Ask Lemmy

Maybe the blog that is hosted on a Nintendo Wii. It's not the most practical hack but I find console modding really neat and the "because I can" style projects are particularly fascinating to me.

Some other favorite hacks are a bit more practical and have to do with extending the life of existing products. RebbleOS, for example, is an open source firmware that took off after Pebble shutdown following their acquisition by FitBit in 2016. It's allowed people to continue using their e-ink Pebble watches largely unchanged. They can still do things like fetch the weather and voice dictation.

I hacked my CPAP. I removed the cancer causing material and did work getting the software in a better state. Also removed the mobile chip that communicates with the original company. Fun times.

Swap Magic case mod for the PS2 made me feel like a wizard when I was 12.

Someone else? Anything Posy or Benn Jordan put out. They are audio visual technomancers bending light and sound to their will.

While it wasn't unintended, the Atari 2600 only had 39 bits of memory to draw 160x192 graphics to the screen. It accomplished that task using the fact that CRT screens displayed images by rapidly moving a beam of light across the screen. Knowing the beam could only be in one spot at any time, the Atari system held just enough space in memory to draw 20 pixels. As the beam moved across the screen, the system updated the colour of the next pixels immediately before they needed to be drawn in a method that became known as Racing the beam.

It was built that way because having enough memory to draw the entire screen at once would have made the Atari 2600 prohibitively expensive for consumers.

We had big powerful workstation at work but we were denied to heat up the temperature in winter to save electricity bill. So we end up running useless heavy computation on our machines.

I know a guy that took a security camera and hooked it up to watch his lawnmower, which is set to automatically mow a certain area as guided by the camera.

So he just hits a button and watches his lawn get mowed.

I use a system of cameras and QR codes printed onto cardboard that I wear on my wrists, waist and ankles to achieve full body tracking in VR using what I had on-hand without buying anything extra for it. All possible because of the free and open source Apriltag software that does all the actual tracking.

One of my personal favorites is the casino that got hacked through a wireless fishtank thermometer. Hackers managed to find the high roller databases. Segment your networks, people.

My first one was psx I found how to play back ups using I the inside of a biro wedged in the lid to hold the lid button down. Pop a demo disc in swap when it stops after the PS1 logo with a backup. My friends at the time were paying for modchips and they would play games in black and white etc. One of those things that make me think I got dumber over time.

Didn't he end up getting hired to work on Kinect?