fredag 24. september 2010

Hacking in French

A GANG of thieves armed with a powerful vacuum cleaner that sucks cash from supermarket safes has struck for the FIFTEENTH time in France.

The burglars broke into their latest store near Paris and drilled a hole in the "pneumatic tube" that siphons money from the checkout to the strong-room.

They then sucked rolls of cash totalling £60,000 from the safe without even having to break its lock.

Police said the gang — dubbed the Vacuum Burglars — always raid Monoprix supermarkets and have hit 15 of the stores branches around Paris in the past four years.

A spokesman added: "They spotted a weakness in the company's security system and have been exploiting it ever since.

"Since 2006 they have stolen more than 500,000 euros and caused damage to alarm systems and other property totalling thousands more.

"It is clearly time Monoprix addressed this loophole and changed the way it guards its money."

In the latest raid on Monday, the burglars broke into the shop through an emergency exit door armed with a large drill and a vacuum cleaner, he said.

They were caught on CCTV but were all wearing balaclavas and could not be identified, the spokesman said.

Monoprix said it had no comment on the burglaries.

torsdag 23. september 2010

The monome


A really cool project to dive into, even for a persistent beginner, is the monome. You can start with a rubber button kit from sparkfun, or find your own special way. Don't fee like building it, you can buy it from monome.org.

A monome is a musical instrument, or a sequencer, or both -all rolled into one. You can even fiddle with the firmware, and make it do whatever. A launchpad controller for your intercontinental missiles perhaps, or maybe a tetris game.

onsdag 22. september 2010

Behind the name

At first Shigeru Miyamoto called his new creation "Mr. Video." Fortunately, the name was scratched before the game was released to Japanese arcades , where it was launched under the name "Jumpman". This name did not catch tho. Fate would have it that a Nintendo employee in the United States ended up in trouble with a landlord by the name of Mario Segal. One day Mario Segal stormed into an official Nintendo meeting and demanded the the month's rent from the employee. The story of the difficult landlord circulated in Nintendo system, et voila, the "Jumpman" was renamed "Mario".

DIY 8bit gaming



In tribute to Marios anniversary today, RavingRobot brings an open source 8bit gaming project. The Uzebox. Based on an ATmega644 microcontroller, with 4k of RAM. You can build the hardware yourself, or you can buy a kit.

His 25th birtday


Yupp. It's the 25th anniversary of Mario! I will selebrate this with quite a lot of Super Mario playing on my DS, and maybe I'll dig up some DIY 8bit gaming here on RavingRobot. Play som Mario, and check back later.

tirsdag 21. september 2010

Beautiful code

I find this piece of coding quite beautiful:
:(){ :|:& };:
Breakdown:
:() //defines ":" as a callable object
{ //that does the following
: //Calls itself
|:& //and pipes itself to yet another instance of itself.
}; // Into the sunset.
: //GO

It results in a wonderful exponentially expanding tree of ":"s in your ram.

This my friends is how you make a logic bomb. Try and type it at your shell prompt -I dare you.

VCI-100 firmware mod


A member of the Dj TechTools community has reverse engineered the VCI-100 firmware to produce a brand new 1.4 version that adds a number of new features and bug fixes including high resolution jog wheels and pitch faders. Just when you thought the VCI-100 might finally be on its way out- boom! Dj TechTools comes back with something cooler. Continue reading for a full list of improvements, and a video demonstrating a easter egg in 1.4- Disco mode!

Read all about it, and get the FW:
http://www.djtechtools.com/2010/09/19/brand-new-vci-100-firmware-1-4-hd-updat/

FDA approves stent stunt

MINNEAPOLIS – Sept. 20, 2010 – Delivering another innovation for interventional cardiology, Medtronic, Inc. (NYSE: MDT), announced today the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the Integrity Coronary Stent System. The new platform for Medtronic’s coronary stents, including the Integrity bare-metal stent, is based on an advance in biomedical engineering called continuous sinusoid technology that enables the exploration of other breakthrough device concepts such as a polymer-free drug-filled stent.

Now available in the United States, the Integrity Coronary Stent System has been shown in bench testing and in blinded in vivo physician assessment studies to be highly deliverable. In this context, deliverability relates to the ability of the device to traverse the patient’s vasculature and reach the narrowed heart artery targeted for treatment.

mandag 20. september 2010

To the beat yall -C'mon


"This is an illustration of how brain rhythms organize distributed groups of neurons into functional cell assemblies. The colors represent different cell assemblies. Neurons in widely separated brain areas often need to work together without interfering with other, spatially overlapping groups. Each assembly is sensitive to different frequencies, producing independent patterns of coordinated neural activity, depicted as color traces to the right of each network. Credit: Ryan Canolty, UC Berkeley"

Read All about it over at http://www.physorg.com/news204220208.html

The #1 wonder

This is where it all starts, now that all else has played out. Grab the tech before it grabs you. Write programs, compile kernels, flash microcontrolers and drink beer. DOOEET FAGGOT!