In the tech sense- what is your favorite way that someone has used systems in unintended ways to do something cool?
I like the one where a guy used a wiimote for head tracking.
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Maybe the blog that is hosted on a Nintendo Wii. It’s not the most practical hack but I find console modding really neat and the “because I can” style projects are particularly fascinating to me.
Some other favorite hacks are a bit more practical and have to do with extending the life of existing products. RebbleOS, for example, is an open source firmware that took off after Pebble shutdown following their acquisition by FitBit in 2016. It’s allowed people to continue using their e-ink Pebble watches largely unchanged. They can still do things like fetch the weather and voice dictation.
Some other favorite hacks are a bit more practical and have to do with extending the life of existing products.
Those are some of mine, too. Even a 15 year old phone still has some cool tech on it that is more useful than e-waste.
I hacked my CPAP. I removed the cancer causing material and did work getting the software in a better state. Also removed the mobile chip that communicates with the original company. Fun times.
Phreaky
Wikipedia page for those that want to learn about this
Swap Magic case mod for the PS2 made me feel like a wizard when I was 12.
Someone else? Anything Posy or Benn Jordan put out. They are audio visual technomancers bending light and sound to their will.
While it wasn’t unintended, the Atari 2600 only had 39 bits of memory to draw 160x192 graphics to the screen. It accomplished that task using the fact that CRT screens displayed images by rapidly moving a beam of light across the screen. Knowing the beam could only be in one spot at any time, the Atari system held just enough space in memory to draw 20 pixels. As the beam moved across the screen, the system updated the colour of the next pixels immediately before they needed to be drawn in a method that became known as Racing the beam.
It was built that way because having enough memory to draw the entire screen at once would have made the Atari 2600 prohibitively expensive for consumers.
Almost, but close enough. It had hardware to draw background solid blocks, two one-pixel dots and two sprites that had width but interestingly no height. The background was repeated or mirrored by hardware registers so if you wanted different patterns on left and right half of the screen, you need to switch the correct values at the right time at every line. Any positing of graphics would be in X position only so you’d have to do it by the line when the raster hit it. It had no interrupts except that you could forcibly wait for next frame to render and then you keep track of the clock cycles to render each line. And it has 128 bytes of RAM, less than the number of characters in this comment, while games were 1,2 or 4 KB on ROM cartridges, needless to say very efficiently coded directly in 6502 machine code. Oh, and the sound chip had no chromatic division of frequencies but weird intervals that aren’t even close to any scale we know. Yet programmers managed to create great games on the platform. It’s absolutely crazy.
We had big powerful workstation at work but we were denied to heat up the temperature in winter to save electricity bill. So we end up running useless heavy computation on our machines.
I worked in a building designed to be heated by that generated from the mainframe in the basement.
…then computers got smaller ;-)
BOINC would combine the useful with the pleasant.
I know a guy that took a security camera and hooked it up to watch his lawnmower, which is set to automatically mow a certain area as guided by the camera.
So he just hits a button and watches his lawn get mowed.
I use a system of cameras and QR codes printed onto cardboard that I wear on my wrists, waist and ankles to achieve full body tracking in VR using what I had on-hand without buying anything extra for it. All possible because of the free and open source Apriltag software that does all the actual tracking.
On a related note for anyone interested there are a lot of programs out there for using other peripherals such as webcams, Xbox 360 Kinects, PSVR cameras and headsets, and so on for VR on PC.
iVRy Driver and Driver4VR are some pretty popular paid programs on Steam that assist with the setup process.
/r/PSVRHack is neat if you are in that ecosystem.
woah, that sounds ingenious! I’m gonna have to make a note of that for the day that I finally pick up a headset.
So it’s like a really simple motion capture because it sees the QR codes and knows where your left arm is sticking?
Could it be that basic and effective?
It’s probably not as good as, like, the Pico trackers or other expensive 3rd party units you wear, but it’s been perfectly functional for me. It tracks better than the headset itself does my bare hands through its sensor array.
I have nothing else to compare it to, though, because I am cheap and found this before breaking down and just buying something 🤣
Sounds like an ingenious way to avoid shelling out a fat wad of cash. Well done!
One of my personal favorites is the casino that got hacked through a wireless fishtank thermometer. Hackers managed to find the high roller databases. Segment your networks, people.
Commander Adama tried to warn us.
All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.
so say we all!
SO SAY WE ALL
My first one was psx I found how to play back ups using I the inside of a biro wedged in the lid to hold the lid button down. Pop a demo disc in swap when it stops after the PS1 logo with a backup. My friends at the time were paying for modchips and they would play games in black and white etc. One of those things that make me think I got dumber over time.
Didn’t he end up getting hired to work on Kinect?
