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Hackaway 2010 Winners Announced!

hunter — Sun, 30 May 2010 15:00:56 +0000

Thanks again everyone for participating this go round. Using my trusty d-10's, I rolled 6 dice per prize and took the resulting number modulo the number of contest entries. As you can only win 1 prize, I felt it would be unfair to do them in numeric order of hacks, so I randomized the mapping of dice rolls to hacks. I hope this provides some fairness to the distribution of prizes. The winners will be receiving an email request for their addresses officially very shortly.... but they are ....
after the jump!
*Update - Packages are shipping out now!

Sneaky blog tricks! Hailing from around the globe, the winners are:

1. Tom Mcleod - Didj Hacking Bundle
2. Nonya Biz - EEE 701 2g surf (bottom half)
3. Aaron Cronk - Famicom Bundle
4. Kea Oliver - Fan Bundle
5. Mike Metzger- Genesis on a chip
6. Geordy Rostad - Infrared Bundle
7. Bob Crichton - Java Bundle
8. Kraig Hoekstra - Laptop Parts Bundle
9. Torin Macbeth - Minidisk Bundle
10. Paul Curtis - netgear zyxel
11. Kevin Thompson -Palm GPS Bundle
12. Yohanes Nugroho - Peek Messaging Device
13. Thomas, der - USB Wireless bundle
14. Bear Naff - Sound Bundle
15. Jon Hawkins - Wifi Bundle
16. Force Multiplier - X10 Home Automation Bundle

Thanks again everyone for making Hackaway 2010 a Tremendous Success!

Hackaway 2010 is Over! A Massive Success!

hunter — Sun, 30 May 2010 01:44:40 +0000

The polls have closed! Hackaway 2010 is officially over, and no entries that come in after now will be counted. The winners have already entered! I had entries from Thailand, Singapore, UK, Germany, Brazil, France, all over USA, Canada, Mexico and Jamaica. Perhaps many more as well! I'll be rolling dice and boxing up the prizes tomorrow. The winners will be randomly chosen based on dice roll! I also want to thank all the people who sent in their personal stories of successful or fun hacks. It's really reaffirming to know how many great folks are all around. A tremendous success!

Hackaway 2010 Announced!

hunter — Sun, 23 May 2010 02:14:41 +0000

It's been a tremendous 2010 so far, and it's time for another Hackaway! Hackaway 2010 is about to begin. This one will be even bigger and better than Hackaway 2009, and there are some really awesome hacks coming your way. Rules and prizes and a ton of images after the jump!

Here are the rules.

Send an email to hunter at hunterdavis.com with the subject line "Hackaway 2010"
Include in the message the numbers of the hackaway items you would be interested in receiving
That's it. I will randomly select the winners after 7 days or 5,000 entries, whichever is sooner. There are no restrictions on who may enter. Any person from any country could win. Just like last time.
If you like, let me know what country and state you are from. Last time we had entries from dozens of countries, and it's always fun to see where they come in from.
After the winners are selected, I email them for their addresses, and send out their prizes. There are no fees or restrictions to entry, and I pay all duties, customs, and shipping

And here are the prizes

Didj Hacking Bundle - Didj+Claude's custom board with SD adapter, custom loader, source code, etc. Everything you need to start porting software.
EEE 701 2g surf (bottom half). Was used for the blu-ray player hack.
Famicom Bundle - Famicom chipset + famicom and nes games, chips, and controllers
Fan Bundle - Fans and fan controllers
Genesis on a chip with infrared controllers
Infrared Bundle - Infrared controller game plus many infrared to ps2 remotes with pass-through ports.
Java Bundle - Four Spongebob branded Npower java consoles. Follow my previous instructions and links on how to write programs for these. Perhaps enough for a small end-user study!
Laptop Parts Bundle - Laptop screen, keyboards, batteries, etc
Minidisk Bundle - A folder full of 74m Sony MiniDisks (all full of data)
Late 90's era Netgear router with serial console (zxyel os)
Palm GPS Bundle - Palm V and Tungston with GPS and chargers and serial adapters.
Peek Messaging Device - Join the peeklinux project and start porting!
USB Wireless bundle - Rip Roar USB wireless messenger (IM-ME clone) along with UBFunkeys reader and many keys (rfid-like keys based on usb passthrough).
Sound Bundle - Street Fighter 4 Japanese practice keychain, audio repeater device, and crammer ogg vorbis/wm3 device.
Wifi Bundle - Netgear N router pre-flashed with openWRT, and linksys wireless-b access point
X10 Home Automation Bundle - Two X10 PC receivers, wireless receiver, heavy duty appliace module, two light modules, start automating your lab!

And that's that! Send me an email! Tell your friends! Good luck! Can't wait to see what hacks you come up with this year!

90′s Tech to The Rescue (network monitor)

hunter — Mon, 10 May 2010 21:25:33 +0000

Like many of you, I am throttled by the uplink speed of my network. Unfortunately, my upstream router (which also supplies my HDTV channels) is supplied by my ISP, and I do not have root access. The cable company also doesn't release metrics for line usage, data transfer for television shows, etc. Fortunately, it uses standard ip networking over Ethernet. I ended up using a 90's era netgear router and an old Palm V to display link statistics, throughput, etc. The connection was made using paper-clips.... more info after the break!

The netgear 314 I had in my closet is actually a re-branded ZyXEL Prestige 314. This is nice as it comes with a serial terminal interface already set up. By inserting this router into your network between your router and the upstream port you can easily set up a syslog rebroadcaster to a linux box on your network. That's the easy way.....

As I also had an old Palm V sitting around, I figured it'd be more fun to do it the hard way. There's an old serial terminal program for palm called ptelnet that I recommend. It has macro functionality, so also I recommend setting your macros to be your favorite system info commands for the Zyxel interface (net show tables, ip address, etc).

If you've got a null modem cable around (f-f adapter) you can plug straight in. Otherwise you'll have to roll your own. Lucky for us the serial protocol only needs 3 lines (power, rx, tx (pins 2,3,5)). The netgear expects hardware flow control to be on, so you'll also need to bridge those lines as well (pins 7,8). I used paper clips (dangerous!!!!), but I would recommend using shielded wires.

Once you've got all your pins connected (or swapped depending on your cabling..), fire up your terminal emulator and power on your router. You're all set to get all sorts of nice statistics your ISP may not want you knowing about.

A Quick Tuesday Prediction

hunter — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 19:54:09 +0000

Being capitalists, Microsoft will shortly roll out a buyback program for downloaded Xbox Live arcade games. Games can be "returned" for 1000 Microsoft points, with the caveat that if you want to re-download the game, it will cost you full price. Corollary prediction, they will make money hand over fist. That is all.

The littlest famicom

hunter — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 22:41:29 +0000

Ok not really. But it's pretty sad anyway. Tired of playing games on virtual console, I set out to construct my own nes (and make use of the carts strewn about my closet).

As I head out to my usual electronics warehouse (the venice women's council thrift store), I had envisioned building the nes from the necessary parts pulled from old consoles, pda's etc. I ended up finding a children's keyboard to tv adapter which came with a plug-in mouse and controller. For 10$, it seemed like a good candidate for chips. Ripping it open, before my eyes appeared a cartridge connector. My NES carts did not fit. They were the wrong size.. by about 12 pins.. Sounds about like. a famicom! Yep. Some company decided to save a $ and implemented a learning device based on the now insanely cheap to produce 1mhz famicom. I slapped it back together with a little hot glue, and that's that! Abolut the size of 3 famicom carts stacked, it's been fun playing the few famicom games I can understand. The hackaway pile for this year is getting bigger all the time!.

Finished building my first guitar

hunter — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 23:27:01 +0000

Mark brought over his copy of Make, and it turns out this last Makezine had a great article on building cigar box guitars. It sounded like a really interesting project, so we went off to the hardware store to purchase some oak timber. Many days/hours/blood stains later, the fruits of our labor emerged, tuned and ready to play. . Lots of hack potential, and an easy fix if I break something. Bonus, tablature looks fine in links browser on the Z2, though you will have to scroll quite a lot. I'll see about getting gnome guitar working, should be interesting (mono bleh). Yet again another use case for the Z2 I wouldn't have imagined.

Site Upgrades!

hunter — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 18:49:24 +0000

So I finally got around to upgrading my site. New features include:

Upgraded to Search Unleashed - now comments are automatically searched and search terms are highlighted on clickthrough
Upgraded to a theme (LightWord by Andrei Luca) which splits trackbacks and comments!
Wide-width theme, better for widescreen displays and photo posts
Recent posts/comments widgests, view recent activity at a glance
Dropped to a 2-column layout, and removed adsense from front page bar

About time right?

Hackaway 2009 Winners Announced!! (Update – Packages Shipped!)

hunter — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 01:35:02 +0000

*Update In Comments"
Using my trusty random number generators, I have randomly selected the winners of each category. No one was excluded and everyone had an equal chance to win. Congratulations to all winners, and all contestants! I think we had a great Hackaway! Emails will go out to all contestants shortly. The winners are:

Zipit Z2 w/crank - Kerry Snyder
Fujitsu Touchpad Serial Terminal - Paul Masterson
PS2 "Robot" - Josh Robin
Jornada 540 - John Wood
girltech im-me - Guillermo Asin
Trivial Pursuit digital - Steve Anderson
digital microscope - Max Thrun
20q nn game - Hunter Fuller (awesome name did not influence selection btw)
usb stuff - Alpha Mule

Hackaway 2009 is over! Thanks Everyone!

hunter — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:54:28 +0000

Aaand it's over. Just over 48 hours after it began and what a great ride it's been. What a response! The winners have already entered, they just don't know who they are!!

I received entries from all over the US, Spain, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Japan, Argentina, Turkey, Serbia, Jamaica, the UK and maybe more! I've been logging every entry into a spreadsheet and I'll be using my favorite random number generators to pick the winners (d10 dice). Thanks everyone for participating! I'll be sending out emails to everyone and I'll post the winners later on. Can't wait to see what freaky projects you come up with!