hardware hacks - page 6

Less than a week after Apple showed off all of the tantalizing SDK and Enterprise features of iPhone OS 2.0, the iPhone Dev Team has announced that it has fully unlocked the iPhone, patching its firmware to work with any carrier and allow the installation of any application, not just what Apple distributes through iTunes.

This is a really big deal, and I’m curious to see how it plays out in the coming months. Apple has made it very clear that it will do whatever it can to relock the iPhone whenever an exploit is discovered. According to the Dev Team, however, this firmware patch, called “Project Pwnage” is unfixable by Apple. I don’t buy it yet, but if this code remains quiet until the official launch of iPhone OS 2, this could be an invaluable tool for anyone who wants the full iPhone experience without AT&T.

Still, a lot of time between now and then, and Apple is as dedicated to lock things down as the hacking community is to opening them up.

Via Gizmodo

The iMac is a beautiful all-in-one desktop solution capable of handling most every need. But it’s also a bit pricey, especially compared to the dirt cheap Mac mini. Jon Doty decided to do something, fusing a Mac mini with a commodity LCD monitor to create a homemade iMac that I can only describe as…elegantly janky.

Make sure to check out the gallery – the whole process is detailed to a charming degree.

Via Digg.

The tinkerers at iFixit have taken apart the MacBook Air to discover:

• The battery isn’t hard to remove, but it isn’t something you’d do mid-flight when the battery dies.
• Most of the internal volume is taken up by the battery.
• The logicboard is surprisingly small: it looks like something out of an alarm clock, not a reasonably-powered laptop.
• The touchpad uses the same hardware as the iPhone and iPod Touch, which may allow Apple to add new multi-touch gestures via software.
• The hard drive is the slim 80-Gbyte model, not the chubby 160-Gbyte drive found in the iPod Classic. Unfortunately, 80-Gbyte is the maximum capacity of drives this size (5mm deep).
• It’s held together by 88 tiny screws.

Gotta love that sky-blue. I know some people aren’t into the fatty nano, but I didn’t know they were especially prevalent in Thailand. Flickr user Mr. Neutron sets us all straight on that point.

Via BoingBoing

I love new technology, especially when it’s enhanced by really old technology. And that’s why I endorse Nanoscope, a bizarre mod of an early 1970s slide viewer that Mark Irwin dremeled down to make it an ideal iPod nano video expander. Pop it in, and you get a huge, beautiful picture — that just happens to be a little warped at the corners.

I’m in. Who else wants one?

YouTube – Introducing Nanoscope
Via Gizmodo

Tags: hack, hardware, nano, ipod

I love the creativity of Mac users. Marcelo, a reader of Lifehacker, put together a great DIY laptop stand he cobbled together from an IKEA paper towel holder. He’s got tips for how to do it, but you really do need some serious hardware:

This was made from some plexi and an Ikea paper towel holder that I had laying around. I drilled some holes in the stainless steel crosspiece (don’t try this without a drill press and graduated high speed bits).

Gorgeous. Totally matches the aesthetic of the MacBook Pro. More pics at his Flickr stream.

Via Lifehacker.

Last month, after a couple of eggnogs at the office, I drenched my keyboard in a cup of coffee. Kind readers suggested running it through the dishwasher. Of course, putting keyboards in dishwashers is the kind of thing you read on the internet all the time, but never believe it actually works.

So, skeptical that it would work, I tried it myself.I’m happy to report that running a filthy, coffee-stained keyboard through the dishwasher works great. The keyboard is spotless, and it works perfectly.

Feel me: dishwashers make keyboards better than new.

Full procedure after the jump.

Since Mac OS X replaced the Classic Mac OS, nothing has galled users more than the Spinning Beach Ball of Death, also known as the “I’m thinking, but I’m thinking in rainbow colors!” icon. Ask your Mac for more than it wants to handle at a given moment, watch as your precious pointer becomes a useless spinning beachball.Dutch artist Gijs Gieske has taken that icon of Mac frustration and turned it into a giant work of art to remind us all how much easier our lives could be, although he claims he made it “for no particular reason.” Just look at it — it’s like staring into hell…

Source: MAKE via GadgetLab via Engadget

So cool. Ben Fino-Radin is doing some awesome work with retro-tech. In addition to the Hacked Mac shown here, he has made needlepoint 128k Mac replica. He hasn’t done anything new in several months, but I’d say he’s earned a break.

Via Boing Boing‘s Mark Frauenfelder.

Leander’s got the full story over at the Mothership. Anyone else have some gorgeous laser-etched Apple stuff they’d like to share?

Image via Flickr

Well, it’s command-line for now, but the iPod touch has been hacked to enable VoIP calling by a modder going by Eok.
The hack uses the utility SvSIP, which was originally created to enable the same capability on the Nintendo DS. It’s pretty far from usable by mere mortals for the time being — typing can be enough of a pain on the virtual keyboard, let alone doing any mucking around in a shell script — but this is fun. The touch is an iPhone in all but communication connectivity only anyway, why not make it a true little brother to the iPhone?

Also, can I get a German layout for my iPhone? I love the look of “QWERTZUIOP”.

Via iPodNN

A video from 1996 at Newton just resurfaced after years of obscurity. Basically, the erstwhile Apple division had 4,000 spare modems for the PDA that they just had to get rid of. Soon, a spectacular display was planned. Over at MacLife, Maurice Sharp, a former Newton Engineer, explained what happened…

I remember making this video… the simple beginning of an email letting people know there were some modems if you wanted one, the discovery that a few was 4,000 or so, then the start. Luckily I lived very close by so I rushed home to get my video camera.

During this time, the Newton group was still in it’s heyday. We were pushing the envelope. We had fun disagreements on what the optimal design was for our customers. There should still be a Newton prototype around somewhere that was built into an empty Palm Pilot shell (now that would have been interesting, though the cost of the Newton would have been much higher.) And the return of Jobs and demise of Newton was not even a bad dream.

I really admire the faith of the Newton true believers. Right up there with the Amiga faith.

Via MacLife

A lot of people, like me, had the misfortune of buying a 3G iPod, loving it, and absolutely hating its terrible battery life. Apple eventually provided a product recall following a class-action suit, but the replacements weren’t that much better. At this point, my factory installed battery literally averaged just 45 minutes of life each charge. Less if I tried to skip a song or change playlists.

To really get this lovely vintage gear in top shape, an upgrade with longer life is called for. Lots of companies are now offering service to install new batteries, but that’s for wimps!

Ready to take on the challenge, I ordered a DIY kit for iPod battery replacement last week, and tonight I got the process down. It’s easy, and it’s fun. So click through for a complete step-by-step photo guide to installing a third-party battery.

In case you don’t speak Geeky Acronym, the gibberish above means that someone (in this case, Ryan Block of Engadget) has dropped a 64-gigabyte solid-state drive into a MacBook Pro. The incredible drives, which are still extremely expensive compared to conventional hard drives, use flash, not platters for storage, and as a result, have no noticeably moving parts. They’re virtually silent, and they’ve been claimed to up battery life to unheard of levels (I’ve heard 11 hours on a Toshiba subnotebook). Block hasn’t provided a battery life figure yet, but I’m kind of drooling. In two years, virtually all laptops will have moved in this direction…

Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: macbookpro, ssd

Remember when Mac OS X only ran on Macs? That era is a thing of the past, as a group of hackers have already managed to install Leopard on vanilla PCs, with only a modicum of effort required. As DailyApps reports:

Well its been only a day since the Mac OSX Leopard was released officially by Apple and the hackers have managed to create a patched DVD that everyone like you and me can use to install Leopard on PC’s without having to buy a Mac. Please note the tutorial that I am going to post is still experimental and things might not work the right way simply because it is still early days in hacking Leopard to work on PC’s. Well if you don’t mind your PC getting screwed then go ahead and try out this tutorial.

I always expected that this was a possible consequence of Apple’s shift to Intel processors, but this still boggles the mind. Has anyone else tried to non-suckify their Wintel box yet? And does the vibrant iPhone hacker community have anything to do with this change?

Hack Attack : Install Leopard on your PC in 3 easy steps! | dailyApps
Via Laughing Squid

Tags: leopard, hacks

Thanks to Apple’s just-announced iPhone software developers kit, VOIP will likely be coming to the iPhone, according to Alex Schaefer lead programmer of Apollo, a web-based iPhone instant messaging application.

“VoIP is next, and I’m preparing to start a new project working exclusively on that,” he tells Wired News’ software blog.

Schaefer is just one of many Mac developers itching to develop for the iPhone. There’s more reaction from developers in this other Wired News story: Developers on iPhone SDK: OMG! ABFT!

My lord: They’ve turned C-3PO into a computer! Alarming work over there at Computer Choppers. Anyone interested in picking one up? Why?

Via Engadget

Looks uncomfortable, doesn’t it? The Mac Store in Maryland Heights, Missouri, blew out some old stock by building a couch from a few dozens Macintosh IIs. Wouldn’t a collection of Performa 6500s be a big nicer to sit on? Always to nice to see the spirit of the original Macquarium kept alive.

Via Digg Via New Launches.

There’s nothing worse than randomly turning on Caps Lock in the middle of writTING A DOCUMENT AND SUDDENLY YOU TYPE LIKE THIS.

To combad that problem, it would appear that Apple has made it hard to turn on Caps Lock on its new thinline keyboards that shipped with the iMac. Wolf Rentzsch discovered the change:

I’ve discovered something shocking. An anti-Caps Lock conspiracy silently bubbling up from the darkest trenches inside Apple:

Apple’s Caps Lock key has undocumented anti-jab protection.

Unique among the rest of the keys, Caps Lock doesn’t activate immediately upon strike. There’s a very small time window perhaps a quarter of a second where if you release the key inside the window, the keystroke is ignored.

He even shot a video to show how it works. Apple — they think of everything.

Via Daring Fireball

Image from Wikipedia

After learning that the teen who first unlocked the iPhone got a Nissan 350Z for his efforts, Wired News editor Kevin Poulsen is willing to trade his classic Nissan 300-ZX for an unlocked iPhone.

Kevin’s car is similar to the car Woz drove (see below), but it needs a bit of TLC, so you might want to offer him an unlocked Razr instead. Or maybe just a regular razor. You know, for shaving. Bids in the comments please.

Flickr User vaughn235 shared his loving clay rendering of the iPhone today (including box and dock, after the jump!). This is easily my favorite tribute to the iPhone yet. Way more impressive than a cake. Or maybe just different enough.

Via BoingBoing

Despite the best efforts of folks like me, bonafide iPhones didn’t show up in the wild until a few week prior to release. As it turns out, that’s because Apple was smart enough to hide iPhones inside of other devices. This according to Richard Burns, AT&T’s President of Wireless Networks, in an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal.

So secretive was the project that he didn’t even show the phone to his wife. And when AT&T’s team of testers hit the streets to try the phone in ballparks, subways and skyscrapers, Burns said they used a contraption to cloak the device so nobody would know what the testers were holding.

Burns declined to offer a description of the cloaking device, calling it “something that looked like something else.”

That’s how you know Apple is brilliant: They made it look like “something that looked like something else.” How visionary. Or not.

My best guess is that Apple made the iPhones look like Zunes. Any other guesses?

Via Digg.
Image from Hideapod.

Scott Walker, the assistant managing editor of the Birmingham (Ala.) News, has made a hack for the ages. Taking an old newspaper vending machine, as a base, he fitted a 17″ LCD screen to the front of the box and then rigged a Mac mini running PhotoPresenter to constantly stream the front pages of newspapers from the Newseum. As well as anything from his iTunes library.

It’s a wonder to behold. And all of this on deadline, too!
Via TUAW

San Francisco’s Chinatown provides a wealth of cheap goods. While shopping for ridiculous San Francisco mementos for a friend who’s moving away, I spotted this display of clearly fake MANNDigital Mp3 players that mimic exactly the look, size and even packaging of Apple’s clippable iPod shuffles.

I could easily see the casual shopper getting confused here, but a few distinctions stand out to me: 1) The volume and skip track buttons have switched places. 2) This device comes in a few colors Apple shuffles don’t, including black. 3) These have a dedicated mini-USB port, instead of Apple’s remarkable headphone/power/USB port.

All told, an excellent knock-off, and one worthy of a cease & desist letter. So get ’em while they’re hot.

We’re past the initial shock of the new with the iPhone, as we have the second hardware hack in two days to customize the look of Apple’s already iconic new device. Dan at Uneasy Silence worked with Philip Torrone to laser-etch his new iPhone with some flying toasters. The video above resulted.

Via Digg.