Some folks say less is more, but we'll bet they never saw Guitar Hero being played by kicking footballs against a giant wall. This epic undertaking will give your plastic axe a major inadequacy complex with its huge wall-mounted piezo vibration sensors and absurdly large fretboard projection. An Arduino acts as the conduit between the contact sensors and a PC running the freeware Frets on Fire. The outcome from such a relatively simple setup is pretty astounding, and you can check it out in the videos past the break, including some behind the scenes footage.

We'll readily admit that most Arduino mods tend to be exercises in creativity (and eccentricity) with little real world utility, which is why this one piqued our interest. A wedding present conceived of and built by Mikal Hart, the box you see above is set to only open in one particular geographic location, and the puzzle of it is to find out where that might be. You're allowed 50 attempts at opening the box by hitting the button next to the LCD screen, which in turn gives you a distance from, but not direction to, your destination. What tickles us about this idea, aside from its ingenuity, is the potential to use it without the helpful hints in securing your own valuables. Check out the read link for a full shopping list of ingredients and the amusing reaction to the quirky gift.

[Via Slippery Brick]

MyDellMini forum member Rob928, take a bow. This honorable gentleman has only gone and transformed an aging 9-inch netbook into a new-fashioned internet tablet. it might still be a chubby little thing, but there's no denying the usefulness of using the entire screen to navigate instead of the usually cramped netbook touchpad. With a 16GB SSD upgrade alongside the venerable Atom N270 and 1GB of RAM, this device will even boot faster into Windows than your run-of-the-mill netbook. The read link will reveal all, including more shots of the hardware laid bare.

[Via SlashGear]

If you build a specialized type of hardware which, by design, rarely arouses emotions of physical desire in the general populace, you can see how you might have a bit of a challenge promoting your wares. How you get around that tiny issue is by pulling off a stunning steampunk mod while retaining the full functionality of the hardware, as British company Hi Tech have done with their Comptometer. The server controller, customized for use in live video broadcasting and editing, has already won a design award for what we understand to be "general awesomeness" and an unmissable video of its obscure workings lays just past the break.

[Via TechnaBob]

We don't know exactly how to say this without overloading your nerd subsystem, but this R2D2 unit packs eight consoles, an integrated sound system and a projector for throwing your Jet Grind Radio sessions onto a wall. The only extras you'll need are the masses of controllers you see above and the steady constitution to not erupt into geek euphoria. Popular Science reader Brian De Vitis is the man you have to thank for this splicing of console goodness, and he's been kind enough to also provide a picture of the R2's mobo-laden innards. It awaits just past the break.

[Via Hack N Mod]

Nokia has been handing out the N900 for selective "artsy" uses lately through its "Push" program, and the folks at Tinker it now! sure seem to have put their model to good use. They've paired the device with all matter of nostalgia, including a Rolodex, FM radio and a 3D Viewmaster. Our favorite by far, however, is the Speak & Spell hack, which puts the gargantuan Speak & Spell keyboard to good use in penning text messages for the N900 -- which displays them in the classic font and even articulates your words with a speech synthesis engine. It's all a testament to the flexibility of Linux, hacker ingenuity and of course liberal application of Arduino, but it's also a little advertorial-ey, so you might want to leave your gag reflex at home for this one.

[Via Nokia Conversations]

We know how it is -- you were an early adopter of the netbook craze sweeping every nation from Austria to Australia, but now that 11-inches is looking like the new de facto standard, your old 7-incher just isn't cutting the mustard anymore. So what do you do? You mod that sucker into a kitchen cabinet door, of course. You'll need a 7-inch USB touchscreen to layer atop an EeePC 701, along with a few other bits and bobs, but the most important thing to remember is a spectacularly loony soundtrack. Or so the video after the break seems to instruct us.

[Via JKK Mobile]

Ariel Waldman contributes Movie Gadget Friday, where she highlights the lovable and lame gadgets from the world of cinema.

We last left off on the cyberpunk streets of LA in Strange Days. This week, in honor of the loss of the man behind so many 1980's icons, Movie Gadget Friday is paying homage to filmmaker John Hughes with a look into the 1985 cult-classic Weird Science. Tapping into the geek-fiction fantasies of most tinkering teenagers, real-life gadget specs are stretched to surreal capabilities to create the ultimate female bombshell. It's without surprise that the character's name, Lisa, was inspired by the Apple Lisa, Apple's first GUI computer.

To think it was just a few months ago that we thought taking 15 minutes to crack WPA encryption was a feat. Researchers from Kobe University in Japan are claiming they can best that by a wide margin by cracking any WPA-protected connection using the TKIP algorithm within just one minute flat. The details will be revealed at a tech conference on September 25th. Feeling paranoid? Bump up your encryption to the still-secure AES algorithm or WPA2... and if you're just wanting to live life on the edge, consider downgrading to WEP -- it's as good as open at this point anyway.

As far as Apple is concerned, the Black Hat 2009 hackers conference didn't end soon enough. Having promptly patched the iPhone vulnerability, Cupertino is facing another security hole, this time in its keyboards. A hacker going by the pseudonym of K. Chen has come up with a way, using HIDFirmwareUpdaterTool, to inject malicious code into the keyboard's firmware. While it's not yet possible to perform this hack remotely, the fact it occurs at the firmware level means no amount of OS cleanser or anti-virals will remedy it -- which might be a bit of a bother to MacBook owners who can't simply swap to an uninfected keyboard. Panic is hardly advisable, as Chen is collaborating with Apple on a fix, but if you want to be freaked out by his simple keylogger in action, hit up the video after the break.

[Via OS News]

According to Dieter over at PreCentral, real, honest-to-goodness usable apps are starting to "trickle out" for the Pre / webOS. Apparently utilizing a loophole in the operating system which allows unsigned apps to be sideloaded through email, homebrewers have taken to the interwebs with small utilities like the tip calculator (pictured above). This comes just a day after a group of DIY'ers figured out a workable solution for getting software onto the phone without rooting, so obviously Pre hacking is moving along at a healthy clip. These are -- of course -- very early applications, so don't expect perfection, and there seems to be some concern that Palm might want to patch up this hole, as it leaves the phone vulnerable to less altruistic endeavors. While the latter point is reasonable to consider, we do have a piece of advice for the folks at the front of this movement: don't wait and worry on how Palm will react to this stuff. It's important to push platforms like webOS, and the Pre needs all the love it can get on the development side right now.

Read - Right now: Install a Homebrew App without Hacking
Read - Homebrew Apps Tricking Out, but be careful

That iPhone OS 3.0 jailbreak we saw the iPhone Dev-Team pull off earlier this week? It's out now, or at least, part of it is. Pwnage Tool is now flooding torrents, but there's lots of caveats here. Most importantly, this isn't Ultrasn0w, which means if you're wanting to use your toy on T-Mobile or another unofficial carrier, be patient -- it's also worth noting that the jailbreak doesn't jibe with yellowsn0w, so those who rely on it should stay away for the time being. No compatibility with the 3G S, or at least, it probably hasn't been tested... we wouldn't recommend anyone setting the precedent here. You'll need Mac OS X to run it, with QuickPwn for Mac and Windows coming further down the line. Ultrasn0w is also due out at some indeterminate future, so that all said, if you're just needing right now a jailbroken device with spotlight functionality, hit up the read link for all the pertinent details. It should goes without saying, but they're might a few negative side effects to it, and one of the big ones we heard is that YouTube might be fubar'd at the moment.

Read - trois, drei, три, három! (Pwnage Tool released)
Read - No YouTube On Jailbroken iPhone 3.0?

Well, that was fast. Just a couple hours after we noted Palm warning against hacking webOS to allow data tethering on the Pre, the first set of instructions has popped up. It's not the cleanest hack we've ever seen -- you need to root your phone, enable SSH, and then configure your browser to run through a SOCKS proxy -- but it'll certainly get the job done in a pinch. Just don't go crazy, alright? We've got a feeling Sprint's watching Pre accounts with an eagle eye.

We've seen a tremendous explosion in the webOS hacking scene ever since the Pre's firmware image leaked out -- between the easily-accessible restore more, Linux foundations and the directly-accessible HTML / CSS / Javascript application code, we've already seen everything from minor tweaks to full on NES emulation to Sprint activation hacks. In short, things are wide open at the moment, and people (including us) are excited by the possibilities -- but that doesn't mean Palm has to play along. In fact, two recent developments have us worried for the future of this happy little scene -- first, Palm's apparently forbidding the Pre Dev Wiki from posting any information about data tethering during the Sprint exclusivity period, and apparently threatening to have the site shut down if it happens:

We have been politely cautioned by Palm that any discussion of tethering during the Sprint exclusivity period (and perhaps beyond-we don't know yet) will probably cause Sprint to complain to Palm, and if that happened then Palm would be forced to react against the people running the IRC channel and this wiki.

Yeah, that's pretty aggro for a company that needs to court all the developer support it can. We're not sure what'll happen after Sprint's exclusivity runs out, but we can't imagine any other carriers are going to be thrilled about hacked tethering options either, so we'd say Palm's going to keep the pressure on until unlocked GSM webOS devices hit the scene -- and we can almost guarantee that tethering hacks are going to make it into the wild regardless of Palm's actions.

Even worse for hackers, Palm's taking an unusually aggressive approach to webOS system updates -- they're mandatory. According to the support docs, webOS updates are automatically downloaded in the background within two days of being available, and they're required to be installed within a week of the download -- after seven days and four install prompts, the phone will give you a ten-minute countdown and then automatically begin installing the update. Sure, we can understand why Palm would want all of its devices to be updated, and we know that a lot of webOS system foundations are in flux while the Mojo SDK is being finalized, but forced updates seem extremely heavy-handed to us -- it's one thing to try and maintain control over a platform, it's another to keep it with an iron fist. Of course, it's probable that we'll see a hack to bypass all of this extremely soon, so maybe it'll all work itself out, but we'd really like to see Palm develop an official policy friendly towards hacking and homebrew and stick to it -- the Pre and webOS have attracted a lot of talent in the past two weeks, and it'd be a shame to lose it.

[Via PreThinking; thanks, Justin]

Read - Pre Dev Wiki tethering policy
Read - Palm webOS updates support doc