MetaFilter posts tagged with hacks

Near Space Photography Under $150

mccarty.tim — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:20:05 -0800

With the integration of cameras, GPS receivers, and more into cellphones, many people take for granted the lightweight, energy efficient technology in their pockets. MIT ties all that tech together to a weather balloon in Project Icarus, where for $150 a prepaid cellphone becomes a high-altitude near-space camera.

Lab coats and safety goggles at the gun show...

Tesseractive — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 09:56:30 -0800

Playing Half-Life with a real gun? The magic of drywall, accelerometers, and geeks. (SLYT.) Courtesy of the good people at Waterloo Labs.

Don't Hate the Player

Marisa Stole the Precious Thing — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 16:17:42 -0800

Why Do We Cheat? - The right, wrong, and why of videogame cheating. Go into virtually any gamer's forum, and you'll see the subject of using cheats and game hacks can stir quite a hornet's nest, particularly in online gaming. But even those using cheats in offline games, not wagering against or directly competing with anyone else, will draw the ire from others in the community, possibly because there are different types of players - that is, the difference between what Penny Arcade's Tycho once described as "people who play games in order to excel at them, and those who play games as a conduit to fantasy".

Ann Arbor Smackdown

mathowie — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 13:57:07 -0800

There's a showdown in Ann Arbor, MI between geeks and suits. It starts when local public tax-funded parking garages start posting the number of available spaces on their site. A few geeks decide to make it more useful while driving so they code up some asterisk hacks to scrape the page and bridge the web content to a phone and presto! you can call to hear which garages have the most spaces available for parking. Not so fast says the city and they shut down access to the site from the app and stop publishing real-time stats (mostly grumbling about a loss of "control"). Geeks are in an uproar (mostly trying to teach the suits what "public domain data" means). This long ass blog post tells the entire tale from both sides of the fight.

Two-story camping car

madamjujujive — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 07:21:36 -0800

"We were classmates in high school... And we spoke the plan to go to Yakushima Island. However, the talk swells greatly...We decided to make a camper for a round-the-japan trip. We thought that various equipment was necessary to long trip. However, the bed space has disappeared when various equipment is packed. Then, the idea adjusted to two stories appeared." More on the truck and the trip. (via Dinosaurs and Robots)

Great Cyber Crimes and Hacks

netbros — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:44:22 -0800

The best criminal hacker is the one that isn't caught — or even identified. These are 10 of the most infamous unsolved computer crimes as selected by PC Magazine. However, some do get caught. Here are nine of the most infamous criminal hackers to ever see the inside of a jail cell. PCMag also reached back into the early days of computing and dredged up the most inspiring examples of hacker brilliance they could find. WANK Worm MoD Skynet satellite hacked CDUniverse credit card breach Military source code stolen Anti-DRM Kucinich on CBSNews.com ApplyYourself hack 26,000 site attack Hannaford and Sweetbay credit card breach Comcast.net redirected

MIT Hackers Restrained

Kirth Gerson — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:09:55 -0800

Three MIT students planned to reveal to Defcon how to make counterfeit "Charley Cards" - the electronic passes that allow access to Boston's MBTA transit system. The MBTA sued for a restraining order, and a judge has granted it. The MBTA complaint (PDF) The Judge's order (PDF) Robert Cringely on the subject

Nintendo Entertainment System Hacks.

Effigy2000 — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 03:17:16 -0800

The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was the most popular console of the 80s but the unstoppable march of time and the introduction of more advanced 16 bit consoles inevitably ensured its demise. But you can't keep a good console down and now it's back, thanks to the work of some dedicated mods out there. But it's not quite how you remembered it. I mean, I don't remember the NES ever coming in the form of a belt, do you? Or a coffee table, for that matter. Those insane NES hackers have even gone and put an NES in an NES cartridge. There's also an NES in an NES controller, an NES in a lightgun, a wooden NES, an NES alarm clock, an NES wallet or finally, an NES guitar. Want to see more? Check this out.

head hacks

madamjujujive — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 10:42:37 -0800

Russell Higgs has been adorning his face and head with various objects and posting photographic portraits online since July 2006. Dutch artist Levi van Veluw also likes to modify his face by putting things on it and photographing the results.

Genocide of the Marios

JHarris — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 19:44:18 -0800

Remember Super Mario Frustration? Kaizo Mario World is another of those super-hard Mario level hacks, this one of Super Mario World. Someone played through its first level 134 times, with save states, recording all his deaths, then digitally composited them into one trip through the level. The result was Many-Worlds Mario. (For those interested, here's a video of a tool-assisted perfect run of much of the game. Here's the rest. Here's some more.)

Make sure to clean your logfiles.

flatluigi — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 22:31:54 -0800

Ever admired those hard-working hackers, toiling away to get you the programs you've always loathed to have? Have you ever dreamt of exploring the innards of someone else's computer but have held back due to those pesky legalities? If you said yes to either of the above questions or just want to play an online hacking simulation, then SlaveHack is the website for you. Protip: Some useful programs and extensions, including a logfile parser, can be found here.

I, for one, welcome our new Wii remote hacking overlords

TimeTravelSpeed — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 16:36:52 -0800

Still aren't sure if the Wii is worth the wait in line? That's okay, the Wiimote is all you need for: Low-Cost Multi-point Interactive Whiteboards Using the Wiimote, Tracking Your Fingers with the Wiimote, and the latest: Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the Wii Remote (extremely cool and the easiest to implement). From the maker of the $14 steady-cam [prev. here], Johnny Chung Lee is taking Wiimote hacking to a whole new level, and giving away all necessary software and instructions for free. Wii games are about to get a whole lot cooler. I successfully implemented both the white-board, and the VR display and I am just floored. You don't need the Wii for any of these projects. Just the Wiimote, bluetooth dongle, some free software, and an IR light source. I got the VR display working in about 30 minutes (20 of which were spent figuring out that I need the latest DirectX SDK and then installing it). Johnny Lee is quite clever, and will likely make even Nintendo realize that their interface has more potential than previously thought.

And you thought Guitar Hero was cool...

Ufez Jones — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 16:51:14 -0800

With the wild success of the Guitar Hero series, using video game controllers shaped like guitars is nothing new. However, the duo at Modal Kombat actually use guitars as video game controllers. They won't reveal all of their tricks, but you can read a bit about their technology here and at this interview with Urban Guitar. The results are awfully impressive. View the original Modal Kombat here, and their newest installment, the admittedly trippy GuitarKart here. via

Bike Hacks

brain_drain — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 12:32:42 -0800

Bike Hacks! Bored with your generic two-wheeler? Check out this collection of funky bicycle modifications. My favorite is the grocery cart.

Corect Seplling Mayd Eesy

alms — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 18:45:10 -0800

How to write a spelling corrector in twenty lines of Python.

When 1,000 words were enough

bigbigdog — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 18:36:17 -0800

Interviews with some early computer people at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Look out, George Foreman!

melorama — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 02:52:34 -0800

Not only does the Playstation 3 play Blu-Ray discs, it also knocks out the fat!

Night Ice

jessamyn — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 15:04:12 -0800

"The Bible describes how to make ice on the desert. Please describe the procedure and explain how it fits your knowledge of heat transfer."

Your assignment: make ice in the desert. Without electricity. Without extra chemicals. Without extra gadgetry or imports. Oh, and the temperature is about 55 degrees (13C). It can be done, there is science behind it. And yet we seem to have forgotten something that everyone used to know.

More accellerometer goodness

mathowie — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 20:45:52 -0800

This video shows how to navigate Google maps by simply tilting your thinkpad. The code is here, a blog post about it is here. I knew the first wave of goofy accelerometer hacks would be followed with better stuff and I can't wait to see what else people do with the sensors. Hopefully someone ports this to the newer macs as well. [via dj]

Art inside of Flickr

mathowie — Wed, 24 May 2006 14:44:11 -0800

I'm a huge fan of clever unintended uses for things, and loloroy's favorites reuses a page/interface I've seen hundreds of times before in a cute way. It may take a second to figure out, but should be worth it [via tmn].

Flickr Leech

jonson — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 10:02:00 -0800

Flickr Leech is an API hack that, among other features, allows you to view all the photos with the flickr "interestingness" attribute by date in a single thumbnail page.

NYC Google Maps Trip Planner

allkindsoftime — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 12:30:11 -0800

Yet another Google Maps hack for the NYC subway system. This one helps you plan your trip from point A to point B, and gives you an estimated travel time. Most locals will quickly find that the routes it suggests usually aren't the optimum, however this may be useful for visitors, at least until Friday morning. In the event of a strike, this is your best bet for some form of direction.

Yahoo Maps, now web two point ohier

mathowie — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 09:49:54 -0800

For the last six months or so, it's been a war between Yahoo and Google to see who can outdo each other. They're often releasing competing products at nearly the same time, but Google Maps has held the lead on coolest map for a while now. Yahoo finally countered today, releasing their beta maps, which work much like Google's, though it uses flash instead of javascript. I kind of like the little video game-style radar map in the upper right to show where you are in the bigger picture and the directions feature closeups on the left pane when expanded. Apparently all the cool API stuff works in it already, and they've released an events browser to show that off as well.

It's 11pm, do you know where your child is?

phrontist — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 12:15:11 -0800

Mologogo Track any Java/GPS enabled phone through a convienent Google Maps based interface with mologogo.

Zip Code Outlines on Google Maps

jonson — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 14:58:07 -0800

If you've ever wanted to know what portion of the US a specific zip code covers, this Google Maps hack is for you.