Use It Better

When Nintendo debuted its DSi game console earlier this year, it closed the loopholes hackers had used to run homebrew applications—unofficial software distributed freely on the Internet—on its predecessor, the DS Lite. But hackers soon found holes in the DSi’s software too, and now DSi-compatible “flash carts,” specially modified cartridges that allow you to run custom code, are coming to market.

I first mentioned Dale Wheat’s tinyCylon kit during a post regarding the “new” SN76477 complex sound generator IC. In case you missed it, tinyCylon is a small kit that creates 10 different LED flashing patterns with 5 red LEDs, an Atmel ATtiny13 microcontroller, and a 4.5VDC battery pack. In other words it’s an LED blinky PCB—easy to assemble and easy to operate.

Here’s a secret they didn’t tell you when you bought a 3G iPhone: One of its best features—the ability to run new applications found on iTunes—is also possible on the old iPhone with an easy software upgrade. Plus, you can hack your first-gen to run unofficial apps alongside the sanctioned ones (known as “jailbreaking” the phone). And remember that your deactivated iPhone still has built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth as well. With all this at your disposal, there are lots of ways to give a first-gen a second life.

GPS devices are cheap, reliable and easy-to-use, but they’ve long been missing a dead-obvious feature: the ability to import a route or list of stops created on a computer. It’s far easier to plan a drive on Google Maps or MapQuest, where you can visualize the whole route and browse for cool pitstops, than it is to do so on a device’s small screen.

If you've ever bent the pin on a microcontroller while trying to insert it into a DIP programming socket, you're not alone. Aligning those crazy pins again and again, while intermittently prying them out of the programming socket and then inserting your freshly burned chip into a target circuit, can lead to a long and sleepless night. Luckily, there is a cure for the bent pin nightmare. And this prescription costs less than $35.

If you want a super-light laptop, you have to pay for it, and you have to use Windows. Thats been the (frustrating) conventional wisdom—at least until late last year, when the Taiwanese company Asus rolled out the Eee PC (pronounced as though it were a single long e), a two-pound, seven-inch laptop starting at a mere $300. The tradeoff: It comes with just two to eight gigabytes of flash memory instead of a conventional, larger hard drive, and a simplified Linux operating system that essentially is usable only for e-mail, Web browsing and typing.