An anonymous reader pointed us to a story about a battery-powered USB disk enclosure. It operates on AA batteries. It's aluminum, and is sorta meant to offload data from cameras. It's only 2.5 inches, so that's not totally unreasonable, but I'm still struggling a bit with the 'Why' part of the equation.

digrieze writes "Here's a story raising a holiday ruckus. Texas has started providing free Wi-Fi service at state parks, causing friction with the 'get away from it all' crew. Looks like a nice place to vacation to me."

An anonymous reader writes "Those un-employed modem hackers are at it again. The group known as TCNiSO has released a very interesting hardware modification for RCA / Thomson cable modems. The modification is done by grounding the bus clock on the serial EEPROM which throws the device into a diagnostic panic mode. Then by using the debug tools from the embedded console to reprogram the EEPROM, a user can permanently enable a developers menu which gives complete control of the modem, such as modifying the hardware addresses or flashing new firmware. Now if only these guys can figure out how to enable the Bluetooth features on my v710 phone..."

feagle814 writes "I've always wanted to create one of those digital picture frames out of an old laptop, and on the heels of a recent slashdot story, I've written up my Digital Picture Frame project. What's unique about this particular incarnation of the digital picture frame is that mine includes a homebrew remote control recognizer made out of a programmable IC, the Microchip PIC16F628. The article discusses everything from design considerations to custom slideshow software, all the way to final presentation, with lots of photos along the way."

blkmagic writes "I have to say this is probably the most amazing homemade case I've seen. The HyperCube^2 was inspired by Vincenzo Natali's first film, Cube. This is a long article, so here's a link to the gallery of images of the final product. I read about this on CubeOwner.com, a Cube site with a slightly different focus."

chrisleetn writes "I'm contemplating getting Slashdot (Speakeasy) 6Mbps broadband or something similar and offering wireless internet access to my neighborhood. Speakeasy even has a plan to allow this. What should I be aware of as far as legal/business/regulatory implications? I know I need to restrict obvious illegal stuff and probably p2p to be safe, but is the local cable modem company going to come after me for competing with them? Has anyone done this who can offer some insight?"

photojournaliste noted a little story running over on Forbes which kinda looks like their editors read Slashdot. Their Five Gadgets You Can't Buy include a few things you might have seen here, as well as some new custom hardware hacks. If you didn't get it for christmas, maybe one of these will inspire you to build it yourself.

Deven "Epicenter" Gallo writes "I've perfected a process by which to overclock the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) to run games smoother without slowdown. The NES CPU normally runs at 1.79 MHz, I've reached a stable maximum of 4.2 MHz, about a 230% overclock. The games do not run faster than they should, the CPU never overheats, and most games are perfect up to 3.3 MHz!" Here's the guide on how to perform the modification, along with photos and demonstration videos

Hobadee writes "First of all, Happy Christmas and Merry New Year! This year for Christmas, my dad and I decided to give my mom a Linksys WMLS11B. (Radio which can play MP3 streams) Since my mom listens to a lot of international news radio on the Internet, we figured this would be great so that she wouldn't have to sit at the computer all the time. The problem is that most of the stations she listens to are either RealMedia or Windows Audio streams, while the player only supports MP3 streams. (It claims to support WMA, but we haven't had any luck in our fiddling yet.) So here is the question: Would it be possible to get other types of files to play on the device? My idea is to have an intermediate server download, convert to MP3, and re-stream the files, but I'm not sure of the implementation. Would this be easily do-able with something like Icecast and Lame?"

An anonymous reader writes "Recently stories about hybrid HD-DVD and regular DVDs were in the news. This was supposed to be an advantage for HD-DVD in its battle with Blu-Ray. But that advantage will not exist, as according to this story on PhysOrg, the same technology will be available for Blu-Ray. And it is even better than the HD-DVD solution, since instead of two sided media, it uses a triple layer structure on one side (one layer of 33.5GB for Blu-Ray, then two layers for 9GB of dual layer DVD data)"

PingXao writes "Well, if you can't exactly give the Moon you can give the gift of a computer to get you there. Almost a year ago this Slashdot story about the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer referenced a pretty cool Dr. Dobbs Journal article from their History of Computing series. Now there's this guy who built one in his basement! It took him 4 years, $2,980 in cash, 2,500 hours of labor and 15,000 hand-wrapped wire connections with 3,500 feet of wire to build. It might be next Christmas before you could build one of your own to give as a gift, but he promises you can build your own for less and it will be better than his. The perfect gift for the space geek who has everything. This guy is my hero."

scarcrowman writes "This is an interesting article on the projected future of what we call the 'P.C.' It is becoming more 'Personal' than ever."

prostoalex writes "New York Times reviews the digital picture frames available commercially: 'Yes, with the ultimate digital camera accessory: the digital picture frame, a flat-panel screen designed exclusively for showing digital photos. A digital frame can do something no ordinary frame can do: change what's in it at the touch of a button, or even treat you to a slide show. Think of it as a screen saver that doesn't tie up your computer.' For those who would rather build the devices themselves - both Linux Toys and Wi-Fi Toys contain the chapters on creating Linux-based digital picture frames out of old laptops. Channel 9 on Microsoft Developer Network also has a step-by-step walk-through of building a Windows-based digital picture frame."

Solomon writes "TV Tuners for the PC have existed for a long time but with the ever increasing popularity of TiVo-like services and the possibility of replicating such features on your Windows PC with little effort and a small investment, tuners have been getting a lot of attention this year. Today there's three-way shootout posted at TechSpot with products from Digistor, Transcend and a very appealing offer from RTV called the VEG that lets you play consoles in your monitor. Although neither of these devices can match TiVo completely, they do give you a very cheap alternative."

pluke writes "Computer and Video Games reports that Nintendo plans to drop the humble d-pad from its next console along with the classic A and B buttons. Nintendo pioneered the d-pad on its 80's Game & Watch handheld games system."

gavinroy writes "As can be seen at PostgreSQL, the PostgreSQL www team has released the new version of the site sporting a new clean and more professional look. This is hot on the heels of PostgreSQL 8.0 RC2 which includes numerous bug fixes and is one step closer to production ready PostgreSQL on the Win32 platform." Neil Bahroos points out this ZDNet article on the upcoming 8.0 release.

J. Misael G. points out a NewsForge article on recent moves by some database vendors to loudly release (some of) their products as open source, asking the vital question "How much open source beer are these newcomers bringing to the database bash, or are they simply coming in and asking where the cups are?" (Slashdot and NewsForge are both part of OSTG.)

Sebastian writes "C64 DTV has been out for just under a month now and the Modders and Hackers have been hard at work. Here is a website dedicated to C64DTV modding. This one has nice pictures of the inns of C64 DTV and even some easter eggs."

vanyel asks: "Yesterday, my external USB 2.0 drive enclosure finished cooking a 3/4 full 200G drive after its fan quit working who knows how long ago. In the time honored tradition of closing the barn door *after* the horse has wandered away, I'm accelerating my quest for a RAID solution. In particular, I want something that will support 4 SATA drives and has temperature monitoring that doesn't require a particular vendor's RAID card or Windows. Better yet, is there a RAID-5 NAS that isn't in the $4-5000USD price range. Anyone with a better barn door to close this problem with?"

technomegalomaniac writes "This new stylish barebones combo from ASUS (case+motherboard) is going to outdo Apple in 'the way it looks matters' department. Customizable to your heart content, no OS included (obviously, since you need to buy your own hard drive). Comes with 'Instant On' software that lets you play CDs, DVDs and MP3s without entering the primary OS thus bypassing the long boot process. Definitely a living room toy." Doesn't beat Apple hardware in my eyes, but still looks like a nifty box.