUSE distribution

• libsipphoneapi – the OSS version
• gizmo-project – the client itself

2. Install the following required dependencies from SUSE repositories or CD/DVD

• expat
• expat-32bit
• openssl-devel
• openssl-devel-32bit
• curl-devel

3. Now we need to create a soft link to libexpat.so.0 in /usr/lib/ folder

# cd /usr/lib/

# ln -s /usr/lib/libexpat.so.1 libexpat.so.0

4. Once the above mentioned dependencies are installed, install the downloaded files from Gizmo project

# rpm -ivh libsipphoneapi-oss-0.78.20060112-1.suse.i586.rpm

# rpm -ivh gizmo-project-1.0.0.18-1.suse.i586.rpm

That’s it. Now you will find a shortcut to your Gizmo application in your KDE -> Internet menu. Once launched, register a new user, or if you are already registered, log-in using your username and password. One small problem I noticed while registering was that I wasn’t able to register with username specified as EazyVG, which I usually use, and intead had to use longer EazyVGSip as username.

I know there are more SIP compliant clients available, such as openwengo, but for the time being I will settle with Gizmo and hope to see better support for Linux users from them.

Hope you will find this small review and Howto helpful. Be sure to check out our new All Calls Free calling plan, and if you want you can call me on my mobile @ +seven ninetwosix threefivenine doubleseven doublesix.

Enjoy and tnx to Moosy blog for the tip

It took longer than I thought, but someone finally released a polished and easy-to-use plugin to help people put all sorts of videos in Wordpress posts.

If you’re interested in putting videos in Wordpress posts, you no longer have to follow my instructions to hack wordpress into this capability. Just head over toone of my personal favorite plugin guys, Viper007Bond, and download his Video Quicktags plugin. Same great functionality as my method, but with pretty buttons in the WYSIWYG editor!

Have a look around this guy’s site for a bit while you’re at it, he’s got a lot of great stuff.

edit: looks like viper007bond’s site is down. In the meantime: Viper007Bond’s QuickTags Plugin There isn’t any license info in the plugin, so hopefully he can comment on here and let us know what’s up with the site/plugin licensing…

I’m seriously starting to love the internet these days.

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Check this guy out. He took ‘Hey Ya’ by Outkast, and instead of yelling, actually sings. And he’s good! Now, I don’t have anything against any type of music. In fact, I listen to everything from salsa to 70’s disco. What I like about this guy is that it’s a perfect example of the internet facilitating a large audience for someone with talent, contrasted with a hit that was churned out by the corporate machine. The Long Tail, indeed.

Anyone know of any other examples of covers surpassing the originals?

Blogger Buzz announced a range of new features today which brings the aging blogging platform more up to date.

Being one of the oldest, free blogging sites, Blogger has matured over the years and has flourished under the purchase of Google but has lost out to more feature rich packages such as Wordpress and Moveable Type.

Enhanced Template Editing:
Blogger now supports a drag and drop interface for editing the template. Wordpress has had this for a while now with its “widgets” enabled templates and vast array of plugins. They also state that there will be a new range of templates available, although when I set up a test blog in their Beta area, only the old default templates were available, but updated to include the new additions.

They have made it easy to add information to certain parts of the blog but have still missed simple and important things like adding an image to the header!

Categories:
They have also added the functionality that Blogger users have been crying out for – CATEGORIES!!!!
Although they call them Labels, but they basically perform the same function as Wordpress and MT categories.

Who Goes There?
Blogs can be restricted to only allow certain logged in users to read the blog. Password protected posts and blogs is also something that Blogger users have been asking about for quite a while now.

Feeds:
Enhanced RSS feeds are also available with a few extra different options.

So, after all the waiting for these items to be added, Blogger pulls a few good things out of the hat, but Wordpress still leads the pack in terms of power, scale and customisation. All of the new items previewed at the Beta Blogger have been built in to Wordpress or available as a plug in for some time.

Blogger still trails the pack.