] Parallel Port Adapter (El Cheapo!)
]
] WARNING!
] This is a horrible hack that I happened to make work.
] Unlike the other design, this one does not use a buffer
] chip to protect your computer's parallel port or
] motherboard.
] You could very well fry/destroy your computer doing this!
] Proceed at your own risk!
] I used an Omron V3A-4K for this Mod. I assume this will
] work with any reader from the V3A family. (Remember, V3B
] readers are simply V3A readers with black cases).
] Included in instruction are hints about making this mod
] work with other readers. Please email me (Acidus @t
] msblabs.com) if you manage to make this mod work with
] other readers
]
] Want to have the parallel port based reader with out
] soldering a cumbersome design or carrying around a
] battery all the time? This parallel port adapter requires
] no external power source, no chips, really nothing at
] all. This will be used to allow a gameport-based reader
] tp be used with a parallel port.

Haven't had a new hardware design in a while, so here you go!

Stripe Snoop :: Parallel Port Adapter (El Cheapo)

] While consumers have learned to delete cookies, most are
] unaware of shared objects, and don't know how to disable
] them.
]
] Mookie Tanembaum, founder and chief executive of United
] Virtualities, says the company is trying to help
] consumers by preventing them from deleting cookies that
] help website operators deliver better services.
]
] "The user is not proficient enough in technology to know
] if the cookie is good or bad, or how it works," Tanembaum
] said.

Well this wouldn't be an issue if you STOPPED MAKING TRACKING COOKIES!

Company Bypasses Cookie-Deleting Consumers

] "All I know is it seems like a good idea to get a
] sedentary animal moving," said Sid Cannon, the vice
] president of Boise, Idaho-based Conveyor Engineering, a
] company that designs heavy-duty conveyor systems used in
] mining and has offered to build Maggie's treadmill.
]
] "I figured that we put rocks on our conveyors that are as
] big as an elephant, and a treadmill is basically a
] conveyor, so building one would be no big deal."
]
] It has turned out not to be that easy.

Big wheels keep on turning...

CNN.com - Alaska zoo elephant to get treadmill

] The simplest magnetic stripe reader
] by
] Luis Padilla Visdómine

I've emailed back and forth with Luis several times, and he is a smart guy. I may add support for this before USB!

Basically you attach either a maghead or a simple cassette tape head to the MIC of a soundcard, and sample really damn fast! He is using SOX to do his sampling, and then a simple C program to act like a filter/ADC to extract the bitstream.

As Stripe Snoop already can deal with bitstreams off cards, this is simply a matter of creating a new Reader class in SS 2.0! (And extracing the needed code out of SOX, which luckily is GPL is SS is!) The best part is almost all architectures have sound support. This might be a better cross-platform reader than any USB type!

The simplest magnetic stripe reader

] A getopt library compatible with GNU-getopt, but
] distributed with a BSD license, and also supports
] DOS-style commandline parsing.

Free Getopt - BSD Licensed getopt.c

] This is a weblog of my current battle against stage IV
] (metastatic) melanoma. I'm John Hall, a 24 year old
] hacker/geek/pilot in southern California.
]
] One of my main purposes in blogging this is to alarm
] people into getting suspicious moles checked out by a
] doctor immediately. If you are even remotely concerned
] about anything on your skin, please make an appointment
] with a doctor today. You definitely won't regret it.

John "Reeves" Hall is a GT grad who was quite active in the LUG and se2600 scene before moving to California to write XBox games.

Though I haven't seen him for over a year, I am proud to call him my friend. Blogging his war takes balls, and we can all learn something from it.

John's War with Melanoma

] NNDB is an intelligence aggregator that tracks the
] activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy,
] both living and dead. Superficially, it seems much like a
] "Who's Who" where a noted person's curriculum vitae is
] available (the usual information such as date of birth, a
] biography, and other essential facts.)
]
] But it mostly exists to document the connections between
] people, many of which are not always obvious. A person's
] otherwise inexplicable behavior is often understood by
] examining the crowd that person has been hanging out
] with.
]
] Eventually, we will have synopses and analyses of
] creative works by the people in the database, including
] their books, films, and recordings.

Soylent productions, the folks behind Rotten, have a kind of IMDB for everyone site going on. I am surprised by the quality and breadth of the database. Good times

NNDB: Tracking the entire world

Slides of Virgil's Datamining talk. Very very cool

Virgil's Datamining Talk @ IV4/OZ1/EZ1

] It's a cheap but astoundingly functional
] underwater robot capable of recording sonar pings and
] retrieving objects 50 feet below the surface. The four
] teenagers who built it are all undocumented Mexican
] immigrants who came to this country through tunnels or
] hidden in the backseats of cars. They live in sheds and
] rooms without electricity. But over three days last
] summer, these kids from the desert proved they are among
] the smartest young underwater engineers in the country.

Wired has an awesome 5 page article about 4 illegal, former gang member high school students who were taught engineering and came in #1, beating MIT's team, in a national underwater robotics competition.

Oh yes, we must stop the flow of these horrible Mexicans, that pick our fruit, clean our toilets, and hack awesome robots.

Poor high school beats MIT in Robotics Contest!

] Known as a rectangular projection, this map is one way of
] looking at the spherical Earth as a flat map. Both the
] size of continents and their shape get distorted as you
] move away from the equator. Compare this with a Mercator
] projection, which greatly distorts sizes in favor of
] keeping the shapes correct, or a Peters projection which
] distorts shapes but gives a true indication of relative
] size.
]
] Also available is a semi-realistic view of dawn and dusk
] from far above the Earth, a look at the moon, and
] information about how this works.

On the same vein as the "world at night" photos, here are some cool maps the whole earth's surface.

World Sunlight Map