palegray.net writes "Scientists have discovered new meaning behind the functions of the Antikythera Mechanism, which has been referred to as the oldest known analog computing device. In addition to providing a means to calculate the dates for solar eclipses, the device apparently tracked the four-year cycles of the Olympiad. From the New York Times article: 'Only now, applying high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography, have experts been able to decipher inscriptions and reconstruct functions of the bronze gears on the mechanism. The latest research has revealed details of dials on the instrument's back side, including the names of all 12 months of an ancient calendar.'"

Solderingfool writes "MAKE Magazine's Phil Torrone and open source hardware hacker Ladyada from Adafruit Industries have a new video series called 'Citizen Engineer.' In the first video they show how a SIM card works, then build a SIM card reader which could be used to clone a SIM card. They also show how to use an old payphone as a regular home phone, later with coins, and for their final hack — how to 'Redbox' it. They released all the projects as open source, and the video is well produced."

lindik writes "As part of their research efforts aimed at building real-time human-level artificial vision systems inspired by the brain, MIT graduate student Nicolas Pinto and principal investigators David Cox (Rowland Institute at Harvard) and James DiCarlo (McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT) recently assembled an impressive 16-GPU 'monster' composed of 8x9800gx2s donated by NVIDIA. The high-throughput method they promote can also use other ubiquitous technologies like IBM's Cell Broadband Engine processor (included in Sony's Playstation 3) or Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing services. Interestingly, the team is also involved in the PetaVision project on the Roadrunner, the world's fastest supercomputer."

Barence sends along PcPro coverage of the second crash of London's Oyster card billing system in two weeks. Transport for London was forced to open the gates and allow free travel for all. "There is currently a technical problem with Oyster readers at London Underground stations which is affecting Oyster pay as you go cards only," explains the TfL website. This follows the first crash two weeks ago, which left 65,000 Oyster cards permanently corrupted. Speculation is increasing that the crashes may be related to the hacking of the Oyster card system by Dutch researchers from Radboud University, though TfL denies any link. Plans to publish details of the hack were briefly halted when the makers of the chip used in the system sued the group, although a judge ruled earlier this week that the researchers could go ahead. During the court action, details briefly leaked on website Wikileaks.

An anonymous reader writes "Clove 2 is a bluetooth dataglove used for one-handed typing. It uses a 31-combination finger-chording design with three modes to allow every key on a standard keyboard to be typed with minimal effort. The bluetooth functionality removes the need to tether it to a computer, and since it profiles as a standard HID Keyboard, a simple translation layer to perform key remapping, sticky modifiers, and mode switching is the only software required. It consists of three components: the glove itself, the bluetooth module, and a custom charger for the Bluetooth module. Video, pictures, and full plans and schematics on the project page." From that page: "Please be advised that the Clove 2 Bluetooth Dataglove is a personal project, not a commercial offering." I hope that gets corrected at some point!

Radio Statler! writes "This weekend marks 2600's last Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. For those of you that can't make it this weekend, Radio Statler! will be streaming live from the event the whole weekend. There will be simulcasted talks, interviews with speakers and important guests, and music 24 hours a day for the duration of the con. Listeners can request music or submit questions by phone or IRC." The conference schedule (PDF) is available if you're curious about a particular seminar, though not all of them will be broadcast. CNet will be running some related stories about presentations from the conference. So far, they've written about a hacking how-to presentation. We briefly discussed the seventh and final HOPE conference last month.

An anonymous reader writes "I have some older computer equipment at work that I want to re-purpose as application appliances. The machines will sit, unpowered, until needed, then powered up. No way around the 'sitting powered off' — company directive. What is the quickest-booting OS I could use for them? I know about LinuxBIOS, but that would require new hardware, which does not go along which the re-purposing theme. Some of them do not need to be connected to a network, so an old version of Linux or Windows 98 are possible. DOS is too old to consider. So what are my options?"

KentuckyFC writes "Liquid mirror telescopes start life as a puddle of mercury in a bowl. Set the bowl spinning and the mercury spreads out in a thin film giving the surface an almost perfect mirror finish. But these telescopes have two important limitations. First, they can only point straight up since tilting the mirror spills the mercury. And second, they cannot be made adaptive to correct for any blurring introduced by the Earth's atmosphere. But liquid mirror telescopes look set for an upgrade thanks to the work of a group of Canadian researchers. Their technique is to change the shape of the liquid mirror using powerful electromagnets. They use a ferromagnetic fluid of iron nanoparticles in oil instead of mercury which is too dense to be easily manipulated in this way. The work is just proof of principle at this stage but the idea is to use magnets to correct for the usual range of optical aberrations that telescopes have to deal with (abstract). And also to allow a liquid telescope to be tilted by using oil that is much more viscous than mercury and correcting any periodic deformation in the fluid that tilting might cause."

Croakyvoice writes "Waninkoko has released the world's first custom firmware for the Nintendo Wii, which is installed using the twilight hack; among its features is the ability to allow writeable DVDs to be read in emulators. From the readme: 'The Custom Firmware installs as IOS249 and it does not modify any other IOS so it is secure to install and has been made to be used ONLY with homebrew software. This is a custom IOS, an IOS modified to add some new features not available in the official IOS.'"

An anonymous reader writes "This piece is described in one of the comments on it as 'a little piece of genius'... and I have to agree! Although Peter Cochrane seems a bit of a crack pot, the ways that he comes up with to get connected when he's out of range in the sticks are pure genius and he makes them appear really simple! Think old satellite dishes, USB dongles and plastic bags and you'd be on the right tracks to upping wi-fi signal by 4 bars." A perfect excuse to link to one of my favorite sites, if you want more details and photos on similar jury-rigged long-distance connections. However, your meterage may vary — I've found USB Wi-Fi devices to be pretty fickle under Linux, with some distros working way better than others.

ya really writes "My family has one of those BUDs (Big Ugly Dishes) sitting in their back yard still. The other day they asked me if I would take it apart for them. Aside from simply recycling it, I was wondering if there are any alternatives for its use. It was one of the last made before DirectTV and Dish took over satellite broadcasting, and even has a digital receiver. I'd say it was made around 1996."

Anomalyst writes "In his quest to create an open source video camera, Andrey Filippov of elphel.com has determined that most Compact Flash devices, although claiming to be DMA capable, do not perform Direct Memory Access transfers correctly. This means successful movement of data to and from the device takes much more time with DMA disabled." The culprit appears to be the controller chip packaged with most of the CF cards Filippov tried. We last visited Elphel and their work on open source digital cameras in 2002. Filippov gave a Tech Talk at Google last year.

dch24 was one of many who noted that the iPhone 2.0 software has already been unlocked writes "If you were wondering how I was doing push email tests on iPhone OS 2.0 and Vodafone UK, this is the reason why. The code wizard commandos at the iPhone Dev Team have been working on this non-stop since the early days of beta testing. In fact, I had iPhone OS 2.0 running on my iPhone since last week. That was version 5A345, two below 5A347, but identical in functionality." Still no word on an iPhone 3G crack.

AnneWoahHickey writes "While the State of California was harassing personalized genomics companies, and hindering the development of personalized medicine, Wired was preparing a guide to genetic testing. It explains how to make sense of the massive sets of raw data offered by 23andMe or deCODEme, and a way to check yourself for genetic abnormalities that are not covered by microarray tests. Facing a medical community that is fiercely resistant to change, the fate of personalized medicine is truly in the hands of consumers."

Leif_Bloomquist writes "The world's first Commodore 64 LAN party was held at the Cincinnati Commodore Computer Club 2008 Expo last weekend, where the new multiplayer C64 game NetRacer was unveiled. The setup consists of up to eight Commodore 64s with Ethernet cartridges and a central server written in Java running on a PC. The game is also playable over the Internet."

ancientribe writes "A researcher performing social-engineering exploits on behalf of several US banks and other firms in the past year has 'stolen' thousands of identities with a 100 percent success rate. He and his team have posed as investigators for the FDIC (among other things), and numerous times have literally been able to walk out the door with pilfered identities. The reason: organizations are typically so focused on online ID theft that they've forgotten how easy it is for a criminal to socially engineer his way into a bank branch or office and physically hack it."

I'm part of my schools IGVC team, and we're upgrading our bot's computer to an onboard mini-itx. Most of the access to the box is gonna be through ssh, but I want a terminal I can just mount on the bot for convenience. Bidding on a psOne LCD already, but what are some good options if that doesn't pan out? I want to keep it as cheap as possible and small (in the 5-7 inch range). I haven't found any good guides to modding a digital photo frame or portable DVD player, but I'm probably just not looking in the right places.

An anonymous reader submits news of Netgear's release of the "open source Wireless-G Router (model WGR614L), enabling Linux developers and enthusiasts to create firmware for specialized applications, and supported by a dedicated open source community. The router supports the most popular open source firmware; Tomato and DD-WRT are available on WGR614L, making it easier for users to develop a wide variety of applications. The router is targeted at people who want custom firmware on their router without worrying about issues, and enjoy the benefits of having an open source wireless router."

stress_life writes "Following controversial allegations that Nvidia is cheating in 3DMark Vantage and Unreal Tournament 3 benchmarks, executives from Futuremark and Epic moved forward to clean any confusion. However, the game was not over — enthusiasts from Israel ported PhysX middleware to run on ATI Radeon cards, achieving remarkable performance. Owners of ATI Radeon cards will be able to play PhysX games as well, such as Ghost Recon 2 and already mentioned Unreal Tournament 3."

LinucksGirl writes "In this article Terra Soft show you how to configure and encrypt, step-by-step, the built-in Wi-Fi network that comes with the Cell Broadband Engine-based Sony PlayStation 3. And, as a little bonus, get 16 quick steps that explain how to switch from a wireless network back to a wired network on the PS3."