Category: classic hacks

If there’s one thing any cat will work for, it’s food. Usually, this just consists of meowing and/or standing on your chest until you give up the goods. [DynamicallyInvokable] has a beautiful cat, Emma, who meows loudly for food at obscene hours of the morning. As she ages, it’s getting harder and more important to […]
There are truisms about dice that you’ve probably already heard: if you have just one of them it’s called a “die”, opposite faces of each die always add up to seven, and those dots that you’re adding together are known as “pips”. But what about the infrared properties of those pips? It turns out they […]
RC cars are a great way to have fun hooning around. There’s plenty of laughs to be had racing your friends in the local grocery store carpark, ideally after hours. [Ivan Miranda] wanted to go in a different direction, however – and that direction was up. (Video embedded after the break.) There are existing toys […]
The Dreamcast was a proud moment for Sega, at least initially, being the first console to launch of a new generation. Unfortunately this didn’t translate into massive sales, and the plug was pulled far earlier than expected. The console retains a dedicated fanbase to this day however, who continue to tinker with the hardware. [DreamcastChannel] […]
Hackers love to measure things, and enjoy monitoring the world around them. Weather stations are a big part of this, and many tinkerers have tried to interface such hardware with varying levels of success. [Ray] is one such individual, and was pleasantly surprised when working on a recent project. Unlike more old-school models, the model […]
With what pinball aficionados pay for the machines they so lovingly restore, it’s hard to imagine that these devices were once built to a price point. They had to make money, and whatever it took to attract attention and separate the customer from their hard-earned coins was usually included in the design. But only up […]
Imagine for a moment that you’ve been tasked with developing a device for interfacing with a global network of interconnected devices. Would you purposely design a spring-loaded dial that can do nothing but switch a single set of contacts on and off from 1 to 10 times? What kind of crazy world would we have […]
DOOM will forever be remembered as one of the founding games of the entire FPS genre. It also stands as a game which has long been a fertile ground for hackers and modders. [Nick Bild] decided to bring gesture control to iD’s classic shooter, courtesy of machine learning. The setup consists of a Jetson Nano […]
The vast majority of cameras will start recording at the press of a button. This is perfectly acceptable behaviour if you wish to film something that hasn’t happened yet. If you want to film something that’s already over, you’re out of luck. [Johan Link] has built a camera designed to do just that, however, and […]
When [Turbo Conquering Mega Eagle] tried lost wax casting, he ended up with a fireball and a galvanizing sense of disappointment. There wasn’t enough heat to get all the wax out, and the paraffin ignited. Though a bit burned by the experience, it didn’t extinguish his desire to do lost wax casting. In a textbook […]