Last week I mentioned that adding &fmt=18 to a Youtube URL, or &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 to the embed code URLs allows you to view and embed Youtube clips in nice looking 480x360 resolution, encoded with the H.264 codec. The result is a much better playback experience than the standard 320x240 sorenson encoded clips, but a post today on webmonkey gives us another tweak that can produce even better results for some videos. Above is an example of ...

Ken Moore, a user experience designer at Google, created a very convincing Theremin simulator using a Wiimote and a Roland JV-1080 synth. I've seen a few Theremin simulators that use accelerometer data, in both Wiimote and iPhone form, but this is the first I've seen that does a good job of recreating an authentic Theremin experience in all its 50s sci-fi awesomeness. Using some IR gloves and the Wiimote's CCD, one hand's horizontal movement controls ...

treasure stolen gold low the sun and busy bees prepare for winter We collected honey from our two backyard hives this fall and I've finally finished jarring it. The new hive, split from last year's hive, produced over 20 pounds of honey. This is more than our first hive produced last year, but the older hive was not to be outdone. Queen Ann, in the second year of her reign, ran a very productive operation. ...

Brad Fitzpatrick created a garage door application for his G1 Android-based Google Phone. This would be noteworthy enough, but the interesting thing about Brad's hack is that it opens the garage door automatically as he approaches his home. I got it all working. I now have an Android Activity (GarageDoorActivity) which interacts with an Android Service I wrote (InRangeService), letting me start and stop the service's wifi scanning task. The service gets the system WifiManager, ...

This DIY bamboo frame is absolutely beautiful. Appropriate, since it appears to have hand crafted with love for a significant other. Aaron writes: The ride quality is TOTALLY SWEET! I realize that I have a bit of a bias, but truthfully I have ridden very few bikes that felt nicer. The bike seems to float over bumpy road surfaces, almost as if it were on giant baloon tires, but nope, they are just 700x23 clinchers ...

Ralf Ackermann sent us a tip on using the Myvu Crystal headset in conjunction with a wearable computer. The Myvu glasses were designed to block out the rest of the world for private iPod video watching, but its VGA resolution and device compatibility makes it pretty suitable for tearing apart. The consumer myvu crystal HMD (sold as a nice though still somewhat "socially unacceptable" 2 eyepiece video output device for the ipod and other devices ...

If you've ever had to move a huge directory containing many files from one server to another, you may have encountered a situation where the copy rate was significantly less that what you'd expect your network could support. Rsync does a fantastic job of quickly syncing two relatively similar directory structures, but the initial clone can take quite a while, especially as the file count increases. The problem is that there is a certain amount ...

It's always struck me that font embedding is a huge omission from the web standards toolkit. If you're not satisfied with Georgia and Verdana, you usually need to turn to images or Flash to get the typeface you want. Tools like sIFR have made this a lot more functional, allowing you to write standard HTML and have Flash dynamically replace content in the page, but using Flash just to display HTML text seems a little ...

Here's an example of a normal embedded Youtube video, borrowed from Patty Schiendelman's Gakken Mechamo Inchworm post. Back in march, it was discovered that when you view a video directly on Youtube, you could add a "&fmt=18" to the URL to enable a higher quality, higher resolution stream which is encoded with the H.264 codec. To make this work in an embedded video, however, you need a slightly different hack. After pasting the embed code ...

Now that you can run commands as root on the Google phone, you may have been thinking about what else you can do with the device. You know, besides the usual talking, texting, and surfing while driving. The device is Linux based, sure, but the installed software is relatively spartan and there isn't too much internal space to get dangerous. Thankfully, Jay Freeman wrote a nice guide for installing a more complete Linux distribution on ...

Wired's how-to wiki gives us "Cake in a Mug," perhaps the greatest thing to come to the microwave since peep jousting: You're working at home and your mind starts to wander to snack possibilities. There are probably some prepackaged, good-until-the-next-millennium baked items in your cabinet, but you're in the mood for something warm from the oven. Something chocolate. However, your compulsion to work is just strong enough to keep you from leaving the computer long ...

Phil Endecott has done a bit of hacking with the Linksys NSLU2 "Slug", the low-power network storage device which runs Linux under the hood. His SlugPower project is a switched outlet that can be controlled from the Slug. This enables his print server to power up the printer when it needs to be printing, and automatically cut power to the device when it's not in use. This page describes the hardware and software design of ...

If you're prone to scratching or loosing your Wii games, there's a way to back up your games to DVD and play them later. An alpha copy of Wii Backup Loader was leaked to the public a while back, and combined with the hack to enable your Wii to run homebrew, this will allow your Wii to play burned DVDs without a modchip. Instructable user thundaboy1047 put together a guide for downloading and installing the ...

You can communicate from Flash to an Arduino device by using a proxy. The proxy runs on a machine which is connected directly to the Arduino with a serial connection. Your AS3 code talks to the proxy over a TCP socket, and the proxy talks to the Arduino over the serial connection. This whole setup is made pretty simple by Erik Sjodin's as3Glue library: as3Glue is an ActionScript 3 library that enables communication between Flash/Flex/AIR ...

Edited: It looks like the process respawns itself after you type exit, so Ed's suggestion of typing cat is the best one. So instead of typing exit, just type cat when your phone first boots up; this should render the rogue root shell harmless. I was freaked out about this awful bug in Android. Basically, there's a root shell running that executes every keystroke you type on the keyboard--as the root user, no less. The ...

Andy Wilson of MS Research—a name you may recognize from yesterday's $1 gesture recognition post—is responsible for a number of pretty unbelievable projects involving image processing and human computer interfaces. It's the sort of stuff that really blurs the boundaries between real and digital environments. I was blown away by the video above, in which Andy demonstrates a multitouch-like hand gesture interface. Get this. It uses only a standard webcam. The webcam is positioned to ...

The "$1 Recognizer" is a simple gesture recognition algorithm created by Andy Wilson from Microsoft Research and Jacob Wobbrock and Yang Li from the University of Washington. By simple, I mean that it's under 100 lines of code that you can quickly add to your application to give it gesture recognition capabilities. To enable novice programmers to incorporate gestures into their UI prototypes, we present a "$1 recognizer" that is easy, cheap, and usable almost ...

At last year's Chaos Communication Congress conference, Drew Endy presented a lecture titled "Programming DNA - A 2-bit language for engineering biology". He does a fantastic job of laying out the state of bio-engineering technology, including some of the potential applications and societal challenges, all from a hacker perspective. Genetic engineering is now a thirty year old technology. For reference, over a similar period of time, modern computing machines went from exclusive objects used to ...

During tonight's election coverage, CNN pulled out some deep tech, displaying Jessica Yellin live via hologram. I looked closely and wasn't even able to see the R2 unit behind the scenes. <update> My original impression of how this works is below. A comment from Eric suggests that this might actually be a real hologram that Wolf can see in person, and not a live bluescreening effect. More on this at the end of the post. ...

I loaded one of my test Ubuntu virtual machines today (one that I hadn't used for a month) and, surprise, I had forgotten the password. This sort of thing happens from time to time, and if you're new to Linux, it can be a little disconcerting. Losing your root password isn't the end of the world, though. You'll just need to reboot into single user mode to reset it. Here's how to do it on ...