What is Toluu?
Toluu is a free service for sharing the feeds you read and discovering new ones.		 Get Invite

Hackszine.com

O'Reilly's Hacks Series reclaims the term 'hacking' for the good guys--innovators who explore and experiment, unearth shortcuts, create useful tools, and come up with fun things to try on their own


Use Google Maps to view high-res photosToday

gmapcutter_20090106.jpg

In order to present a high resolution map of the entire globe inside an ordinary web browser, programs like Google Maps employ the use of tiles. When the map is prepared, it's rendered out at each available zoom level, and each zoom level is divided up into a number of small 256x256 pixel squares. When the map is viewed in a browser, the map display code takes care of loading in just the tiles that are visible in the current map view, sparing the download time and processing power required to load in the entire world's map imagery.

You can think of the Google Maps display engine as a photo viewer for really, really high res photos.

In fact, you can use the mapping software to display your own high res photography. By tiling different zoom levels of any high resolution photograph, and replacing the default map set with your own custom tiles, you can use the Google Maps interface to zoom and pan any image you like. The UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis created a program called Google Maps Image Cutter that makes this process very easy:

The Google Maps Image Cutter takes a large image and cuts it into lots of 256x256 pixel images. At the top level there is only one 256 pixel square which is a smaller copy of the original image. At the next level, there are four 256 pixel squ

Take a 6-month exposure photoYesterday

6monthpinhole_20090105.jpg

Pocket-Sized sent in a link to this article about the photography of Justin Quinnell. Using a pinhole camera made from an aluminum can, Justin was able to take super-long exposure, 160 degree angle photos over a 6 month period. The photo above was exposed from the 2007 winter solstice to the following summer solstice.

In the photos, you can clearly see the path taken by the sun each day, marking the passage of time. Justin has dedicated the project to his father, who passed away on the 116th sunrise that was captured.

You can make your own pinhole camera to take long exposure shots like this. Justin put together a howto that documents his own method. The hardest part is finding a good solid place to mount the camera where it won't be disturbed for months at a time.

One interesting thing that he mentions is scanning the film at high-res without even developing it. I've never heard of doing this, but I presume that if it works, it's a one time shot. Does anyone have experience with this that would care to comment?

Pinhole Photography By Justin

BaR2D2 - mobile droid bartenderJanuary 5

bar2d2_20090104.jpg

After a long day on Tatooine fighting off Sandpeople and haggling over the price of power converters, Obi-Wan and Luke Skywalker walk into a droid...

BaR2D2 is a radio-controlled, mobile bar that features a motorized beer elevator, motorized ice/mixer drawer, six-bottle shot dispenser, and sound activated neon lighting. The robot is driveable so you can take the party on the road! It was created in my garage using standard hand/power tools and readily available parts and materials.

BaR2D2's creator, Jamie Price, sent us a link that includes all the construction details, as well as a few photos of the droid with C3PO, R2, Vader, and some Stormtroopers at the Dragon*con convention.

Build A Mobile Bar - BaR2D2


Wikipedia over DNSJanuary 4

David Leadbeater created a service that distributes Wikipedia entries over DNS using TXT records. Simply looking up a TXT record for any subdomain of his service will pull a summary of the Wikipedia entry for the title of the same name.

I had written some code to take wikipedia articles and summarise them. I wanted to offer this for use in various places, now the obvious way to offer it is just a web service (via REST, SOAP, etc), but that's boring and I had a cunning plan. Why not offer it over DNS - it is basically a huge associative array and DNS is designed for this stuff.


So I wrote a little nameserver which returns the results as TXT records. There are some obvious limitations for example responses are limited to around 430 bytes (it only does UDP). It has advantages too, it gets cached at your nameserver and it is also faster than HTTP (no need to setup a TCP session).

Here's an example command line entry that will pull a summary of the Hack article in Wikipedia:

host -t txt hack.wp.dg.cx

hack.wp.dg.cx descriptive text "Hack may refer to: Hack (technology), a term used in the technology and computer science fields, Hack (masonry), a row of stacked unfired bricks protected from the rain, Hack writer, a writer who is paid to write low-quality, quickly put-together articles" " or books, Hack and slash, a genre of video game or a type of gameplay, Life hack, productivity techniques used by... http:/


iPhone 3G software unlockDecember 31 2008

The friendly iPhone Dev Team hackers have been hard at work over the holidays and have promised to release the iPhone 3G software unlocking utility, called yellowsn0w, sometime tomorrow for New Year's Eve.

A few details from the iPhone Dev Team blog:

We have been working hard on a few other things. The main one being the 3G unlock codenamed "yellowsn0w". This is now completed and is currently being packaged into a user-friendly application with the simplicity that you see in QuickPwn or BootNeuter.

  • The target release date for the unlock is New Year's Eve 2008.
  • This unlock method is available to iPhone 3Gs that have 2.11.07 baseband or earlier, we did warn you.
  • You can tell what version baseband you have by going to Settings->General->About->Modem Firmware
  • The unlock requires a jailbroken 3G iPhone. It'll be installable via Cydia and so it doesn't matter if you have a Mac or PC.
  • Please refrain from updating your baseband, regardless of what version you're at.
  • We'll have complete directions on New Year's Eve.
  • We'll stream a live demo of the unlock before Christmas (see the update at the end of this post)

The software exists, as you can see from the video above, which was released last week, so I'm pretty confident we'll see the release as promised. From what I understand, the software is non-invasive and needs to be run every time the phone