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Posts Tagged ‘hack’

AMD Phenom X4 overheat revisited: cooling tweaks save budget boards

By Chris Davies on Friday, May 2nd 2008 No Comments

After AMD was forced to address the potential overheating issues experienced by the higher-speed processors in its Phenom X4 range earlier this week, new testing suggests that workarounds can be implemented so that the 9750 and 9850 chips will work with motherboards not using AMD’s recommended 790 chipset. AnandTech found that, with four low-cost boards claiming support for AMD’s 125W processors, modifications including tweaked or aftermarket heatsinks or an additional, targeted 120mm fan would significantly boost stability. The compatibility claims of those tested had not in fact been validated by AMD themselves.

ASRock motherboard & AMD Phenom X4

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TiVo network control via Telnet, courtesy of Crestron

By Chris Davies on Thursday, May 1st 2008 No Comments

After some clever lateral thinking over at the TiVo Community forums there’s now a way for users to remotely control their PVR via anything with network access and a telnet client. It’s all thanks to Crestron, who worked with TiVo back when the company was developing v9.1 of the set-top box software; they added support for the home automation company’s touchscreens and did so in a relatively straightforward way. Telnet into your TiVo using port 31339 and you can use almost forty different commands to input numbers, control channels, set recordings and more.

TiVo telnet remote control

Check out the video of the system in action after the cut

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Remote-controlled whiteboard hack

By Chris Davies on Tuesday, Apr 29th 2008 No Comments

A remotely-controlled whiteboard is one of those hacks that seem vaguely pointless at first but, as you think about them, you start coming up with plenty of uses. Leaving messages or reminders for people at home or in other offices, perhaps, or teleworking with distant colleagues. After watching Jeroen Domburg’s video of his hacked whiteboard in action – that uses a webcam and the mangled entrails of an old scanner to accomplish remote sight and local control, respectively – I’ve decided that my life isn’t complete without one.

Remotely-controlled whiteboard

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Touchscreen 40GB Eee hack on eBay for crazy $3,200

By Chris Davies on Monday, Apr 28th 2008 No Comments

Could you ever bring yourself to spend more on a ASUS Eee than the price of a new MacBook Air, Lenovo X300 or Sony VAIO TZ? Currently up on eBay for a whopping $3,200 (or open to bids from $2,800), this uber-Eee takes an innocent new 8GB model and adds a built-in 32GB Patriot XT drive, a touchscreen and updated WiFi card supporting A/B/G/N. There’s even an FM transmitter, to play audio through a car radio, and the overclocked ultraportable is running Windows XP SP3 with 2GB of RAM.

Eee PC mod

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Psystar customer demos Open Computer, but who exactly is the target audience?

By Chris Davies on Monday, Apr 28th 2008 No Comments

Psystar’s Open Computer video demo may have prompted more questions than it perhaps answered, but it did encourage one Gizmodo reader Patrick (username Whiskeyfrown) to reveal that he’d not only put down the money for a non-Apple system running OS X but had already taken delivery of it. At the time, his comments were:

“I used this machine all day today at work without a hiccup. So far everything is working perfectly (something I can’t say about my G5 it’s replacing) Photoshop, Firefox, VMware Fusion (I know…ironic) as well as the OS itself all performed as expected” Patrick (Whiskeyfrown)

Now Patrick has produced a video of his Psystar system in action, including tracing the VGA cable from tower to monitor just to confirm it’s not some under-the-table Mac doing all the hard work.

Psystar Open Computer video demo 2

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XBox controller rapid-fire & macro mod

By Chris Davies on Tuesday, Apr 22nd 2008 No Comments

Obviously SlashGear doesn’t condone cheating in games, but if you’re like me (and rubbish at them) then, when playing casually against friends, you might sometimes wish you had a bit of extra help. AcidMods may be able to arrange that; their tutorial shows you how to add pre-programmed macro chips to your XBox controller, together with the new buttons to control them. That means shortcuts like rapid fire are a single press away.

XBox macro mod

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NES system squeezed into original game cartridge

By Chris Davies on Tuesday, Apr 22nd 2008 1 Comment

I don’t know how good French gamer Kotomi is at actual gaming, but when it comes to case mods I’m impressed. Taking an original Super Mario Brothers cartridge, the stripped down guts of a “NES on a chip” clone system was squeezed inside, making for one of the most compact (and cool) NES systems I’ve seen. It’s all functional too, with the obvious cartridge slot, power and reset buttons together with composite video, stereo audio and not one but two joystick ports.

NES cartridge mod

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Sony XEL-1 broken down – shot from the dissection at the Embedded Systems Conference

By James Allan Brady on Friday, Apr 18th 2008 No Comments

For some reason the announcement of a newer, thinner OLED TV by Sony and the attention of an event gave someone cause to disassemble an 11-inch OLED TV that costs $2500. It’s 3mm thick, so reassembly was probably harder than disassembly.

sony xel1 oledback sm

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Lite-On Blu-ray drive reads PS3 discs

By Chris Scott Barr on Thursday, Apr 17th 2008 5 Comments

Knowing that the PS3 games use Blu-ray discs, have you ever wondered about popping in one of your game discs into a Blu-ray drive on your PC to see if you could read it? Since Blu-ray drives are still really expensive, probably not. Even if you did have one it wouldn’t do much good, unless you had a Lite-ON DH-401S that is.

reading PS3 Disc

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DIY Electric off-road skateboard

By James Allan Brady on Wednesday, Apr 16th 2008 1 Comment

Some guy put together and instructable on how to make an electric mountain board or whatever those off-road versions of skateboards are called. It’s pretty ingenious too taking most of his parts from electric scooters.

elec skateboard had