DIY iPod battery packs!

One of the biggest complaints… well, the only complaint about the iPods is their battery life. Sure we all want the battery to last 100+ hours between recharges, but that’s not going to happen.

However, there are battery packs on the market. I was in Walmart the other day and they had the Belkin 4AA battery pack on clearance for like 20 bucks. It claims to give you 8-16 extra hours. I went with one from Staples, a 9v model which claims 4-8.

But you can also just make your own for under 10 bucks.

I found this website My Homemade iPod Battery Pack which tells you how to do it. He’s also got a ton of references to other diy projects. I really like his Band-Aid battery pack. Very nice.

But got to say my favorite is the Atari battery pack.

Depending on the design, you can get away with spending as little as say 10 bucks (price of a firewire connector, two 9v and two AA’s), or you could get really crazy with regulators and various other things.

The hidden cost is the price of an iPod… say if you end up doing a poor soldering job and have to purchase a new one. But it seems pretty straightforward.

So do-it-yourself battery packs, starting at bucks to a few hundred.

Robot’s that reproduce!

Simple but seminal: Cornell researchers build a robot that can reproduce

Now this was sort of a cool article. As an electrical engineer, I’m always interested in electronic gizmos.

I’ve designed numerous things in the past and what gets me is the idea of something healing itself, or reproducing itself. Think about it. What if your computer could “heal” itself after a power surge fried it? That would be cool. Or what if, when Microsoft releases a new operating system, your computer could just evolve to fit the new conditions?

However, what these Cornell students did isn’t really true “reproduction”. Their little robot is designed to start with predesigned modules to which other predesigned modules are then added. It reproduces by using these building blocks.

It doesn’t start with nothing and then design the building block.

One thing I find fascinating as an engineer is that evolution says life started from nothing and through random processes everything eventually came together. As a designer, I know that if you start with nothing and do nothing then what you end up with is a big pile of nothing.

When I design something, I start with something, then manipulate that something into something else.

As a designer I’m fascinated with my dog. I mean, she moves fluidly (no jerkiness like robots), she can reproduce (if we hadn’t had her fixed), she can process things (when I say “bunny” she runs to the door to see if there’s a rabbit out there), she powers herself (with food and water), she can heal herself, and she can respond to things very quickly.

I can’t imagine the amount of code I’d have to write merely to get the firmware responses down – much less the hardware to respond fluidly and that could heal itself or adapt to changes in the environment.

So from a purely engineering stand point, I don’t really buy into the whole blind luck of evolution. And in a previous post (Intelligent Design article), I pointed to a website where people with PhD’s in biology don’t buy into evolution either.

But still, those little robots are cool.

Hack the web: Bookmarklets

Ever visit a page and the web designer was probably smoking crack because the text colors they used matched perfectly with the background color which makes the webpage almost completely unreadable? How about visiting a page with a ton of ads all over the place?

We all have our annoyances while surfing the web, so the only thing you can do is… hack the web!

Maybe you’re thinking “I’m just a normal person, I saw the movie ‘Hackers’ what do I know from hacking the web?” No problem, the solution is a bookmarklet!

What’s a bookmarklet? Well, you know what a bookmark is right? When you find a webpage you like, you bookmark it so you can find it again later. A bookmarklet is like a bookmark but instead of storing a web address, you store some JavaScript code in it.

Don’t worry what JavaScript is, it’s just a nice little thing.

What a bookmarklet will do is give you the ability to change a webpage’s appearance.

trylookinghere.com has an AutoFill Anonymous function that will fill in every field with the word anonymous. Pretty handy for those websites that make you register all the time.

Jesse's Bookmarklets site has a lot of really useful bookmarklets – the Zap functions are very nice. Zap ads, colors, whatever. Makes checking your yahoo mail (if you still have a yahoo account you really should try gmail) nice.

SubSimple has some nice bookmarklets particularly the layout bookmarklets. You can remove ads, you can allow right-click for those websites that disable this mouse function.

For futher information visit Introduction to bookmarklets By Simon Willison

All you have to do to install a bookmarklet is to click on it and hold down your mouse button and then drag it up to your toolbar. Any changes the bookmarklet does can be reversed simply by hitting refresh! Have fun!

A billion miles to the gallon

Scientists recently calculated that "If a car were as fuel efficient as the black holes, it would travel more than 1 billion miles on one gallon (3.8 litres) of petrol. This is because black holes are the most fuel efficient engines in the universe, the US space agency NASA said on Monday." (Black holes show how to be fuel efficient)

Of course, they are The Most Descructive engines in the universe too. You get in a head on crash with someone driving the Black Hole-mobile, by the time the air bags go off, the world will be sucked into an ever widening garbage disposal from which even light cannot escape. How do you insure a car like that? I mean, they're having to specially train emergency techs for those hybrid cars, think of the training you'd need for responding to a car that not only destroys the envrionment if it leaks – it freakin destroys the environment, the ozone, the oceans, the land masses and everything everything everything that exists on the planet.

Microsoft IEeeee 7 – 7th’s the charm

Microsoft is coming out with a new web brower. Apparently they recently discovered that Internet Explorer sucks for security. Well, that's a very good thing to know, too bad they didn't figure that out before millions of people got a viruses on their computers.

The primary reason why I switched to Firefox was because it's a lot mo better as far as security. It's like night and day. I haven't had a pop-up while surfing in like forever. Javascript behaves itself, I can block flash, I can surf in style.

Switch back to IE? Not likely.

Microsoft Tries for Safer Surfing

Firefox tips!

You should have Firefox by now. If you don't then you've got to get it. You can get extensions for it, skins for it, it's just the bomb okay?

Multiple pages on load:
You can actually set Firefox up to open multiple pages when it starts up. Just go to Tools->Options->General and for your homepage type in several pages separated by the "|" symbol. For example,

http://bishopbooyah.wordpress.com/|http://mail.google.com|http:…

Jump to address bar
When you're browsing a page and it's type to leave, don't you just hate having to waste all the time moving the mouse up to the address bar? Not any more baby!

ALT-D jumps straight there.

Add the ".com" part of the address quickly
We're all about saving time and effort these days, here's another tip CTRL-Enter will add the "www" and the ".com" for you. This also works in ye olde Internet Explorer.

Just type "google" and "CTRL-Enter" and bam, you're there.

Web Browsing: Firefox baby yeah!

If you don’t know about Firefox yet, then you should go get it. It’s an awesome browser because you can customize it with extensions.

One of the big selling points to me for Firefox was that it had native popup blocking – no more popups! I hate those things. It also gives you control over java and javascript so webpages can’t mess around with your browser. Also makes it harder to install viruses.

Some of my favorite extensions include:

Faster Fox
Supercharge your browser, gives you the option of whether or not you want to play nice while surfing. You can tweak these settings by typing about:config as a web address, but why bother when there’s an extension that will do it all for you? You can set it to courteous mode which will be nice to the webpage you’re browsing. Or you can select turbo charged mode which will basically get in a webpage’s face and say “Gimme your wallet fool!”

Hack your windows address bar!

Hack your windows address toolbarWe all have this address toolbar thing down at the bottom of our windows machines. Most of us don't use it. So why not hack it and make it useful?

If you have a web service you use a lot, you can create a shortcut to that service.

For example, most people use Google to search the internet and Google uses a standard address format to search for things, so you can shortcut that format into the windows address bar.

So open notepad and type (or cut and paste):

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\gg]
@="http://www.google.com/search?q=%s"

Ipod – Totally Wiki’d!

Alright, as if putting a ton of music on your Ipod wasn't enough, you can also play Doom, Pac Man and plenty of other games but this takes the cake:

You can now put Wikipedia on your ipod!

"Encyclopodia is a free software project that brings the Wikipedia, which is one of the largest encyclopedias in the world, to the Apple iPod. Encyclopodia can be installed on iPod genarations one to four, as well as on iPod Minis and Photo iPods."

Visit the website!

Homemade Ipod Dock

This guy has a really neat DIY Ipod dock. I like how he managed to make the dock part of his desk, but I'm not sure about all the glue he used. I'd hate to glue my Ipod to my desk – having to drag your desk around would really suck for portability.

Another DIY Ipod dock is this wooden one. I really like this one since you can stain it. Instead of using glue over everything like the first one, this guy just dremel'ed off the cable barbs.

I think what I'll end up doing is making my own desk and incorporating both ideas. I like the built in dock, but I would like it to be made of wood for stainability.

So it's all good. Booyah.