In order to get the most from your Solar Panel’s it is neccesary to reposition them throughout the day in order to maximise the amount of sunlight they are exposed to. Ideally you want to automate this process….
Gary Rey’s www.builditsolar.com has detailed their construction of a DIY Solar Panel Sun Tracker. It uses an old bed frame, satellite dish actuator and a pickle jar. The brains of the tracker is the ingenious Redrok LED Tracker which uses LED’s to track the position of the sun and sent positioning data to the satellite dish actuator.
End result is a Solar Panel that tracks the sun throughout the day, maximising energy created! He noticed a 20% gain using 160w Solar Panels. Great project for powering a garage or a shed…..
Those of us over in the UK are all used to using the chip & pin system, we were all told by the banks tha this new system would virtually wipe out credit card fraud.
Now three researchers from the University of Cambridge in the UK have cracked the Chip & Pin system in alarmingly easy fashion. Check out this video from BBC’s Newsnight detailing Sarr Drimer, Stephen Rimmer and Ross Andersons physical attack on the Chip & Pin system.
As you can see, for some unknown reasons, the manufacturers thought it would be a good idea to transfer the data from the PED (Pin Entry Device) to the terminal unencrypted. Allowing an attatcker to obtain the complete card details.
Cult Of The Dead Cow who have previously brought us the ever so ingenious Back Orifice remote control software, are back with their new tool named Goolag.
Goolag brings together a huge amount of google search commands into one easy piece of software. It allows you to enter an address and scan it for different vulnerabilities using google’s search engine.
This, obviously depends on two things
1 - The target address has software or hardware attached that have vulnerabilities
2 - That google has indexed the page
A good way to check your box for any vulnerabilities, try it yourself! But remember to behave :)
Before you go crazy with it be warned, if you try and scan for too many vulnerabilities in one go, it may lead to google blocking your IP……
It’s also worth checking out http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/ for another great resource of google hacks, most if not all of these are available in the Goolag Scanner, but Johnny’s site is a good source for extra information on individual vulnerabilities.
Found this over at the Benheck forums, it’s a DIY Nintendo 64 ROM Dumper built using a PIC16LF877. It outputs its signal via a serial connection and is powered by 3.3v.
The creator also explains his plans to build a custom flash cartridge that would plug into the unit. Allowing you to copy games to a blank cartridge.
Seems like a good weekend project to get all those dusty N64 ROMS transferred to your PC, might take some time doing it at serial data rates though :)
The project in its current guise seems to have been abandoned now with the creator attempting a new version using an off-the-shelf USB chip, should make transfer speeds improve at the least….
On his site at http://retroactive.be/ you can also find an attempt at translating the PCB to schematics for a Homebrew N64 Cartridge with 2-4Mb capacity. It uses a 5V Atmel chip to store the data.
If this has got you in a console kind of mood then it’s also worth checking out the CopyNES
Its a DIY NES ROM Dumper, in an easy to build kit, let’s you convert a standard NES into one that lets you dump cartridges inserted into it - It even includes an LCD screen to let you know the current status of the ROM dumping process!
exposed to. Ideally you want to automate this process…. 
Goolag brings together a huge amount of google search commands into one easy piece of software. It allows you to enter an address and scan it for different vulnerabilities using google’s search engine.
Hackaday