I’m a big fan of people who do fun stuff with computers and so I am a big fan of this. These guys programmed 20 computers to play one note over and over. The resulting cacophony turns out to be a beep-boop version of the Tetris theme.

The project is simple, using the internal speaker of each computer in the class to play a different channel (instrument) of the tetris theme.
All computers are linked with the upd protocol, so not all the computers are synchronised, but for now it will be good!

Arduino-Controlled Lock from nootropicdesign on Vimeo.

This kit uses a CD-ROM drive and an Arduino board to build a clever robotic lock. This dude used a bolt to create the project and it’s voice activated.

I’d be a little worried that anyone could come up to the device and say “Unlock,” but what do I know about robotics. Also, that bolt looks flimsy. Maybe he could make a new system that shoots spikes through the floor?

While I would totally go out with Princess Peach (provided all the parts are really there, and they must be because those Mario Brothers have been after her for years), I find this story to be quite disturbing. A Japanese man married Nene Anegasaki in a church in Guam and is going to be streaming their honeymoon live.

Now this is either a media hoax or proof that Japan’s birth rate will soon drop precipitously but either way I do not want to see this boy’s DS after the consummates the marriage.

via Technabob

So picture this: You are tasked with watching a volcano And you’re totally like out to lunch one morning and the volcano explodes. You’re like FUUUUUUUUUUU!

With the HUMANITARY INVENTION you’ll never be away from an exploding volcano! This device, which consists of a Piezoelectric system that pushes a rod out of a box. You are then supposed to put a phone next to said box. The phone will then call you and you can be totally like “OMG MY DISTANT PHONE IS CALLING ME! WOW!”

While many of you would say “This is really stupid,” rest assured that:

THIS PROTOTYPE IS MULTIPURPOSE WITH UNLIMITED APPLICATIONS

FOR PROTECTION OF EARTH SPACE SEA AND YOU

SPONSORED BY YOU !

but the prototype i propose can detect unknowns phenomenons for your survival on earth space sea and at your home in order to watch one of them

Plus, there are videos.

I’m bidding on this thing right now, friends, so soon we’ll be able to sense things from very far away. Best of all, Dr. George has a website. But hey, what have I ever invented? Bupkus. At least this guy is trying.

The L and R buttons flash, there are a couple of LEDs behind the speakers, and the four epilepsy invoking LEDs on the back flash in response to the sound coming out of the thing. Here’s a breakdown of how he did it, if you’re curious.

[Via Ubergizmo]

The latest victim of this ridiculous trend is Left 4 Dead, which has apparently been recreated in loving 8-bit fashion by one Eric Ruth. It’s worth mentioning that it had an even more deconstructive de-make in Left 4k Dead, but this one is more extensive. Would it be too much to ask to make a zombie version of River City Ransom?

The game, about 30% done at this point, will be released to PC gamers in early January and will comprise all four missions from start to finish, with special infected and everything. So awesome.

[via 1up]

Are you ready to watch Bill Ruppert’s honey drip? Don’t answer that. Bill recreated the sound of a Fender Rhodes electric piano with a guitar and some EHX pedals.

The piano is famous for adding a bit of class to jazz in the 1970s and 1980s and is instantly recognizable if you’ve listened to much of anything from that era. The fascinating thing is that it’s analog all the way down to the Doppler producing rotating speaker.

So the dudes at Boston Dynamics have finally added weapons to the Big Dog, America’s favorite scary striding robot. What does this mean? More fun when you run naked and bleeding from your home, your left kidney stolen from you as you slept, as the robots rise up and begin preparing our organs for harvest!

OK, so horns aren’t weapons, but they are pointy!

How long before Big Dog starts looking like this scene from a recent school reunion gone wrong in Scranton, PA?

Why? Just because. This looks like an amazing game. Nicholas will have a review up tomorrow.

via ConsoleNintendo

HUBO Walking! HUBO Taichi! HUBO with sword! HUBO aiming for your heart and lungs!

This clever Korean robot won’t kill you (yet) but it does move in a surprisingly life-life fashion. Seriously: how far are we until we’ve hit Surrogrates territory (an actually OK movie, by the way).

As you’ll recall, the C64 emulator for the iPhone was shut down by the App store for being too awesome. Apple has approved the app but took off the BASIC support. Not great but not bad, either.

You can download the app here and this time there is no secret back door for enabling the BASIC emulator right in the app, which caused the emulator to run afoul of Apple’s draconian “no fun” policy.

Here is a cheerful Australian man running you through the app. It allows you to play classic games including that Kung Fu game that you remember but don’t quite know the name of but had a picture of the Sydney opera house in the background (it was called International Karate). It comes with eight games.

When I bought a webcam for my front door – mine is the Linksys WVC54GCA – I was faced with a predicament. The built-in motion detection software bombarded my email inbox with images of an empty frame. It was set off by the motion of a leaf or a reflection, rendering one of the most important aspects – notification of trespass – ineffective.

At an impasse, I decided to build a cyberbiomimetic AI using a cockroach brain and a vat of amino acids. The resulting system, while effective at spotting intruders, eventually threatened to become self-aware and so I had to shut it down. Finally, I tried Vitamin D. Problem, as they say, solved.

Vitamin D is a three-step piece of software. You point it at a webcam on your network (it’s compatible with a few models right now) and tell it what to do when it sees evil people encroaching on your turf. Be they the UPS guy or brain-eating zombies, the system will record a clip of their activity and can even notify you via email and an audible chime when it senses movement. In short, it allows you to create a very powerful security system in a few minutes.

You can add multiple cameras and the system grabs only the most important parts of the day, ensuring you don’t miss a single entry or exit. Because it’s compatible a number of webcams, including webcams over a network.

I was able to connect my webcam and start recording in less than a minute. It’s a great feeling to know that the webcam has suddenly become more than a way to watch your front step. Sadly, you need a PC or Mac running the Vitamin D software to record 24/7 video but if you set this up on an always attended-to system it makes for an interesting and valuable upgrade.

It’s free right now and you can download the beta here. A subscription version will be sold in early 2010.

Note: My webcam is sideways because that’s how I mounted it in my window. Long story.

Have you ever wanted to share everything with everyone? Maybe you’ve always wanted to project your home movies on your seatmate’s tray table. Or maybe you want to surprise the kids with some video of you back during your frat days. What better way to do it than with a $495 mini-projector for iPhones, iPods Touch, and Video iPods.

It blows out video at 640×480 pixels at 60 inches and it includes speakers and a tripod. The video, above, proves the majesty of its resolution and the usefulness of its usefulcality.

via Eng

We present to you the Star Wars Rap, a rap about the film Star Wars. This is the apex of our culture and will be remember as the high water mark for Western thought, a sort of Jungian tipping point.

I want to be able to tell my children when this happened – if we survive the coming Dark Ages that this must inevitably produce.

via NowhereElse

Is there anything the iPhone can’t do? Sure you can store your files, add contacts, and play Civilization Revolution on it but did you know you could drive your car with it?

The lads from Engineer Awesome rigged up a Oldsmobile Delta 88 to run entirely by remote control and then created an iPhone app so they could drive the sucker with a few choice taps and swipes.

They also ride their car like a surf board.

The boys come from Waterloo Labs at National Instruments so these guys know how to bring the science.

Presumably this kills iPhones by baking them to death, but our Nik Cubrilovic and Michael Arrington have decided to review dual hot dog and bun toaster and compare it to the iPhone on the basis of its ability to cook hot dogs. It seems that they were able to make hot dogs and eat them and, interestingly enough, they got 9 minutes of video out of this abomination.

They also got the machine to shoot a hot dog at them.

Clearly the iPhone failed in this test and Nik gives this a 6 or 7 out of 10 on the Patented Cubrilovic I’ll Put Anything In My Mouth Scale.

I wanted to make one of these for a long time. The problem was that there were no reasonable tutorials or guides on how to proceed. Additionally I am not a programmer by a long shot so the software was also a problem. This was actually the biggest problem, there was no type of software available at all.

So read that again and think long and hard if you want to trust this man to teach you how to build an autonomous weapon that will shoot at anything that movies. Are you thinking? Don’t lie. The gun will be able to tell. And it will follow you and shoot you.

So this dude has been wanting to make one of these for a long time. He used a computer, a camera, servos, and a gun with laser sight to create something you’d pick up in Half-Life 2 and put down in a spot where those dudes with the radios come out.

It doesn’t actually look like he mounted a gun to his little system, but, as with all fun-time anarchists, it’s easiest to remove the last important step and let the mad man or fool add in the final important part. Luckily, this kit looks a too weak to hold up a Derringer let alone a chain gun.

via BoingBoing

To repeat, do not upgrade your Apple TV to 3.0 if you’re running hacked ATV plugins like XBox Media Center or Boxee. I’m sure this will be fixed in a matter of days – if not hours – but as of right now it means a ride on the Failboat to Sad Trombone Town. That’s right: this update destroys the only thing that makes Apple TV usable and good.

Also, as an added bonus, Apple TV firmware 3.0 is insignificant. It adds Internet radio to the package and improves the UI. It also adds Genius playlists. My cup, as they say, runneth over.

I started to really like the Apple TV recently because I built an entire infrastructure for watching TV and movies using shell scripts, RSS feeds, and spit. Apple’s ham-fisted hegemony has destroyed all that.

But I do have Internet radio! Welcome to 2001, Apple TV! When I’m old and bitter I can listen to AM talk radio from all over the world!

Yipeee!

That said, you can easily hack any 2.x AppleTV with the ATVUSB Creator, a Windows or OS X app that takes the hard work out of hacking. You just run it and insert the resulting USB key into the Apple TV. A few minutes later you have Boxee and XMBC installed. We also have an older How-To here.

For now, keep your eye on this and this for updates. I’ll do the same. Together, we can fight this menace.

If you accidentally update to 3.0, run ATVPatchstick on your 3.0 machine, ssh into it using frontrow@appletv.local password: frontrow. Then enter these commands, ideally one at a type:

wget -c http://mesu.apple.com/data/OS/061-6242.20090624.Aq20P/2Z694-5660-029.dmg
wget -c http://mesu.apple.com/data/EFI/009-7567.20080212.Vc45T/LOCKED_ATV11_00DA_00B.scap
wget -c http://mesu.apple.com/data/EFI/061-3046.20080212.U7tgG/AppleCapsule.efi
wget -c http://mesu.apple.com/data/IR/694-5484.20080708.hnji4/irrxfw-0x0244.irrxfw
wget -c http://mesu.apple.com/data/IR/061-3045.20080708.Aq12D/IRReceiverUpdaterTool2
wget -c http://mesu.apple.com/data/SI/061-3618.20080212.Pk8Bn/hdmiutil
wget -c http://mesu.apple.com/data/SI/061-3617.20080212.Qvh6u/FW29050_20080205_dse_hex.sihex
mv {2Z694-5660-029.dmg,LOCKED_ATV11_00DA_00B.scap,AppleCapsule.efi,irrxfw-0x0244.irrxfw,IRReceiverUpdaterTool2,hdmiutil,FW29050_20080205_dse_hex.sihex} /Users/frontrow/Updates/
wget -c http://ericiii.net/sa/appletv/osupdate
chmod 755 osupdate
sudo chown root:wheel osupdate
sudo ./osupdate

This will downgrade your system to 2.4 without touching your content.

UPDATE – If your remote stops working after loading 2.4, you can either factory restore or:

1. Allow the normal 3.0 update to download but do not install it. A screen will appear asking you if you want to update later. This will place a set of files, including the 3.0 firmware, into /Users/frontrow/Updates/ (these files will include IR updates as well)
2. Remove the .dmg file containing the 3.0 firmware.
3. Download the 2Z694-5660-029.dmg from here and place it into /Users/frontrow/Updates.
4. Follow the last part of the above update:
wget -c http://ericiii.net/sa/appletv/osupdate
chmod 755 osupdate
sudo chown root:wheel osupdate
sudo ./osupdate

Jeezum crow! This guy has made a fully functional (kind of) Proton Pack from Ghostbusters including a trap, ecto goggles, and some coveralls. He added a few lights controlled by an Arduino board.

The best part? He added lasers to the blasters. Now he just needs to remember not to cross the beams and that your halloween party can be a promotional expense so you should invite clients instead of friends.

The instructions are, obviously, at Instructables.

While I’m not quite down with a lot of Watchismo’s aesthetic choices, you gotta respect his drive. This guy loves Swiss quartz, crazy designs, and even goes nuts over Hamilton Electrics, watches that are so odd that only one person in the world can fix them.

Dudes like Watchismo and ABlogToRead really took up the watch coverage torch and they’re doing some of the freshest watch reporting out there. Good on ‘em.

via Coolhunting