Check out this DIY Litter Box Exhaust System. If the smell from your cat’s litter box is enough to have you cleaning the box many times a day you should consider an exhaust system. It was built using a 120 mm computer case fan, 4″ dryer duct, 12 vdc power supply, steel cans, electrical tapes, long zip ties, plywood and a few other various household items.  Some required tools are hot glue gun, knife, drill machine and permanent marker.

“This project costs less than $35 to make and can be prepared from affordable household’s and recyclable objects. The design is perfect for apartment dwellers.”

Check out this new robotic car that has been developed in France by the team from IFSTTAR and the Embedded Electronic Systems Research Institute at ESIGELEC. The goal of the two groups is to develop an autonomous car which would help us be safer in our cars. Researchers can control the car speed and its trajectory through an on-board computer system. The researchers drives the car with the help of a joystick, the group modified a Renault Grand Espace by adding robotic driver sensors, camera and control bay on roof.

Via: ieee Spectrum

“There are three cameras to monitor the vehicle’s surroundings and one forward-facing used to track road lanes and markings. A LIDAR unit at the front detects other cars and pedestrians.”

Check out this interesting project which uses some remote controlled Hex Bugs. By adding a computer, an IR Toy from our friend Ian and an Arduino Jim Choate has created a way to add voice control to these cool little bug toys. The voice commands are deciphered by custom software running on the computer which was written in C#. If you are interested in having a look at the code Jim has it available here. 

Ben goes over some basics of CPLD and FPGAs. If you need a ton of power and a microcontroller just won’t cut it, it might be time to move up to a CPLD or an FPGA. Watch as Ben shows us some results of the first few Hello World like programs he runs on an Altera CPLD. Looks like there would be a steep learning curve to become proficient in VHDL or Verilog.

Thanks to Jeremy Lane from FastLane Technologies and Steve from Podnutz for inviting me onto the Podnutz show (episode 333). Podnutz is a podcast for Computer Repair Technicians. They were interested to hear first hand about the Global IT / Global PC Protection Scam. Wow I didn’t realize I said um and ah so much, I have to work on that…

You think these scammers from Global PC Protection (they often call themselves Global IT) would have me on their do not call list after the fun we had with them in Part 1 and part 2. I figured that would be the last we ever heard of them. Well to my surprise I got another cold call from one of their agents warning me that my computer has once again been sending them errors and warnings.

I just had a bit of fun with them before I again told them who I was. Guess what, they were not very pleased about this and they started to delete a bunch of system files, browsed to a porn site and attempted to format my hard drive. I guess they still didn’t realize that they were just playing around in a VM.

The video is quite long, here are the highlights.

• 0:00 Initial description of problem.
• 13:09 Peter Anderson tries to convince me that he is calling from New York.
• 15:46 Peter Anderson with a new voice answers my call.
• 17:00 The first Peter Anderson calls back. 
• 35:30 Virtual Machine setup shown.
• 18:10 They once again try to make up junk about what the Support Connection Code is for.
• 20:39 VM hard drive issues, for some reason the virtual hard drive isn’t automatically growing as it should.
• 26:30 Cleaning the old VM was talking a long time, I just made a new copy of the VM image to start with a fresh copy.
• 29:30 They connect to my system using Team Viewer.
• 37:42 Their technician has remote control of the system and “checks” the computer out.
• 48:02 I give Peter a hard time for accidentally hanging up the phone on me.
• 57:05 I show them who I am, they hang up but stay connected to the computer.
• 58:35 They talk about what they think of me.
• 59:27 Start deleting files while they talk to me.
• 1:01:50 The load up a porn site and look around, then they hang up the phone while remaining logged onto my computer.
• 1:05:48 They try to format the hard drive.

It was a great day when we could start our cold car remotely. A bit of trivia, the first remote car starter was produced by Canadian company here in Winnipeg called Kraus.  Times have changed! In this hack Brandon Fiquett uses Siri in his Apple iPhone 4S to command his car to start using voice commands. Lots of the heavy lifting has been done by Viper in this case who has developed a method for the iPhone (and other smart phones) to interface with its smart remote. This capability is possible because of the flexibility that has been built into Siri, because of this I think we will see lots of new hacks in the near future!

Via: iPhone Hacks and www.vincentabry.com

“I created a new ruby plugin that is used by plamoni’s “Siri Proxy”, a proxy server for Apple’s Siri assistant. This proxy server allows for the creation of custom plugins that can intercept recognized speech and perform virtually any function imaginable (programmable, scriptable).

Technical Details:

• Siri Proxy & DNSMasq box – Ubuntu 11.04 Server VM
  Ruby 1.9.3

• LAMP server - Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server