Mike Davidson hacks his myspace page to (_gasp_) look decent.
Many MySpace outsiders knock the service because its garish appearance and overall clunkiness overshadow anything good that may be underneath.
I’m going to say that’s a pretty damn good reason not to use the thing. But I might just have to make a profile and take it out for a spin sometime this summer.
Make it work well from 60 feet away from the receiver!? Not particularly hard or invasive, either.
Neat css hack to disable advanced styles in IE, done and now this all looks presentable to windows folk IE users.
Viral myspace hack – embed javascript so that it embeds itself in the pages of those who view your profile. Make the js do cool things like make you everyone’s hero. 20 hours and 1,000,000 people get infected. But myspace sucks.
Programming can give us both intellectual and emotional satisfaction, because it is a real achievement to master complexity and to establish a system of consistent rules. Andrei Ershov
To be a hacker, you have to develop some of these attitudes. But copping an attitude alone won’t make you a hacker, any more than it will make you a champion athlete or a rock star. Becoming a hacker will take intelligence, practice, dedication, and hard work.
Work as intensely as you play and play as intensely as you work. For true hackers, the boundaries between “play”, “work”, “science” and “art” all tend to disappear, or to merge into a high-level creative playfulness.
Find something to hack, and hack it.
I’m stuck at Logan Airport in Boston, without even a book. Paying $8 for internet sucks, especially when your just at the airport for a few hours. Thank god, whoever manages the wifi login/pay system left a backdoor:
go to https://nomadprime.subscribe.loganwifi.com:1112/, after having connected to the wifi network.
Click around until you find the screen that lets a new user sign up, click that screen, and it will say “free internet.” This isn’t verbatim because after you get past the payment on whatever access point is nearest to you you cannot go back, and I can’t exactly remember what buttons I pressed.
But my flight home has been delayed due to weather, and I’ve hardly even noticed. Wifi rules.
Dale Dougherty (ed)
Great magazine, good read. I felt like this one was longer then the last two, and it is. By two pages. Needle in a haystack, huh? Just margin notes and page references to things I found interesting.
A few of the programs here look fascinating, particularly these:
And lots of others.
Change a stoplight from red to green with the walk button:
The most popular hack, which works on most models, is the “Instant Walk.” Three short clicks, followed by two long, one short, two long, and three short; turn any crosswalk signal from “don’t walk” to “walk” with a matching change in the traffic signals.
How to build a live picture frame out of an old laptop. I have an old laptop, and this would sure be a cool project for it.
Instead of trying to brute force a password on the fly, do it from a table of pregenerated hashes.
Some ready to work lanmanager and md5 tables are demonstrated in Rainbow Table section. One interesting stuff among them is the lm #6 table, with which we can break any windows password up to 14 characters in a few minutes.
Uh oh. A table made up of all standard keys, limited to 14 character passwords, takes quite awhile to generate (and weighs 64GB), but can crack 99.9% of windows passwords within a few minutes (text and video to prove it).
I want to learn how to sew, but my mom’s 70s era behemoth is on the fritz and doesn’t have a manual for me to use. I guess I’m just window shopping, but hey.
I’m looking to try and switch to firefox now that it’s summer and I’ve got lots of time. I want to set the thing up real well, and curb safari for at least a week to really evaluate firefox. I need some good tips.
Mark Fraudenfenlder
Another well done issue, even if I probably won’t make anything from it for awhile, its real fun to read through.
Bluebox with your iPod (or computer, cellphone, over VoIP even). also
What you get when you let python hackers loose on a mobile paltform: some cool shit. I just wish I had a sweet series 60 phone.
Also: series60 snippets
I’ve been meaning to take apart my alarm clock for a few months now (I wanted to make it sensitive to light, and wake me up gradually as the sun comes in the room) but I don’t have any screwdrivers that fit into it to get the screws out. Here’s another really cool clock idea.
Sweet IRC hacking episode.
iTunes power user skillz:
My music collection is far larger than my Powerbook or iPod can accommodate, so my encoded selection rotates as new and revived interests push other things out of the active 20GB. Much of the time I use iTunes in Browse mode, listening to individual whole albums in the same way I would have pre-shuffle-era. But increasingly, and especially during periods when my listening isn’t so dominated by new releases, I also use iTunes’ Party Shuffle mode, fed by a Smart Playlist that filters out non-music genres, cuts out tracks that are too short (<1:30) or too long (>5:22) for my shuffle attention-span, and via another playlist reference excludes anything that has been played recently (i.e., in the last two weeks, or the last 10 hours of music, whichever list is shorter). If I’m in an especially random mood, I have an Applescript that goes through the upcoming Party Shuffle selections and eliminates repetition of artists.
Although on very rare occassions I do rate tracks manually, for the most part I find that it is more effective to treat the rating as a temporary variable representing my actual behavior towards the track, instead of an attempt to measure my subjective assessment directly. In my case, the rules are approximately these (I’ve left out some of the more logistical obscurities):
I love how concrete this is. I should do it like this, and maybe rate the song in the comments subjectively.
Automated payment of artists who’s work was downloaded, but not paid for. Sweet script to do it all without lifting a finger.
I
Blow the minds of college kids next time your frat house hosts a kegger. Real fun looking.
Paul Graham comes out with a program to fund startups – looks cool, but I don’t think I could do it this summer. Sounds like it would rock though!
Another set of notes from a different session at etech, Bits & Atoms.
[KEY POINT] there’s not just a digital divide, there’s something much bbigger. there’s an instrumentation and fabrication divide. computation isn’t enough. you need to measure and modify the world.
How a college student hacked past google prints page limit for viewing scanned books, and wrote a program to spit out pdf’s of them! Unfortunately he didn’t release the source code (just a few hints), and apparently google now discriminates against his name. Wheee…
Hack up the new powerbooks accelerometers, to do cool stuff with your software! This could turn into some real fun.
I want to set this up here at textdrive, but I’m not quite smart enough yet. I’ll keep working though!