This GPS Hunt Project is very interesting, the box is electronically locked and the only way to open it (without using the emergency backdoor) is to go to a certain location. It gives lets you know how far from the target location you are each time the button is pressed but you only have 50 presses to figure it out.

 Thanks for the tip Jim.

"Major components

You might remember Michael Saunby, he was the guy that had the interesting clock that we were trying to determine heritage for. The clock was almost featured on Antiques Roadshow but unfortunately was left on the cutting room floor. Michael works with lots of antique electronics and this 1930 vintage amplifier and speaker is a great example of what can be done with a mix of old and new.

"The original amplifier was typical for a 1930s broadcast receiver, a single ended pentode with tone correction. The valve chosen was a high slope pentode type AC/SP3; as used by the BBC in pre-amplifiers from late 1930s through to the 1950s."

Need to get into a tricky lock, why not make a lock pick out of one of your old hard drives? That is what the guys over at sorgonet.com did.

Not your typical player piano where the piano automatically plays a nice tune. This creation plays many notes simultaneously to simulate spoken words. What would be impressive is if a person could achieve the same effect using only his fingers.

Via: Anything and Everything

Thanks to the SuperSync for sponsoring the contest this week. They will be providing a number of registered copies of their software to the winners. SuperSync is an application designed to compare and synchronize music libraries, ensuring that users will always have complete access to all of their own music. With SuperSync, music libraries can be accessed via the Internet anywhere, anytime, making it easier for users to manage multiple music libraries and stay organized.

This contest will run for one week (October 17 - 23, 2009) . Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item pictured above and give an example of what can be done with it.

Please do not give the answer in the comments. 

Send an email to contest @ hackedgadgets.com with "Name the Thing Contest" as the subject, and the message body consisting of:

• The name of the item in the above picture
• An example of what the item pictured above can be used for

The winner will be chosen at random from all of the correct entries.

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Added November 6, 2009

The item to guess was the Orange Power Pump

The winner is Isaac W.  and Blair T, both of them won a 5 license pack of SuperSync.  (There were 39 entries)

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Below is a screen shot of the the prize.

This is a great TED Talk with Woody Norris. He is a mainly self taught inventing genius! Near the end of the video he talks about some of the cool military uses for his new directional sound device that are very interesting (and funny). He also discusses some of his ideas that have sold for millions of dollars. His interests vary more than most people, you may remember the AirScooter II Ultralight Helicopter that we featured before, yes that is one of his ideas also!

"Woody’s electronics knowledge is mainly self-taught, consisting of repairing broken radios he begged from the local repair shop on the way home from school. "I had a chicken coop full of 20 or 30 or 50 radios… I fixed most of them." He had a mere six months of basic electronics training in the Air Force, where he worked with radar and electronics used to trigger A and H bombs."

Folding bikes have their place. I much prefer to use a normal full sized bike but if I needed to take a bike to work that would fit under my desk then all of a sudden you don’t have many options. When I was young I had a folding bike, other then the small wheels (smaller then the ones on the bike in the picture) it rode quite well and was neat to see it when it collapsed into such a small package. See the interesting video below that tells the story about how this interesting the Brompton folding bike company started.