I recently saw a demonstration of a very large Spinning LED display. The type of display that spins a bar of LEDs fast enough that the bar "disappears" and only the floating LED message remains. From my understanding these are simple to make -you see them frequently on MAKE- so what if you inverted the concept. If the bar revolved around the viewer it would, or at least should, create a neat surround image.

Booting into linux (Ubuntu) on my Dell Inspiron 1420 severely reduces the wireless performance. I'm unclear as to why this happens, but it drops about 70% compared to windows. In a perfect world I would be able to move between my Office, Bedroom, Garage, and Kitchen without loosing the signal. Rather than buy high gain antennas or additional access points, I decided to move the router to better location. This location just happened to be outside.

That title is misleading, I was going to use "Hacking Sleep: Benefits and Drawbacks of Sleeping with an Eight Hour Offset," but the current one is more fun. Either way, I'm currently nocturnal and have been for over a month. It has turned out to easily be the coolest lifehack I have ever done. If you have a flexible schedule I recommend you try it. Note: Important details are overlaid on the story using javascript tooltips, if you are viewing this in an RSS reader (or some other type of browser that does not support scripts) you are missing critical pieces of information.

The clever art of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging information is called social engineering (hehe, human hacking). Just like a good music teacher can actually play an instrument, the best security professional knows how to think like an attacker. That being said, here are three fairly common scenarios told through a fictional narrative (any resemblance to real persons or entities, living or dead, is purley coincidental as none of these events happened, and they especially weren't executed by me). Do not attempt to preform any of the tricks or actions shown in these short stories. Also Note: Important details are overlaid on the story using javascript tooltips, if you are viewing this in an RSS reader (or some other type of browser that does not support scripts) you are missing critical pieces of information.

NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) operates a handful of satellites for various reasons. It's possible to decode these transmissions, but amateur radio isn't as popular now as it was in the past, and most the sites which explain how to do this are very old. So to help out, I wrote this updated version and included my results. It's pretty cool actually. (Also check out my related podcast on hacker public radio)

While I was testing my new microphone, I noticed the connection was exceptionally clean. This means that unlike a cheap microphone, you can increase the volume without getting as much noise. So I opened up a multitrack session in Adobe Audition, set the microphone as the input to Track 1, and turned on Input Monitoring. Essentially that passes the microphone audio into my headphones, and with a few items on the effects rack, it makes for a decent stethoscope. (And it makes for a really cool image)

I'm fairly certain this is completely useless, however, it still makes really neat looking images, so it's worth talking about. I found that high resolution pictures of a negative mold make for a pretty decent bump map.

I was planing on spending a nice weekend in the desert (I own a Honda TRX 450) although I had a video conference I wanted to attend. So I purchased a cheap webcam (with IR capabilities) to take with me, assuming that I could just use my EVDO connection (which turned out to be extremely difficult). After a while I noticed that some pieces of clothing, mostly T-shirts, would appear white instead of black.

	Using an array of 80 high intensity infrared LEDs and a Sony Handycam (DV NSTC), I was able to capture video of the veins in my hand. The hand was the only part of the body thin enough for the light to illuminate.

	I think the final installation looks nice. The machine isn't actually running windows of course, it just happened to be displaying that image when I took the picture. The result is a picture frame running Ubuntu Linux. To deal with the cables I knocked a small hole in the wall and was able to run the network and power through that. I wanted to be really cleaver and use Power of Ethernet, but I didn't have the time.

When I was asked to give a marketing presentation I printed several coupons from Carls Jr (Hardees in the east country). Some of them were even edited for purposes of my presentation (such as the one above). This was done using a layered photoshop file I created by scanning several coupons from a fundraising booklet I bought.

I finally got around to compiling the results of a wifi wardrive/warwalk that I did a while ago. The results are presented in three Google Earth kml files. Together the three files contain over 1000 networks and thousands of minor information bits (such as encryption level or detected clients).

I came across this idea a while ago when searching for a fish eye lens. Henry Dietz (Fisheye Digital Imaging For Under $20) writes:

"There is a commodity market for a specific type of fisheye lens: door peepholes. Door peepholes were not designed to be camera lenses, however, most devices for human viewing are designed to produce their images at an apparent viewing distance comfortable for humans - which is a fair approximation to what a converter lens does. Thus, it should be possible to use a door peephole as a converter lens."

Some friends and I decided to explore a local abandoned building that was marked for demolition. It turns out that a nearby cellular site actually connects to the telephony equipment within this building, in order to reach the street.

Fax machines often are used to transmit sensitive information, and although people remember to shred the papers that are printed, the average person rarely shreds the actual used rolls of ink.

Due to the way common fax machines work, its remarkably easy to recover this information by examining a used roll. You can sometimes make out the words by holding a roll up to a light, but I used a back lit drawing surface and a digital camera. I attempted this with a scanner but it was slow and captured poor images.