Filed under: Audio, Hardware, iPod Family, Cool tools, Hacks

Retro Thing, one of my favorite blogs, points out this clever hack. The iPod nano is great, but that screen is a little small for watching movies. How do you solve that problem? Well, if you have some time, a 35mm slider viewer, and some small speakers you can hack together a solution (as seen in the video).

The movie looks pretty good, though this solution does make the iPod just a little less portable. That’s the great thing about hacks, though, they don’t need to be practical to be awesome.

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Filed under: iPod Family, Hacks, iPhone

Guess what’s come out of the pumpkin patch news service this time? A video that shows hackers using iTunes to restore an already-jailbroken and activated 1.1.4. The iPhone software bundle (the ipsw file) has been pre-hacked and updates through iTunes to a fully hacked system. Like other hack previews, this one is not yet ready for prime-time. The developers put this together as a proof-of-concept, but hey’ll likely be releasing this method when the actual SDK comes out.

Congratulations again to Pumpkin, roxfan, Turbo, wizdaz, bgm, np101137 and the iPhone dev team.

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Look, we’re sorry, but 1,420 LEDs just isn’t cutting it anymore. Maybe back when we were children a touchable 14-foot by 6-foot wall lit up by a myriad of magical blue lights would’ve managed to pull us away from our Lincoln Logs for a minute or three, but the kids of today grew up on Baby Einstein and a post-Steve Blue’s Clues — they aren’t easily impressed. The Philips “Imagination Light Canvas” is being shown off at the Mercy Medical Center in Rogers, Arkansas, and allows visitors to touch the wall and “paint with light.” Whatever you draw slowly fades over time, and apparently you can draw using a bunch of different colors and shapes, though we’re only seeing blue squares here. The wall can accomadate six people drawing at once, and pulls about as much electricity as a regular toaster. It’ll be unveiled on March 16th.

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Filed under: iPod Family, iPhone, Graphic Design

Web designers and enthusiasts are likely already familiar with Dave Shea, the Canadian web designer behind the css Zen Garden and other standards-based web projects. If you’re not familiar with him from that angle, you may recognize his Chalkwork series of icons which has just had a set of iPhone & iPod touch icons added to it.

While most of his work comes with a well-deserved price tag, this set is available free of charge. It contains 29 well-designed icons, including the default applications and some select third-party apps. The download includes a selection of Dock and Wallpaper images as well. You’ll need a jailbroken iPhone/touch to use them and the set comes with instructions for manual and SummerBoard installations.

iPhone/iPod touch owners (and anyone else who wants to) can download the free icon set at mezzoblue.

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Filed under: iPod Family, Multimedia, iPhone

A while back instant playaudio karma hit when I was playing around with the iPhone command line. Today, it hit again. After adding video to my command-line playback utility (courtesy of dmunsie’s working it all out), I decided to try playing back video from the Internet archive–and it worked! I watched the “Cliche Family” in a small window that floated above my GUI. (Screen shots don’t work with video–that’s why you’re seeing a black rectangle). If you’ve got command-line access to the iPhone and a copy of my utilities, try issuing the following from the command line. So cool!

playaudio 'http://www.archive.org/download/cliche_family/cliche_family_64kb.mp4'

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Filed under: iPod Family, iPhone

Matthias Huber wrote in to tell us about his new iChinese system that helps you learn your characters. iChinese uses the iPhone’s touch-based interface to teach users how to write the characters on-screen.

It’s available by adding the http://ichinese.de/repo repository to Installer.app. I don’t speak Chinese. I don’t write chinese (although I’m very fond of chinese food). I wouldn’t know an ideogram if I tripped on one, so if you give this a try and have an informed view on how useful it is, let us know in the comments.

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Filed under: iPod Family, UNIX / BSD, iPhone

After typing his fingers to the bone, overworked iPhone developer Jay “Saurik” Freeman has finally finished his long-awaited Cydia release. As Freeman puts it, the iPhone is a 667MHz computer with 128MB RAM and at least 4GB of flash. So why not use it as a Unix workstation?

Motivated by the relative limitations of the existing BSD subsystem, Freeman decided to port Debian’s APT to the iPhone — tweaking items to work better with the iPhone’s relatively messed-up network settings. A UIKit front end, Cydia, provides a GUI for users to select and install programs — basically Installer.app for fully leaded geeks. Cydia isn’t limited to command-line software. It should allow installation of any and all software package types.

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Remember Project 28? That Boeing / DHS system to put a 28 mile stretch of sensor-tower laden virtual fencing along the US / Mexico border in Arizona? Well, the government swiped the contract back from Boeing last week for lack of, well, working, and is apparently going at it alone with plans to delay it three or more years to get the job done right. Well, you know, right as total failures and wastes of taxpayer dollars get, ultimately.

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Although Gibson’s self-tuning Robot Guitar is mighty snazzy, buying an entirely new instrument in order to ease your tuning woes isn’t exactly practical. Truth be told, the N-Tune won’t do the tuning for you, but it does make adjusting those flats and sharps a lot more interesting. Essentially, the chromatic tuner replaces the volume control on your electric axe and can be retrofitted in most every guitar / bass out there. Once installed, users simply pull the knob up to mute the volume and turn the tuner on simultaneously, and then you can check out the on-knob LEDs to gauge how accurately your strings are tuned. Best of all, this thing is slated to ship within the next month for just $100, but alas, it’s recommended that you pay a professional to actually rig it up.

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

What’s worse than being forced to hang with your “pals” as they peruse the aisles of Sharper Image? Why, perusing the aisle at Brookstone, of course! In an admittedly ridiculous ploy to solicit business from now-shafted Sharper Image gift card holders, Brookstone is attempting to do the world some giant favor by converting any Sharper Image gift cards or gift certificate into a 25-percent off discount for its stores. Unfortunately, the individual with a $1 gift card and a $20,000 gift card get the same lame-o discount, and better still, the deal isn’t valid on the few things in there worth a darn Sony, Celestron, Bose, Panasonic and Tempur-Pedic items. Thanks for nothing, Brookstone.

[Image courtesy of OrlandoAirports]

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