soldering
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Add GPS to your Viewsonic G-Tablet and test your soldering skills
If you picked up one of those G-Tablets, but are now suffering from buyer's remorse after realizing how much you miss GPS, there's a solution -- provided you have a strong DIY streak. It turns out Viewsonic set space aside on the Froyo-powered slate's motherboard to place a GPS receiver. Of course, if you even have to ask what flux is or what SMD stands for this is not the hack for you. And while apps that rely on 3G, such as Google Maps, won't work properly, offline navigators like Navigon and CoPilot should be just fine. If you're comfortable tearing open your device and poking at it with a hot iron, hit up the source link for a complete list of parts and some very detailed instructions... or, you could just buy a tablet that already has GPS. [Thanks, Andrew F.]
Datel Drive Doctor for Wii does statistics and code injection, requires soldering
Surely the whole point of purchasing a commercial product to run a few homebrew games or activate a few cheat codes is that there's no soldering required: that's not the case with the Datel Drive Doctor for Wii. The $34.95 Drive Doctor is designed to allow Wii owners to connect their console to their PC with a USB 2.0 cable, enabling you to review the internal statistics of the Wii, eventually run homebrew games, and even inject code "into the data stream ... it's fun!" Unfortunately, the press release mentions that it'll require a little soldering of wires in order to get the little box that clips on the back into a working state. Most people won't find that fun, but then again most people wouldn't find the idea of accidentally injecting code that kills their Wii fun either. We're left thinking that this one's strictly for the intermediate or pro hacker, so stay away if your coding and soldering isn't up to scratch. Us mere mortals will wait for something a little more dumb-consumer friendly, thank you very much.[Via Nintendo Wii Fanboy]
Datel tries its hand at Wii mods
Nevermind the product's name -- Datel's Wii Drive Doctor isn't a tool meant for diagnosing and remedying your console's ailments. There should be laws regulating these misleading medical monikers. How many have suffered the embarrassment of consulting Dr. Dre about their disorders, only to find that the gangsta rapper prescribes phat beats, and not actual medicine? The Drive Doctor is pitched as a "straightforward way for amateur programmers and techie tinkerers to get inside the game." With the mod in place, users can hook their Wii to a PC with a USB cable, allowing them to monitor the system's status and add data to running software. Homebrew applications and games are also playable through the $34.95 device.Datel's homebrew and cheat tools usually boast low barriers to entry, making them accessible to even the most inexperienced users, but installing the Drive Doctor will require soldering. We've never been too keen on voiding our consoles' warranties, so hearing that requirement was enough to scare us away. Until something cheap and hassle-free comes along, we're going to live a boring, risk-free life with our unmodded Wiis.
How-To: Make a simple sound mixer
We like using a few computers at the same time -- big surprise, right? Ubuntu box here, Vista box there, Leopard box, well, somewhere; but unless the speakers have multiple audio inputs, it's a bit difficult to get audio from our everything in our stack of machines hooked up. Today's How-To involved a late night parts run, some Bawls, and some true and proper self humiliation.
How-To: Make a component video switch
Maybe you've got a few HD devices around and only one component video input on your HDTV. We've even got component out on our dear old laserdisc player. So we were rooting around in our box of parts and realized that we could make our own component video switch. HDTV switches are ungodly expensive, but KVM have gotten dirt cheap; in today's How-to we'll show you how to turn one into a component video switch.
