Developages - Development and Technology Blog

The problem with bleeding edge devices is that they quickly become old and irrelevant. Replaced with the latest gizmo, old smart phones and PDAs tend to find their way to a drawer or a landfill after about 2 or 3 years.

It’s not that most of us want a throwaway society. It’s that most of the gadgets we buy are designed to expire, with hardware that cannot be user serviced, batteries that cannot be easily replaced, and with firmware and software stacks that cannot be modified to accommodate the future. Proprietary. Closed. User subjugating. Stupid.

One half of the solution is to choose open hardware and open source whenever you have the choice. The other part of the solution is to hack your closed devices to do your bidding. Thankfully, there are a lot of people working hard to make the latter possible, and you can run Free Software on everything from Palms to iPhones.

We caught this note from Hans-Christoph Steiner on the dorkbot nyc mailng list. He’s currently working on a project called Reware, which is attempting to bring a common hacker-friendly Linux distro to a variety of PDAs:

We’ve been working at Eyebeam since July on making it easy to hack old devices and run new software on them. We now have our first Reware HOWTO video, showing the basics of how to use a Reware image yourself, then it illustrates some of the Pd patches we’ve made.

Coming soon, a image for running Pd, Python, and Lua programs on PDAs, as well as a HOWTO for making Pd patches for 1-5G iPods. The key idea is to turn old PDAs, mobile phones, etc. into something like an Arduino, where you can easily upload your own code to the device.

Currently Reware supports several Palm devices, but with iPods on the radar and a number of Pocket PCs that can run Linux, there’s a lot of potential here. Just think about all those 200-400MHz ARM processors just waiting for something interesting to do.

Reware Wiki - tools to recycle old devices
Reware First Release
Ångström - Linux for devices, including many Palm, Nokia, HTC, and iPaqs

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Original post by Jason Striegel

This Guitar Hero mod posted by Youtube user Egyokeo blew my mind. A MIDI drum kit and some custom software on a PC send button-press input via the Xbox Input Machine (XIM) hardware to an Xbox running Guitar Hero.

Since I injured my middle left finger playing Guitar Hero 2 way too much when it came out, I’ve been dying to get back to playing it. But my finger hasn’t healed. I was holding the neck too tightly on the X-plorer guitar controller and it hurts to bend it anymore. I’ve never had an injury playing the drums, so I thought “wouldn’t it be great to be able to play Guitar Hero on the drums?” So I thought about how that might be accomplished… researched, implemented, borrowed, and here I outline the finished product.

Here’s the whole chain of what’s going on:

1. Me banging on my drumKat MIDI drum pads
2. drumKat MIDI Out to MIDI/USB adapter to PC
3. PC running my own custom MIDI Hero software
4. MIDI Hero calls into XIM which sends input to the Xbox 360 console

To make the songs playable with two-sticked drum input, some of the pads simulate multiple button presses for the 3 note chords and an input buffer on the PC automatically holds all notes until just before sending another hit event. You could tweak the setup to use a MIDI keyboard or even a MIDI guitar.

There are a lot more details on Egyokeo’s site as well as the blog maintained by XIM creator OBsIV. Unfortunately, there are no instructions for actually playing like this. I’m pretty sure it involves secret ninja stuff.

MIDI Hero: Play Rhythm Games using any MIDI Instrument
Building your own Xbox 360 Input Machine (XIM)

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Original post by Jason Striegel

The iPhone dev team, hard at work as usual, announced a successful iPhone Linux port today. It’s still at a very early stage, but the kernel boots on first and second generation iPhones and the first generation iPod touch. A framebuffer driver and a working Busybox installation point to an exciting open source future:

What we have:

- Framebuffer driver
- Serial driver
- Serial over USB driver
- Interrupts, MMU, clock, etc.

What we have in openiboot (but hasn’t been ported yet):

- Read-only support for the NAND

What we don’t have (yet!):

- Write support for the NAND
- Wireless networking
- Touchscreen
- Sound
- Accelerometer
- Baseband support

If you’re a Linux hacker and want to pitch in with the porting process, hop on the #iphonelinux IRC channel at irc.os⼶.hu.

iPhone Linux - Official Announcement

It’s just a demo at this point, but if you can’t wait to see this running on your own phone, here’s what you need:
Installation Instructions
iphonelinux-demo.tar.gz

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Original post by Jason Striegel

Braden Stadlman wrote in with a link to the Springatron 3000, a gigantic spring reverb made out of Slinky and cucumber:

This is basically a giant spring reverb made from 10 slinkys. I was trying to make the best sounding spring reverb possible, I think I achieved this but it is probably the most inconvenient spring reverb ever made. The reverb time (sustain) is so long that the springs need damping and I found that the best material for doing this is a slice of cucumber wedged under the end of each spring, other materials like foam or rubber tend to kill all the treble.

…Although it is very inconvenient as a reverb, it is very good for making horror sound effects by playing it with a violin bow.

This is just one of several DIY mechanical synths made by Nick of Nick’s World of Synthesizers.

The Springatron 3000

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Original post by Jason Striegel

Last week I mentioned that adding &fmt=18 to a Youtube URL, or &ampap=%2526fmt%3D18 to the embed code URLs allows you to view and embed Youtube clips in nice looking 480𝘨 resolution, encoded with the H.264 codec. The result is a much better playback experience than the standard 320𝖰 sorenson encoded clips, but a post today on webmonkey gives us another tweak that can produce even better results for some videos.

Above is an example of Collin Cunningham’s brilliant LED investigation in high def.

By changing that fmt variable to &ampfmt=22 or tacking on &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 to the embed URLs—that’s right, turn it up twice past 11—Youtube will kick out compatible videos at a whopping 720p resolution.

Here’s some example embed code:

<object width=”600″ height=”362″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/P3PDLsJQcGI&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;rel=0&amp;ap=%2526fmt%3D22″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess″ value=”always″></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/P3PDLsJQcGI&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;rel=0&amp;ap=%2526fmt%3D22″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash″ allowscriptaccess=”always″ allowfullscreen=”true” width=”600″ height=”362″></embed></object>

The only downside to embedding videos this way is that it really raises the bandwidth requirement for viewers. On my home connection, it can take several seconds before the video begins playback, and depending on how well my wireless is behaving, it’s not uncommon that the download rate will be slower thank playback, requiring quite a bit of pre-buffering. On the other hand, some videos are just worth the wait.

How To: Watch YouTube Movies in Full 720p HD Glory

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Original post by Jason Striegel

This DIY bamboo frame is absolutely beautiful. Appropriate, since it appears to have hand crafted with love for a significant other. Aaron writes:

The ride quality is TOTALLY SWEET! I realize that I have a bit of a bias, but truthfully I have ridden very few bikes that felt nicer. The bike seems to float over bumpy road surfaces, almost as if it were on giant baloon tires, but nope, they are just 700⻷ clinchers pumped hard as rocks. My big worry was that I had not gotten the frame alignment right, but that seems dead on too; riding no-handed is no problem. Oh yeah, and it corners like a fricking roller coaster and it accelerates as fast as anything I’ve ever ridden. Maybe that’s due to the fact that it weighs only 16.5 pounds! I had no idea that it was going to be so light and honestly did a full on “YESSSS!” complete with double fist pump when I hung it on the scale.

There isn’t a huge amount of info about the build process, suffice it to say that it began with harvesting carefully selected bamboo and ended with over 100 hours of epoxy and carbon fiber work.

Aaron’s Finished Bamboo Bike [thanks, nick]
Details on Making the Bike

Previously:

The Bamboo Bike Project is a collaboration between scientists and engineers at The Earth Institute at Columbia University and a bicycle builder at Calfee Design. The project aims to examine the feasibility of implementing cargo bikes made of bamboo as a sustainable form of transportation in Africa. The ultimate goals of the project are:
1.To build a better bike for poor Africans in rural areas.
2.To stimulate a bicycle building industry in Africa to satisfy local needs.

The Bamboo Bike Project

Making a Carbon Fiber Bike frame

From the pages of MAKE

Working With Carbon Fiber - MAKE:09 𛘨

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Original post by Jason Striegel

Ralf Ackermann sent us a tip on using the Myvu Crystal headset in conjunction with a wearable computer. The Myvu glasses were designed to block out the rest of the world for private iPod video watching, but its VGA resolution and device compatibility makes it pretty suitable for tearing apart.

The consumer myvu crystal HMD (sold as a nice though still somewhat
“socially unacceptable” 2 eyepiece video output device for the ipod and
other devices generating a PAL/NTSC signal can be modified into a much
smaller 1 eyepiece version. This one works very well with a multitude of
devices like a Parallax propeller, a Nokia N95 via TV out or a Archos
PMA 430. It is thus well suited as the core of “another wearable computer”.

For this purpose it might also be combined with the iphone / ipod touch
Xbee IO extension described earlier this week.

Ralf’s project is still a work in progress, but it’s a reminder that most of the hardware required for a wearable is now commonly available. Considering most of us already carry a sufficient computer (iPhone, N95, ˇ, etc.) around with us all the time anyway, it’s only a matter of time before a HMD design is made cool enough to dodge the social stigma.

Myvu Crystal HMD Modification (Flickr Photo Set)

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Original post by Jason Striegel

Here’s an example of a normal embedded Youtube video, borrowed from Patty Schiendelman’s Gakken Mechamo Inchworm post.

Back in march, it was discovered that when you view a video directly on Youtube, you could add a “&fmt=18″ to the URL to enable a higher quality, higher resolution stream which is encoded with the H.264 codec.

To make this work in an embedded video, however, you need a slightly different hack. After pasting the embed code into a blog post, adjust the two video URLs (one in a param tag and one as the src parameter in the embed tag) by adding “&ampap=%2526fmt%3᪢″ to the end.

For example, the above video embed becomes:

<object width=”600″ height=”475″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/iMQBKkDJY2c&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;rel=0&amp;ap=%2526fmt%3D18″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/iMQBKkDJY2c&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;rel=0&amp;ap=%2526fmt%3D18″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”600″ height=”475″></embed></object>

And here’s the result:

The still frame before the video is played is the exact same over-compressed image, but when a user clicks play, they will get a nice surprise. Instead of 320𝖰 video encoded with the Sorenson codec, the video will come in at a resolution of 480𝘨, encoded with the superior H.264 codec.

Embedding High Quality Youtube Videos [via Kottke]
View YouTube in high-res

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Original post by Jason Striegel

Handy tip, MAKE Flickr photo pool member Superlocal writes -

I am always forgetting my prepaid numbers esp when i’m in a city for a few days, so i just snap the number on my iPhone camera and make it my wallpaper, so it’s easier to get at whenever i meet someone who needs it. (i know it’s a bit blurry but at least it’s mostly legible)…

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Original post by Phillip Torrone

It’s always struck me that font embedding is a huge omission from the web standards toolkit. If you’re not satisfied with Georgia and Verdana, you usually need to turn to images or Flash to get the typeface you want. Tools like sIFR have made this a lot more functional, allowing you to write standard HTML and have Flash dynamically replace content in the page, but using Flash just to display HTML text seems a little unsavory. Typeface.js changes all this, providing a standards-compliant way to deliver a rich type experience using HTML and Javascript with no proprietary technologies.

typeface.js uses browsers′ vector drawing capabilites to draw text in HTML documents. For a good while, browsers have had support for vector drawing — Firefox, Safari, and Opera support the &lt;canvas> element (as well as SVG), and IE supports VML.

You declare the particular fonts to use with the font-family attribute, just as you would normally do in CSS. Then you add the “typeface-js” class to any HTML element that should be rendered by the typeface library. The actual embedded font is delivered to the page in the form of another javascript file, which contains the vector information for the particular font face.

The cool part is that any Truetype font can be easily converted to the javascript format using a perl utility that comes with the package (or a web form provided on the typeface.js site). Simply convert any fonts that your page requires and add them to your html using the script tag. The whole process is at least as convenient as building font swfs for use in sIFR, making it a worthy open source alternative.

Typeface.js - HTML/JS Font Embed Library

Previously:
HOWTO - Use rich fonts in your web design with sIFR

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Original post by Jason Striegel

Brian Heater, Lance Ulanoff, PJ Jacobowitz

We ventured all the way across town during evening rush hour yesterday to check out the latest holiday goods from a slew of tech companies at Pepcom’s annual Holiday Spectacular. We saw Treos, SpongeBob iPod speaker docks, flying RC Tinkerbell toys, and so much more.

Check out some of our favorites, after the jump.

Expresso Bike: Like riding bikes but hate all that fresh air and scenery? The Expresso Upright and Recumbent bikes are claimed to be “the first and only Web-enabled cardiovascular exercise machines to engage and immerse riders using the latest interactive technology.” The bikes offer 30 virtual courses and come with a 17- or 19-inch LCD monitor. Prices range from $5,145 to $5,295.

HP: HP‘s snazzy new HDX X18-1020US is an 18.4-inch media-centric notebook. It comes with NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT graphics, two 250GB hard drives, and a standard LightScribe Blu-ray drive.

N-Power: SpongeBob SquarePants Eyeball Speaker Dock. Equal parts cool and creepy, this $39.99 speaker dock comes with a pair of rocking and rolling eyeballs.

Palm: The ultra-popular Centro next to its new cousin, the Treo Pro. The Pro offers one-touch Wi-Fi, integrated GPS, and a world phone. The device will be available for a suggested $549.

PetNovations: The PetNovations rep who spoke with me must have uttered the word “poop” two dozen times during his pitch. In his defense, the guy was trying to sell me on his high-tech cat litter box, the CatGenie. This $329 device washes and dries its proprietary litter–and flushes itself automatically.

RIM: RIM showed off the first-ever Blackberry flip phone. The Pearl Flip 8220 is a quad-band EDGE smartphone with a SureType QWERTY keyboard, built-in Wi-Fi, and a number of other standard Blackberry features.

Samsung: The 𒻤 features a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard, access to Sprint TV, a 2-megapixel camera, and expandable memory up to 16GB. It will be available later this year.

WowWee: The consumer robotics company showed off a slew of familiar robotic faces, like the Tri-bot and Femisapien. The newest product is this Tinkerbell Easy Flier. She’s light and durable, with the same dual-wing design as WowWee’s Dragonfly and runs off three AAA batteries. Find her this fall for around $40.

Original post by Brian Heater

All right everyone, settle down. You were all wrong to openly mock John McCain’s perceived lack of technical expertise. The man may have admitted publicly that he’s never checked his e-mail, but he would never let something so trivial as that come between him and the creation of one of the early 21st century’s most popular pieces of consumer electronics.

According to McCain adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the Republican presidential nominee was actually the driving force behind RIM’s uber-popular BlackBerry smartphone. When asked what work John McCain did as Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate’s top economic adviser pointed to his PDA.

“He did this,” said Holtz-Eakin, referring to his BlackBerry during a press conference this morning. “Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce committee so you′re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.”

In related news, I’m fairly certain that Barack Obama can materialize iPhones out of thin air by blinking his eyes.

Original post by Brian Heater

Gotta love it when a handset manufacturer gets on a roll. HTC announced two more phones today: the Touch 3G and Touch Viva. Like the Touch HD, both phones feature HTC’s TouchFLO navigation.

According to HTC, the Touch 3G offers “wireless download speeds up to 18 times faster than standard 3G.” And the Touch Viva features Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, for business-minded users.

The Touch Viva will be available in “storm gray,” and the Touch 3G will come in a variety of colors, including black, gold, blue, and brown. Both are set for an early October ship date. And as with the Touch HD, if you live in the U.S., you’ll have trouble getting either one.

Original post by Brian Heater

See that awesome-looking HTC handset? That’s the Touch HD. It’s got super-fast 3.5G (European speak for HSDPA) connectivity, with a downlink speed of up to 7.2 Mbps. There’s also a snazzy 480-by-800 pixel, 3.8-inch-wide WVGA display; a 5-megapixel camera; and HTC′s Vibrant TouchFLO 3D interface. Oh, but too bad: If you′re in the U.S., you can’t have one.

Well, that’s not entirely true. There’s no U.S. release scheduled for this phone, because, well, wireless carriers aren′t really into the whole cool-features/high-speed approach to handset sales. Besides, even if one of the carriers did pick up the phone, you wouldn′t be able to use that wicked-fast HSDPA connectivity on its network.

You may, however, be able to pick up this bad boy from a specialty important and use it with AT&T or T-Mobile’s not-so-fast 2G network.

Or you could just move to Europe.

Original post by Brian Heater

BlackBerry users have a reputation for being hyper-productive business professionals that are almost pathologically tied to their smartphones. As of today, however, they can be Slackers, too. Research In Motion has announced a partnership with Slacker.com that will let BlackBerry users play Internet radio stations.

You can stream music, or even better, cache stations and individual songs on your BlackBerry’s memory card, so you can listen when you have zero bars of coverage. Just listening to stations is free, but you need to subscribe to Slacker’s premium service ($10 a month) to save individual songs.

As a doting owner of a Blackberry Curve 8330 and a daily listener to Slacker Radio, I am pretty psyched. This is the kind of app RIM needs, to win the hearts and thumbs of consumers and compete with the iPhone 3G. I’ve played with the service very briefly, and the interface looks pretty clean and easy to use. I can’t speak to the audio quality yet, but I guarantee it will sound better than the music most current BlackBerry owners listen to on their phones–which is to say, none.

Original post by Dan Costa