The iPhone Dev Team may have held off on releasing their ultrasn0w iPhone 3GS jailbreaking and unlocking tool, but that hasn’t stopped long-time Apple hacker George Hotz. He’s released a tool called purplera1n which, while not unlocking the iPhone 3GS, does at least jailbreak it so that unofficial third-party apps can be installed.
More and more notebooks and netbooks are getting multitouch-capable touchpads, but if you’re chugging away with your existing machine and you want some straightforward multi-directional scrolling then you may need to take things into your own hands. As you can see from the newly-acquired nubbin in the right palm-rest on this Eee PC 901, modder Dave Astolfo decided to extract the trackball from an Apple Mighty Mouse and implant it into his netbook.
Video demo after the cut
Take the bodywork of a Fiat 500, throw in the mechanics of a second-hand tractor, and you may end up with this: the Fiat Cinque Tank. The handiwork of Kogoro Kurata, a Japanese ironsmith, the distinctive vehicle’s one main flaw is its somewhat pedestrian top-speed of just 3kpm (less than 2mph).
Video after the cut
We can’t say we looked at the Sharp Mebius NJ70A netbook – with its nifty touchscreen trackpad – and thought “what this needs is a second touchscreen”, but then we’re not SKY at UMPC Fever. After unboxing the N270-based netbook, he loaded up Windows 7 and then installed a touchscreen layer so as to use handwriting recognition direct onto the 10-inch display.
Video demo after the cut
Reminding us of Thermaltake’s monster Level 10 PC case, this is actually the Edelweiss PC, the handiwork of Pius Geiger and in fact initially constructed all the way back in 2006. Updated this year with a crisp new white color-scheme, the water-cooled Edelweiss separates out drives, graphics and power-supply, and then illuminates them with a discrete but effective lighting system.
You’ll need more than a passing familiarity with the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 to spot the mod here, so we’ll give you a hefty hint: it’s the fingerprint reader in the right-hand side of the palm-rest. MyDellMini forum member Rich decided he wanted biometric login functionality in his netbook, so inserted the guts of an Eikon fingerprint reader into the Mini 9.
Video game hating ex-attorney Jack Thompson has finally made himself useful, with a copy of his book “Out of Harm’s Way” providing the donor housing for a rather nifty PS2 case-mod. Mattigus of the Halflife2.net forums is the modder in question, who bought a copy of Thompson’s book on eBay and stuffed his working PS2 inside.
Palm’s webOS ROM has only been in the wild for a matter of hours, and already the first homebrew apps are showing up. A developer going by scm6079 has put together a test app that displays a simple “Hello World!” message and runs a five-second timer; meanwhile others are trying to disable the Pre’s otherwise unassailable camera shutter sound. Meanwhile, there’s also talk of a third device codename (after “castle”, the Pre, and “pixie”, the Eos), as the ROM apparently contains reference to “zepfloyd”.
We’re hearing that Nintendo’s Wii MotionPlus accessory is beginning to ship from Amazon, with preorder customers receiving emails telling them their Wiimote add-on is on its way. The MotionPlus dongle, which clips onto the base of the Wii’s controller, went up for preorder back at the start of May, priced at $19.99; it brings with it greater motion recognition accuracy.
Hard-drive based media players aren’t anything new, but hifi equipment actually built from old drives are somewhat rarer. At Hifiduino they’re using an Arduino microprocessor to construct a DIY preamp, and they’ve salvaged a deceased hard-drive to form the base and the top.
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