hacks

Yamaha and Fabian Cappello teamed up to deliver this modified typewriter, which has each key wired to play a different musical note as you type. The end result is a sentence that also plays out as a melody.

Chris Varenhorst, the MIT engineering student responsible for this hydraulic-powered door that can be opened with the tap of an iPhone app or the rap of a secret knock sequence, says that after a long day of studying, he doesn't want to waste time messing with keys. We have a different theory.

Have you ever found yourself wishing that your Eee PC had a better trackpad, or maybe even a joystick? Well, the Atmel AVR USB key might be your answer.

This little gimmick has been in graphics design studios for years: a clever way to bring a wayward menu bar back from a dual monitor setup without plugging in a second monitor. Essentially, by shorting pins 1 (red video signal out) and 6 (red ground), and 3 (blue video signal out) and 8 (blue ground) on a 15-pin VGA adapter, you can mislead the PC into -- erroneously -- detecting the presence of a second monitor. Then it's just a matter of dragging the menu bar back onto the correct display.

Including a built-in SD card reader in the ASUS Eee PC was just one of many smart decisions that went into the lovable little portable (are you listening Apple?). Without a large hard disk, memory cards are crucial for any Eee user wanting to store large media collections, keep tons of applications, or boot multiple operating systems, allowing for a virtually unlimited data storage system without any external add-ons.

Ben Heckendorn’s game-console creations, from a portable Atari 2600 to a pocket-sized Nintendo 64, are famous in the modder world. But he may have topped himself with his Xbox 360 Elite laptop.

To shoehorn a full 360 into the 2.25-by-16-by-12-inch case and keep it playable, Heckendorn had to install fans and speakers and redo the internal layout of the machine several times. He then rewired the console to output the video to the 17-inch LCD display, on which he mounted an Xbox Live Vision camera for online multiplayer games.

As we showed you in our May 2008 issue, Asus's Eee PC has quickly become a favorite of hardware hackers around the web. Here, we offer the first installment of our Eee PC School series. Check back in the coming weeks for more tiny ultraportable tweaking.—Eds.

What good is that portable PC if you can’t type anywhere and anytime? With its ultra-compact keyboard, even touch typing pros will be hard-pressed to avoid frequent mistakes on when the lights go out. To say it’s a frustrating exercise in futility to locate the miniature F3 key in the dark is an understatement. Oops, you just lost WiFi contact by accidentally hitting F2.

We're back from this weekend's Maker Faire, the third-annual event in San Mateo, CA . Our friends at Make continue to up the ante, bringing DIYers from far and wide to show off their projects at the ultimate geek county fair.