Bitshift

If you're a geek, a nerd, a hacker, a DIYer, a Maker, and you own an OS X-based Mac, you need this book. What book? Amit Singh's Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach. It has a great website, too.

Everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING (the book is over 1600 pages long!) you ever wanted to know about the internal workings of OS X is in here. EFI? Yup. Encryption? Yep. Filesystems? Indeed. Boot process? You betcha.

Perfect for those late-night Apple TV hacking sessions. Buy yours now!

For those of you living under a rock, you may have missed the news that Apple launched its assault on the world's living rooms last week: The Apple TV was released. True to form, the community rose to the challenge, and hacks and mods a-plenty sprung from the ether.

There's a Wiki set up to collect information on hacks and mods and a forum thread detailing the progress people have made adding functionality to the Apple TV. There are a few other sources, but these two seem to be the main thrust of the development work being done.

So far, people have managed to add larger hard drives to the Apple TV, get Xvid and Divx files to play on it, get the Apache webserver running, get SSH running, enable filesharing, enable remote desktop, and in the forum thread above, someone's managed to write some Objective C code and add their own items to the menus.

Several groups are working furiously to fully-enable the USB port on the back of the unit, to allow keyboard use and -- perhaps more importantly -- allow the use of external USB drives as added storage space, or as alternative boot devices.

Strange days we live in!

Let me just start by saying that I neither speak nor read Croatian. I can, however, read Anglicized words, parts lists, specs, and schematics. And Ivica Novakovic has put up an interesting little piece on how to build a thermostat out of a Nokia 3310 LCD, a DS18B20 1-wire temperature sensor, and a 12F629 PIC.

Full schematics, source code, and instructions (in Croatian) are available. Check it out!

The kids over at Perpetual Kid have this wonderful barcode Doormat for sale. Nothing expresses your individuality and proclaims your alternative, self-reliant, not-one-of-the-crowd hipness like the the consumer seal of genericism: the barcode.

Go forth, my little wallet-bearers, and consume!

That's my new word for hat: headgadget. Try it on. Use it with friends (the word, not the hat). While you're practicing, practice in style with a Ninja Bunny hat from bunnywarez.

What's not to love? It's stealthy, it has ear-pockets, it's got its ninja mojo workin', and it protects that oh-so-valuable geek noggin of yours from freezer burn.

I think I'm beginning to understand the geek attraction to all things textile. I have many friends who like to knit, crochet, and/or weave, and they seem to derive a similar pleasure from those activities as they do from things like coding, doing graphics work, playing with and/or building gadgets, etc. I believe it's because working with textiles provides the same sense of organization and systematicity, as well as incremental progress towards a goal. Knitting is definitely a hobby I need to add to my stack of Things I Do When Not Doing Other Things(TM).

To that end, I present to you basic knitting instructions for the complete noob, how to knit a binary scarf, and how to knit Space Invaders socks.

Now, to figure out if I can knit one, python two...

Dr. Richard P. Feynman is one of my personal heroes. He wasn't afraid to admit he didn't know something, he had a gift for conveying complex ideas so everyone could understand them, and he retained a childlike curiosity throughout his entire life, maintaining a sense of wonder and awe about the world around him. He is truly the geek's geek, the hacker's hacker.

I was struck by an anecdote he likes to share about the walks he used to take with his father. One day, he saw a bird, and asked his father what it was. his father admitted to not knowing what it was called, but suggested instead that they observe the bird and learn about its behavior. To name a thing, contrary to mystical tenets, is not to hold power over it. You can know the name of something in as many languages as you choose, and still know absolutely nothing about it.

In this wonderful Google video, Feynman recounts this and other tales, explaining his philosophy of learning and knowledge, and demonstrating the joy he takes in discovery.

I can never hope to be a fraction as brilliant as Mr. Feynman, but I would count myself lucky indeed to be as agile of mind and wit as he is when I'm that age.

The TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) Conference kicked off today, with talks from a diverse group of folks, from a thought-provoking cognitive psychologist, to an NBA Hall of Famer, to a Nobel laureate physicist, to an extremely talented jazz musician. More than just a gathering of geeks and uber-geeks, TED has something for everyone, and is sure to kick-start your brain.

This year's talks aren't online yet, so unless you not only forked over the thousands of dollars for registration and were deemed worthy of attending (not everyone who's willing to pay is allowed to go), you'll just have to wait.

In the meantime, the official website has an outstanding collection of previous talksonline. Do yourself a favor and sit down with them. Just be prepared to have your creativity and imagination provoked.

In the heady days of my youth, I collected t-shirts. If it was remotely geeky, I probably bought one. In fact, I probably bought two, just in case something happened to one. This had two effects on my life: a gradual but total depletion of my discretionary funds, and a gradual but total depletion of empty volume* in my home. I'm not sure which is worse: my gadget addition, or my geek shirt addiction. I hardly wear any of them any more, and I've largely stopped purchasing them (though I do make the occasional exception).

I've gotten rid of some of them via donations, but most are just sitting around, occupying territory I could be using for other things, daring me to try changing addresses again. I'm tempted to just toss them, but then I came across this article on how to repurpose old t-shirts. Rather than getting rid of them, I could use them to make new shirts, turn them into a bag for my laptop, make some stylin' underwear (do text editor jokes make for good undergarment reading?), and more.

Anyone remember the game You Don't Know Jack? I was addicted to it. And now, I'm doomed, because it's back, it has new daily installments every day, and it's now on the web and Flash-based. Polish up that geek brain of yours, dust off the smarts, and dig in.

Suffer along with me!

It's a conceit as old as science fiction itself: Computers become intelligent enough that they're eventually either explicitly or implicitly granted personhood in the eyes of the law. The genre is rife with stories of benevolent and malevolent artificially-intelligent computers (AIs) running around with rights and privileges similar to those of humans. Some geek somewhere trips over the crucial concept that allows sentient computers, and next thing you know, we're slaves to our gadgets. Wait...ok, that's already the case. Answerable to our toasters, then.

Of course, we're nowhere near "strong AI", which is basically a self-aware computer...or are we? I met Tom Ray many years ago in Santa Fe, and played with his Tierra system, and it's about as close to what I'd consider actual artificial life as I've seen, short of Drescher's Made-Up Minds, but I've neither met Drescher, nor had a chance to play with his software.

*ahem* I digress. We're nowhere near "strong AI" -- self-aware computers of the type commonly seen in science fiction -- but we've got "weak AI" nailed. Weak AI is software that reasons. IBM's Deep Blue is a good example in the chess-playing realm.

Whether or not we have the technical cajones to go from weak to strong AI is almost tangential to the more interesting question: At what point do we recognize software as something more than the computational equivalent of a hammer? When do we start down the slippery slope of granting a computer personhood? Several governmental bodies have considered granting at least a subset of human rights to various primates and dolphins at various points in time. But the issue of computer personhood has never really arisen.

Until now, that is. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has just upheld a ruling that declared a computer guilty of the unauthorized practice of law. The reasoning here is that the computer, being an expert system (which is a simple form of weak AI, using what amounts to a collection of IF-THEN rules to make decisions), went beyond simply filling out forms, but made suggestions as to how to fill out the forms, and what to put in them. It also offered snippets of relevant law and suggested exemptions to the user. In this, it went beyond being a simple tool, claims the court, and entered the realm of practicing law without a license.

How soon before someone sues their copy of Quicken rather than Intuit for acting as an accountant? It's this sort of thing that sets the precedent for us to start treating software more like the embodiment of an intelligence and less like a box wrench.

One of my favorite geek gadget DIY sites, Instructables, has a new article up, and this time it's how to build a flashing LED that will learn new patterns. It's short, it's simple, it's cheap, and it's quite cool! It's the perfect Saturday afternoon project for the budding electronics hobbyist.

If you've never seen The Show with Ze Frank, stop whatever it is you're doing and go watch a few episodes right this minute. I suggest starting with a recent one and just feeling your way around the archives. His show is idiosyncratic, sometimes including lots of in-jokes and catch phrases that at first make no sense whatsoever, but slowly become meaningful as he acculturates you into his own little online world (which happens to be richly interconnected with his sister site, The ORG.

He uses intros filmed by his audience, often fields questions from his audience, and runs competitions that encourage his viewers to break out the webcam and involve themselves in The Show in some way. His style is literate, well-spoken, sometimes self-deprecating wit. Some days, he'll riff on a cold he has. Others, he'll spend 5 minutes giving a very lucid, entertaining, and educational diatribe on the workings of short- and long-term memory and study habits. Every so often, he'll do topical shows addressing current events (these used to be called, "Ride the Fire Eagle Danger Days", with segment intros by fans, but that theme seems to have come to a close, although the segments remain.

In my opinion, he's currently one of the most entertaining people producing regular live video on the web, and definitely worth a few minutes of your time. If you use a news aggregator or other form of RSS reader, there's even a The Show RSS feed, so you can catch each new episode as it's thrown out into the ether.

Space.com has an interesting article on the 10 weirdest things in space, from science's point of view. From nothing to brown dwarfs, you can read up on some of the weirdest astronomical phenomena this side of a Charlie Stross novel. Space geeks rejoice!

I'm the first to admit I'm a slob. Well, not a slob exactly; I just own too much crap. A side effect of owning too much crap is not being able to keep it organized very well. I launched a massive campaign at the beginning of the year to declutter my life, starting with all the excess crap I don't need, don't use, don't want, or don't have room for.

WikiHow is a treasure-trove of how-to knowledge, and their article on how to declutter and organize your kitchen is spot on.

If you're anything like me, you can't see one wall of your home or all the wires dangling from the various electronics you've got shoved up against it. Never fear, because Van Mardian has a solution for you. This looks very nicely done, and would make an excellent weekend project.

Personally, I'm using some cheap under-desk wire guides from IKEA, but they're full-to-bursting, and something like this has an aesthetic appeal for me. Check it out!

The Make: magazine-sponsored, 2nd annual Maker Faire tickets are now on sale! If you missed last year's inaugural event, you missed quite a bit. Imagine an entire weekend full of exhibits, classes, and vendors catering strictly to the ubergeeky DIY types. Imagine a giant walking robotic giraffe, a preview of some really cool new wireless java-based gadget platforms from Sun, classes from Parallax, teaching people how to build RFID readers you can take home, a flame-throwing trampoline, Steve Wozniak on his Segway, frygrease-powered cars, and much, much more.

That's just a tiny sampling of last year's.

I am still kicking myself for missing the auditions for this year's Faire, but I hear there will be, among other things, a demo of a homemade 3-dimensional (think: print your own solid objects out of thin air) printer using sugar as the main building material. How cool is that?

Go. Buy. Be enticketed.

I'll admit it: I own a Prius. And I'm quite smug about the 50MPG I average on it, particularly when I pull into a gas station and see that the previous customer dropped at least $40 on a fill-up, when I'm only paying $20 and even then only every third week.

However, driving a hybrid -- or, more accurately: driving a car with a full-screen display giving me instant feedback on how my driving is impacting my miles per gallon (MPG) -- has shown me that how you drive matters just as much as, if not more than, what you drive.

Case in point, the enthusiasts over at The Hypermiler Wiki. There, you'll find all sorts of tips, tricks, and techniques to manage over 50 MPG on a non-hybrid, or how to approach 100 MPG on a hybrid, just by altering your driving habits.

Learning to draft, drive without using your brakes, using cruise-control, etc. can make a world of difference in your mileage, and your wallet. Sure, you might lose the luxury of being 2.7 seconds ahead of the guy in front of you, but the macho you lose by not driving like a maniac turns into the moolah you'll be saving every time you pump dead dinos into your ride.

Back in 2003, I cobbled together a portable active wireless network scanner, using a Toshiba Libretto 50ct (see also this page) whose guts I'd swapped out with those of a 70ct (I won the motherboard from eBay), an ancient DeLorme TripMate GPS unit, a nice Cisco wireless card with dual external antennas, and a cheesy hack to wire the GPS unit to use power from the Libretto's PS/2 port on its dock.

I used it along with Kismet and the included gpsmap code to fully map all the wireless networks while driving from San Jose to Las Vegas back in 2003.

Those of you unfamiliar with the LIbretto may not realize it, but it was one of the first truly powerful pocket-sized computers. It's got a 120MHz Pentium, 32MB RAM, and this one has a 40GB hard drive in it, yet it's the size of a paperback book. I don't mean to malign technical marvels like the HP100lx or the Nokia 770 (indeed, I own both), but the former is woefully inadequate to such a task, and the latter... well, I just haven't gotten around to trying something like this with it yet.

I'm planning on putting a new OS on it and wiping the current config (an old RedHat install), but I'll take some photos and throw them up in the Projects section, along with documentation on the setup before I tear everything down.

A kind Craigslist user in Seattle has classified the various types of folks you'll run into in Costco stores.

Though, honestly, you'll see these types of people pretty much anywhere there is something for sale and people vying to buy it. Personally, I try to avoid public consumption when at all possible, for exactly the reasons listed in this article.

Some of you may have seen pictures floating around this new-fangled "intarwebs" thing that's all the rage with the kids these days, of MacBooks etched with all sorts of interesting things (most notably the Tarsier shown here, from the cover of an O'Reilly book).

In just under two hours, I'll be over at The TechShop, having the founder, Jim Newton (of many hats, including the science advisor from season 3 of MythBusters) teach me how to use the Epilog Summit machine, so I can learn how to ruin my own shiny gadgets.

If you're in or near the SF Bay Area, and haven't checked out TechShop yet, you're doing yourself a grave disservice.

Using DNS as a covert communication channel is nothing new. Dan Kaminsky has been giving talks and writing papers about this sort of thing for years (hi, Dan!). His paper on tunnelling audio, video, ssh, and pretty much anything else over DNS is a must-read.

However, Landon Fuller has been inspired by Dan's work, and decided to monkey around with the DNS flags, using them as a signaling medium. It's a good read, and looks like a fun approach.

Not to toot my own horn, but I did something similar with UDP packets in al-Dalam, a.k.a. Sifr's Obfuscator (code available here) back in 2004. Oddly enough, it was also shortly after hearing Dan Kaminsky give a talk.

Not to be left out, the Wii isn't going to let the PSP steal the hackery spotlight. Over at Wii Hacks, LiquidIce has collected pretty much everything a geek ever want to know about the various ways in which you can hack your favorite gadget, the Nintendo Wii. From homebrew software kits to open source/open hardware modchips for the DIY type, to articles on exporting content from OS X for use on a Wii, Wii Hacks has you covered. Shoo!

CrunchGear (why does every site on the planet have camelcase names these days?) has thrown together a wonderful little guide detailing how to bring a dead iPod back to life.

I've got one exhibiting these symptoms myself, so I'll have to give this a try and report back to everyone. I know it's not totally dead, because I was able to boot Linux on it. It just didn't want to play well in the iPod's native firmware.

I just recently shipped my DS Lite back to Nintendo to deal with a sudden proliferation of dead pixels on the upper screen. Saddened and somewhat twitchy from not having my DS to covet when I get home from work, I picked my PSP back up. I forgot what a great little platform it is, with surprise titles like Loco Roco and Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception.

However, I also began to wonder what sort of hackery people have been up to with the much-maligned PSP. Geek gadget DIY bastion Make: Magazine didn't disappoint, and they've got a plethora of PSP hacks and projects listedover in their blog archives. Check them out!

Ever spent hours, or even days, searching for just the right component for some project you're working on? Been frustrated by the lack of comparative shopping tools to help you find the thermistor or microcrontroller you need? Wondered what the world of DPDT switches had to offer you?

Wait no longer. The fine folks over at Octopart have thrown together a Googlesque, minimalist search engine to service exactly this need. It's a new Y-Combinator-funded Silicon Valley startup, and it looks like it'll be really useful to gadget-hackers, Makers, and electronics hobbyists.

Mr. Bad and Crackmonkey have thrown together a list of 70 things to say when you know you're losing a technical argument. No guarantees are made, express or implied. Though you may win yourself a chuckle from the peanut gallery.

Tomorrow morning, I'm taking my first class at TechShop, a public (membership required) workshop with tools that most people just don't have laying around. MIG welders, plasma cutters, CNC mills, Epilog Summit laser cutters, 3D printers, and more. They even have heavy-duty industrial gear like auto dynamometers, engine hoists, vehicle lifts, anvils, forges, and hydraulic benders.

Not to be overshadowed by the heavy metal, they also have more delicate equipment, such as oscilloscopes, circuit board etching stations, sewing machines, silkscreen printing gear, lost wax casting setups, micrometers, and more.

Plastic forming your thing? They've got vacuum formers, plastic welders, rotational molders, injection molders, vacuum casters, and pretty much anything else you might need.

Take the coolest community center you can think of, geek it out to the gills, and you might come close to TechShop. They'll even teach you how to use all this stuff (indeed, they require you to take classes for most of the equipment before they'll let you use it on your own).

I'll be learning how to use their CAD system and the 3D printer tomorrow morning, and either Tuesday or Thursday next week, I think I'm going to take a class on using their laser etching system, because I've been considering etching something on my macbooks and powerbooks. They're close to my office, so it's very convenient.

I need to ask them some questions, but if there's someone there that can help me with the woodworking stuff (I never took shop in high school), I may buy some stock and finally finish the wireless XBox 360 arcade joystick I've been trying to build at home with my pathetically inadequate equipment.

Day passes are $30 (as are most of the classes), monthly memberships are $100 (if you buy a day pass and decide to upgrade to a monthly, the $30 will be counted towards the cost), and yearly memberships are $1200. If you're in the SF Bay Area and have any interest at all in using or learning to use these things, and/or need a space to work on your projects, this is where you need to be! Buy a membership today!