Unlock Serial Communication with the iPhone

Serial ports are as vintage as CRT monitors, but serial communication itself is still widely used.  Some devices feature serial communication via USB as a standard protocol, but certainly not in an iPhone.  But!  A group of network engineers have found out how to create a serial connection to the iPhone.

• Don’t Miss: All Our Apple Hacks

  
  “So…what’s good is it?” you ask.  For one: a jailbroken iPhone with a serial port can be used to connect with servers. Instead of lugging around laptops, network engineers can use the pocket sized iPhone and downloaded applications from Cydia to turn an iPhone into a near computer and troubleshoot networks.
  
  The complete how-to with a slideshow makes it easy for someone who knows his way around an iPhone and a soldering iron. The little known secret lies in hacking the dock connector of an iPhone to make it work as a serial port. Next is jailbreaking the iPhone, installing Terminal, OpenSSH server and Minicom. The last slide tells you where to find the $80 worth of parts to build your own

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Stylish DIY Desktop Speaker Build

These Apple-inspired desktop speakers are custom designed from the ground up.  The speaker enclosures are primed, painted, and polished with a sleek aluminum hued finish. Apart from the smooth finish, the black Plexiglass front and rear is what really makes these speakers stand out.

 The modder has used the 50 Watt Dayton amplifier to power 2 desktop speakers, a 300W Bash Subwoofer, and a Dayton Neodymium Tweeter in his setup.  You may need a CNC machine to help with the precise plotting and cutting.

But with the help of the discussion thread on the project and parts list, you should be well on your way building your own DIY speaker system.

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Turn Old IPods Into Custom Speakers

Learn to build custom speakers by installing bare speakers in two of the original iPods where the scroll wheels normally are.  Instead of gutting your old iPod, you can purchase iPod front panels and back panels on eBay for a few bucks.  Just add a simple amplification circuit and you’ve got yourself a pair of custom iPod speakers.

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Easily Connect a Wiimote to your PC

Use a bluetooth adapter and some free software to read data from your wiimote’s accelerometer and sensors.  There are fantastic connectivity tutorials here and here using software is avaliable for Mac, PC, and Linux.  Why would you want to do this you ask? Pairing your PC and Wiimote enables you to develop fantastic wiimote projects such as:

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Make DIY Speakers Out of Old Hard Drives

Ever wonder what you should do with your old hard drives? Turn them into speakers! It’s fairly easy, all you need is some hard drives (the more, the better), some soldering tools, some headphone wire, and an audio source (iPod, Computer, etc..). For more info on the project, check out the project details.  A similar project can be found here.

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Easy Laptop Mod allows Eye to Eye Video Chat

A major problem with video chat is people cannot have a conversation while retaining eye contact.  Since eye contact is an essential part of any communication from casual chats to business calls, this simple solution may be able to help.  Although the device is a bit bulky, it easily slides off when you’re done chatting.

Using mirrors, the image is “projected” directly in front of the laptop camera, providing the illusion you’re looking the person directly in the eye. Essentially it’s the same thing as a modern teleprompter, the device commonly used by today’s news anchors.

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iOS keyboard Exploit Allows brute Force IPad Lock screen Attack

It’s quite common to have a timed lockout after entering several bad passwords. This simple form of security makes automated brute force attacks unfeasible by ballooning the time it would take to try every possible permutation. The lock screen on iOS devices like iPad and iPhone have this built in. Enter your code incorrectly several times and the system will make you wait 1, 5, 15, and 60 minutes between entries as you keep inputting the wrong code. But there is an exploit that gets around this. [Pierre Dandumont] is showing off his hardware-based iPad lock screen attack in the image above.

He was inspired to try this out after reading about some Mac EFI attacks using the Teensy 3. That approach used the microcontroller to spoof a keyboard to try every PIN combination possible. By using the camera kit for iPad [Pierre] was able to do the same. This technique lets you connect wired keyboards to the iPad, but apparently not the iPhone. A bluetooth keyboard can also be used. These external keyboards get around the timing lockout associated with the virtual lockscreen keyboard.

We’re of the opinion that this is indeed a security vulnerability. If you forget your passcode you can simply restore the device to remove it. That wipes all of your personal data which can then be loaded from an iTunes backup. Lockscreens are paramount if a device is stolen. They will give you the time you need to change any online credentials which might be remembered by the device.

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How to: Automatic Hard Drive Back Up

When was the last time you backed up your important files? Last year when your friend called in tears after the Blue Screen of Death ate his thesis?  We thought so.  Learn to set up a program called SyncBack which automatically generates password protected zip files of your important documents.

Benefits:

1. It’s free and pretty easy to use.
2. You can choose to save them to an external hard drive or upload them to an FTP server.
3. Schedule nightly, weekly, and monthly backups so you don’t have to lift a finger.

No, don’t just bookmark this post and do it later. Do it now! Before it’s too late!  If you need assistance automating backup, see a full guide to using SyncBack

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Easily Connect a Wiimote to your PC

Use a bluetooth adapter and some free software to read data from your wiimote’s accelerometer and sensors.  There are fantastic connectivity tutorials here and here using software is avaliable for Mac, PC, and Linux.  Why would you want to do this you ask?

Pairing your PC and Wiimote enables you to develop fantastic wiimote projects such as:

read the rest of article...

Make DIY Speakers Out of Old Hard Drives

Ever wonder what you should do with your old hard drives? Turn them into speakers! It’s fairly easy, all you need is some hard drives (the more, the better), some soldering tools, some headphone wire, and an audio source (iPod, Computer, etc..). For more info on the project, check out the project details.  A similar project can be found here.

read the rest of article...

Easy Laptop Mod allows Eye to Eye Video Chat

A major problem with video chat is people cannot have a conversation while retaining eye contact.  Since eye contact is an essential part of any communication from casual chats to business calls, this simple solution may be able to help.  Although the device is a bit bulky, it easily slides off when you’re done chatting.

Using mirrors, the image is “projected” directly in front of the laptop camera, providing the illusion you’re looking the person directly in the eye. Essentially it’s the same thing as a modern teleprompter, the device commonly used by today’s news anchors.

read the rest of article...

Blackhat: IOS Device Charger Exploit Installs and Activates Malware

A team of researchers from Georgia Tech unveiled their findings yesterday at the Blackhat conference. Their topic is a power charger exploit that installs malware on iOS devices. Who would have thought that there’d be a security hole associated with the charging port on a device? Oh wait, after seeing hotel room locks exploited through their power jack this is an avenue that should be examined with all device security.

The demonstration used a charger and an BeagleBoard. Plugging in the charger is not enough to trigger the exploit, the user must unlock the screen while charging for it to go into action. But once that’s done the game is over. Their demo removes the Facebook app and replaces it with an infected impostor while leaving the icon in the same place on your home screen. They notified Apple of their findings and a patch will roll out with iOS7. So when would you plug your device into an untrusted charger? Their research includes a photo from an airport where an iPad is connected to the USB port of a public charging station.
The summary on the Blackhat site has download icons for the white paper and presentation slides. At the time of writing we had a hard time getting them to download but succeeded after several tries.

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How to: Transfer Files via Soundwave

We’ve seen a few odd ways to transfer data before (see sound transfer over lasers) but this is probably the most bizarre.  Instead of using a USB drive, this man decided to invent his own file transfer method by using his sound card to send morse code-like messages representing 1′s and 0′s.  This guy definitely deserves some geek street cred for coming up with this.
How it works:

• For every character:
• For every bit:
• Send a short pulse if the bit is 1.
• Send a long pulse if the bit is 0.
• Send a silence.
• Send a very long pulse (4 times as long as the shortest pulse).
• Send a silence.

 The author says generating and transmitting sound out is the easy part while interpreting the sound via a microphone attached to another computer is quite difficult.  Check out the full documentation and how to.

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Absolutely Incredible Mac-Tacular Lair

Yes, you’re probably drooling at the above picture too.  What an absolutely incredible setup!  There are actually several computers hooked up to the monitors and they can be controlled by the single mouse and keyboard using Teleport.  Check out the entire flickr set and sleek slideshow for more details on the setup and a description of all the gadgets shown.  (scroll down for more pics and info)

A zoomed out shot of majority of this guy’s lair.  See more close up pics below.  Note, the blue LED lighting behind his workstations.  You can learn how to create that effect by reading Build your own PC Ambilight and this tutorial as well.

Finally, another close up of the audio setup.  We featured another triple monitor Linux setup if you’d like to learn more about that.

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Turn an Old Hard Drive into an External Hard Drive

Odds are you have spare hard drives lying around from old computers.

Instead of tossing them out or letting them collect dust, you can easily turn them into DIY external hard drives and use them to backup your important files. Basically all you have to do is pick up a cheap hard drive enclosure, stuff the old drive inside, and connect it to your computer.

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How to: Back Up Your Hard Drive For Free

If anything can go wrong, it will. This means although it can be a bit tedious, we always need to backup our computers. Data backup is not only good practice; it’s an essential one. It may be a spanking new computer or a jalopy for the digital world, data backup is as important as a virus scan or keeping a firewall.

Think of all the files accumulated over the years.  One snafu and oops it’s gone. Good news is that data backup solutions can fill that gap for you. It’s out there’s easy and importantly, it’s free. One of the backup solutions is built right into your operating system, some of it is on the web and some can be provided by a kind friend.

The Basics:

The easiest and most accessible backup is obviously on another networked computer. Simple file sharing between two computers makes it a routine of copy and paste. Configuration is slightly different among the different systems (Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7). Native Mac backups or with a PC are also pretty much covered.

 Manual backups are like heavy duty lifting. Backup utilities like IdleBackup (Windows) and SilverKeeper (Mac OS X) automatically sync folders for you, relieving a lot of the work load.

1. Simple File Storage Sites

Cloud computing is upon us and so why not take a look at some online solutions. Of course, you can go for full system backups which are available at a premium. But we did mention “free” in the title. A lot of online file storage companies offer ample space for free though falling short of complete system backups. Backing up your stuff online thus calls for cherry-picking essential files and safekeeping them online.

Here are a few in the queue:

• Windows Live Skydrive: A total of 25GB for free with a per file size limit of 50MB.
• File Factory: 100GB of free storage with a 300MB file limit. Downer could be the slow speeds.
• Dropbox: For smaller needs.  Offers 2GB of free storage with neat file syncing features.
• Mozy: 2GB of free storage but with a handy Windows client that makes uploading a cinch.
• Orbit Files: 6GB but with limited choices.

2. Documents, Photos, Music and Videos

Yes, some of these websites do double over for file storage needs. You probably use them every day but never looked at them from this angle.

 - Docs: For your documents, why go any further than the trio of Google Docs, Office Live and Zoho.

 - Pics: For your photos, make your online accounts with Flickr, Snapfish, Picasa, Photobucket or Facebook.

- Tunes: For music, MP3Tunes, File Factory and Deezer sound really cool.

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How to: Install Snow Leopard on Your

With a Hackintosh PC, it’s possible to have the better of two worlds. But with the recent launch of Snow Leopard, the new flavor Mac OS X operating system, how do you upgrade the Hackintosh with a quick and easy install? This installation guide details the building of a Hackintosh system with a Snow Leopard OS from the ground up

This how-to guides you through a simple click and run installer for Snow Leopard.

Essentials:

1. USB thumb drive (minimum size 8GB)
2. A copy of the Snow Leopard Install DVD (Optionally use the use the $29 ‘Upgrade’ disc).
3. A Mac system to create the Snow Leopard DVD image on the thumb drive.
4. The EP45UD3P Snow Leopard installer package.

The installer package makes it relatively easy to setup Snow Leopard as you get to skip the Terminal in favor of a normal install.
The guide details the three steps (and two post-install tweaks) required with easy to follow instructions and videos. The brief steps are –
Step 1: Prepare the thumb drive

A process where you need to format the thumb drive and create the Snow Leopard DVD image on it. The steps are detailed in the earlier Lifehacker post.

Step 2: Configure the BIOS
Some BIOS settings are modified to boot-up the new OS. These screenshots illustrate.

Step 3: Install Snow Leopard

Format the hard drive partition which will hold the installed OS. Installation is dead simple with the thumb drive and the installer package.

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Absolutely Epic Xbox to Mac Transformation

This exceptional mod uses the shell of an old Xbox to house stunning new hardware.  While Macs have that sleek, sexy feel, when they’re priced at $4500 that feeling fades quickly.

  So instead of buying a super expensive Mac, learn how to build your own for under $1500.  The most stunning part of the project isn’t the concept, it’s the detailed, superb build video posted below.  Watch, learn, and enjoy.

The specs on the finished machine:

• 2.93Ghz Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550S processor
• NVIDIA Geforce 9800 GT graphics card
• 8GB of RAM
• 16GB solid state drive
• Four traditional hard drives – (Windows 7, Snow Leopard, and two 500GB 7,200 RPM drives for video editing)

Again, the video speaks for itself: A superb project with a fantastic result.  Check out more Mac hacks, iPhone hacks, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, this took 35-40 hours and 2 months to complete.

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Stylish DIY Desktop Speaker Build

These Apple-inspired desktop speakers are custom designed from the ground up.  The speaker enclosures are primed, painted, and polished with a sleek aluminum hued finish. Apart from the smooth finish, the black Plexiglass front and rear is what really makes these speakers stand out.

The modder has used the 50 Watt Dayton amplifier to power 2 desktop speakers, a 300W Bash Subwoofer, and a Dayton Neodymium Tweeter in his setup.

You may need a CNC machine to help with the precise plotting and cutting. But with the help of the discussion thread on the project and parts list, you should be well on your way building your own DIY speaker system.

read the rest of article...

DIY Telepresence Robotics – Mobile Video Chat

Sparky Jr is a homebuilt robot from basic hardware and leftover materials that acts as a mobile video telepresence robot. It has a forward mounted screen and webcam so you can chat as well as WiFi and computer hardware to enable the communication.

 The hardware needed to build Sparky Jr is pretty straight forward. An old Mac computer, 7” VGA screen, communication hardware such as the webcam, and a roomba vacuum cleaner.   Sparky can be driven with WASD from a computer keyboard or it can be programmed to respond to a video game controller.  All of the software and instructions needed to build Sparky Jr. are included in the guide and can be downloaded to your computer.

 The site itself covers the hobby of creating Sparkies around the world. The homepage is full of conferences, demonstrations and conventions where people show off their Sparky creations. Many heavily mod the original and come up with something truly unique like the ones above.  You can ‘add a blog post’ to the homepage yourself to post pictures of your Sparky and describe how you built it. There is also a discussion forum.

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