Find of the weekend? That would be Hideapod.com, a site devoted to an amazing anti-theft device for iPods: the brown Zune. It’s actually a t-shirt sales, website, but you should poke around. It’s well-executed, and the error code when you make an order is pretty amazing. Also: It’s iPhone-ready!
Stunning.
Via Digg.
The iPhone is beautiful. We all know that. But some have wondered about Apple’s decision to include just a little bit of iPod-esque chrome amid all that gorgeous brushed aluminum and black plastic. Rather than whine. Flickr user D.Ballance broke out the Brillo pads and masking tape and started buffing away at those edges. The result? The all-brushed aluminum iPhone you see before you. It’s an update before Apple releases an update! A sure collector’s item for the whole family.
iPhone Brushed on Flickr
Via Digg.
Right after the iPhone was introduced, Rikard Linde posted a pretty brilliant recommendation for upgrades to the device. The brief scenario made the machine much more context-sensitive and integrated the functions to new degrees.
Rikard has revisited the iPhone again, focusing on the media capabilities on the device. The file-sharing strategy he suggests is really interesting. I’d buy a machine built on his model. On the other hand, the suggested name, Clubline, doesn’t do it for me. Still, it’s great to have someone thinking this deeply about where the technology can go for the next generation.
Read “Introducing Clubline, music sharing done right.” [Enklo]
It’s giant friendly green blob Haro from Gundam! And his back ate a Mac mini! Good thing he can dance or something. A very, very odd Japanese import. Check Ubergizmo for more.
Via GeekSugar.
Well, that’s the missing link resolved. The above video depicts an AppleTV running MythTV, an open-source PVR program. If the AppleTV hard drive were a little bit bigger, it would officially be a real TiVo challenger. Will Apple ever release official PVR support?
Maker Faire is an amazing event held annually in San Mateo, Calif. where people from all over the place come together to show off the crazy hardware hacks and contraptions they’ve cobbled together. As you might expect, it’s not actually a Mac-heavy location. If you aren’t building your computer from spare parts you found in the neighbor’s trash, you’re sort of a second-class citizen.
Anyway, I went on Saturday, and met up with Tod Kurt, author of Hacking Roomba and the Todbot blog, who was showing off the latest and greatest in mods to make your robot vacuum cleaner do things it was never designed to, like play a sad sort of vacuum music or even act as a giant spirograph doodler (pic after the jump). Best of all, Tod and his boothmate, from the company he runs, ThingM, were an all-Mac shop. Hacking Roombas is great. Doing it with Macs is even better. It’s all very easy over Bluetooth, apparently.
Technorati Tags: makerfaire, roomba
Pete Doherty, the shambolic baby of a lead singer for the Babyshambles, is a Mac user. According to GeekSugar, Doherty, boy-toy of Kate Moss, chased paparazzi away by focusing the iSight on his MacBook on them and recording their activity on video. Kind of takes those fun surveillance-cam videos and photos from MacBooks to the next level, doesn’t it? Now they’re active security systems, not stealth ones. Wherever shall we go next?
Thanks, Angelica!
Technorati Tags: apple, isight, macbook, pete doherty
Hacking stories bore me to tears, but the cleverly named “pwn-2-own” hacking competition (Hack a honeypot MacBook, get it as the prize) is getting such attention, it’s worth pointing to some of the better reporting on the subject:
Dan Goodin at The Register:
A New York-based security researcher spent less than 12 hours to identify and exploit a zero-day vulnerability in Apple’s Safari browser that allowed him to remotely gain full user rights to the hacked machine. The feat came during the second and final day of the CanSecWest “pwn-2-own” contest in which participants are able to walk away with a fully-patched MacBook Pro if they are first able to hack it.
…Dai Zovi, who is not attending the conference, was recruited on Thursday night by Shane Macaulay, a friend and conference attendee. The ease Dai Zovi found in pwning the machine was all the more remarkable, given an update Apple pushed out yesterday patching 25 Mac security holes. Macaulay described Dai Zovi’s vulnerability as a client-side javascript error that executed arbitrary code when Safari visited a booby-trapped website.
Turn off Java; to be safe, until Dino lets us say more, turn off everything else too. Or live dangerously like me.
… huge numbers of pundits and anonymous nerds on the Internet will decry Apple’s lack of security and how unfair it is that Microsoft, which expands so much effort on security, is perceived as having a less secure OS. Meanwhile, Mac users will rationalize the situation, including me.
Instructables: Build a periscope for your MacBook’s built-in iSight camera for filming lectures or talks.
TVShows is a free, open source application that triggers automatic downloading of TV shows via BitTorrent.
Working in conjunction with a BitTorrent client, the application manages show subscriptions. Favorite shows are automatically downloaded in the background whenever they become available online.
Most BitTorrent video is encoded in DivX or .AVI formats, and will play fine in a media player like VLC, but if you want to stream it to an AppleTV, you will need to convert the shows — or hack the AppleTV to support DivX and other formats.
Another way to get TV shows automatically is to set up Azureus with the RSS Feed Scanner plugin. Full instructions here.
Michael Adberg of WeaKnees, a company known for its TiVo upgrades, wrote in to say his company just started shipping a self-install upgrade kit for the AppleTV. For $200, you get a 160 Gbyte hard drive pre-formatted for the AppleTV. “The installation process only takes a few minutes and then the AppleTV will re-synchronize with your iTunes to download all of your music, videos, and photos,” WeaKnees promises.
Link.
Everyone who ever said built-in iSights were a security risk? They’ve been proven right again, but this time in reverse. A MacBook used in London Fashion Week and set to upload Photo Booth pictures to the Topshop site was snatched about a week ago. In the mean time, the crooks have used Photo Booth A LOT, sending their ridiculous mugs right to the top of the queue.
The victim of the theft has confirmed it’s true to Gizmodo today:
This is not a hoax. Two computers were stolen from the Covent Garden venue during London Fashion Week, London, UK. These computers were set up to automatically upload photos to the Topshop London Fashion Week Website via the Topshop Flickr Account. About a month after the theft new photos appeared on our Flickr account and London Fashion Week website. Whether the people in the photos are the thieves, or have just bought a dodgy computer is still in question. As of Thursday 5th April 2007, these computers had still not been recovered.
Anyone recognize their sketchy friends here?
Stolen Laptop Pics Not a Hoax After All – Gizmodo
Everyone is loving the story of the iPod that allegedly saved the life of U.S. Infantryman Kevin Garrad in Tikrit (read more at Gadget Lab). Though it seems like the perfect story, there is actually more to this tale than you might assume. First of all, the iPod didn’t save his life. His body armor did. And it isn’t even an Apple model. Click through for the rest of the story.
Australian Simon Clement had the back of his PowerBook laser etched with the specs of the original Mac and the signatures from inside the case.
The case of the original Macintosh was embossed on the inside with the names of the development team, led by Steve Jobs. “Artists sign their work,” he said at the time.
Here’s the details. And a Flickr set.
More pix after the jump
It’s official – the AppleTV is the company’s most hacked piece of hardware since the Apple II+. Need proof? Less than two weeks after the launch of the living room digital media server, a hacker has loaded the $300 device with the full version of Mac OS X, creating the cheapest Mac ever.
Semthex at Hackint0sh pulled the trick, which involves swapping out Apple’s Mach Kernel for a new one that works on the cheap box. There’s a video which appears to validate the claim. This just feels like a nice novelty, though. For twice the price, you can get a machine with way more power and, most importantly, a much-larger hard drive. Plus, the idea of running Tiger on 256 MB of RAM just made me shudder.
How much longer will it be before someone gets a full install of Parallels Desktop running Vista up on the AppleTV?
Mac OS X Running on AppleTV [AppleTV Hacks]
Via Digg.
There was some debate a few weeks ago whether Intel Macs would boot Microsoft’s upcoming operating system, Vista, because of conflicting boot-up systems. While the Intel Macs use EFI, a new boot system from Intel, initial versions of Windows Vista will use the old BIOS system.
Well, in the comments to the blog post below, reader RLPM posted a link to a Flickr photoset showing his MacBook Pro booting off a Vista disk image, thanks to Apple’s new Boot Camp software.
RLPM says he didn’t try a full install because he hasn’t backed up his MacBook, and presumably doesn’t want a disk error to wipe everything out.
He writes: “After installing the firmware update and boot camp (didn’t run boot camp assistant), it booted off the most recent Vista. I haven’t had time to backup my system, so I didn’t install vista, but it boots from the latest image!”
So I guess Apple’s Boot Camp software makes the whole BIOS/EFI firmware issue moot?
Slashdot commentator on Windows on a Mac:
“We’ve figured out how to put an inferior OS on more expensive hardware! That way, we can have both the frustrations of Windows and pay out of the ass for Mac. Everybody wins!”
And here’s Joy of Tech’s take. Click the pic for the entire cartoon.
It reminds me of my experience of installing Linux on a Mac a few years ago — which was, “great, now what?”
Another Slashdot poster has a good point about Windows-running Macs being attractive to businesses — they won’t:
“First, dual boot is a myth, it is damn annoying and so counterproductive. Most people dont realise that until they actually experiment it, it’s hype now, but all Linux users know it’s a pain, and I know from experience that a dual boot Windows/Linux means one thing… Windows 90% of the time. Vmware and others solutions are the way to go for people who need Windows professionaly for a given application, I can’t wait for a Mac OS X version. Second, some people try to makes us believe that companies will buy Apple PC to their employees now that they can run Windows, yeah right, serious manager will buy more expensive hardware, plus a Windows licence, so that their employees can have an Apple design and the joy of using Mac OS X out of the office… “
Here’s a cheap way to boost the range of your Airport Express Wi-Fi base station: stick it inside a steel wire-basket ladle.
This idea is to put the Airport Express in the middle of the parabolic kitchenware. In other words to make a kind of a passive wifi antenna enhancer. Et voila!
… Positioning this area of the AE in the focal point of the parabola with some sticky tape can even marginally improve the range extension. You could also use a bigger chinese kitchenware.
(Via MacBidouille)
Philip Torrone has some friends who own a $20,000 laser-engraving machine. So he gave them his PowerBook and a 19-Century etching of a nocturnal creature (from a book by O’Reilly, who Torrone works for).
The result is this amazingly-detailed etching.
