Here’s a cool DIY showing you how to turn a 1978 Corvette into a Batmobile.  I think you could probably also do this with older Stingray Corvettes too.

Q: What is the original car that this was made from?
A: A brought-back-from-the-dead 1978 Corvette (most likely the limited edition pace car model).

Q: Did you make this from a kit? Where can I get it?
A: No, this is not a kit car. This was handmade using high density foam, fiberglass and a variety of classified materials. A 1989 Kenner toy car was used as the base model for which the modifications were made.

via hacknmod, DIY Page

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Here’s a cool PSP Hack that shows you how to turn your PSP into a second monitor for your Windows XP-equipped PC.

Installation

• Windows application, drivers, etc.
• Download the installer below and execute it.
• When it comes to the display driver installation, Windows will warn you that the driver is unsigned, let the setup program install it anyway.
• After setup has finished, open your display settings and enable the new monitor then move it to the position you like.
• Connect your PSP and copy the files from the “psp” folder in the installation directory to the memory stick.

Download: PSPdisp v0.1 (PC installer)
Download: PSPdisp v0.1

via gizmodo, pspupdate

Well, it looks like the 20 year old David Kernell might be facing some serious charges for what he did, which I see it as harmless from the point of view of a U.S. citizen.

Why? Well, it was Palin’s fault in the first place to let her e-mail account be vulnerable, she should have been smarter to choose a “better” password. Better yet, she should have been using super-encrypted e-mail system, not some public Yahoo e-mail.

What will happen if by chance McCain dies and Palin becomes President?

Yeah, I can foresee Palin accidently clicking on a website with trojans and letting the whole world into U.S. classified information. Maybe this isn’t so serious to most people but I think it’s very serious. If Palin took her current job as Alaskan governor seriously, she would have taken extra 10 seconds to think of a better password not related with her personal information.  This is what computer-illiterates do.

I just cannot see Palin coming out of her soccer-mom , I-am-a-computer-dumbass image.  Well, that’s my 2 cents on this incident, I DON”T CARE IF YOU DON”T VOTE FOR OBAMA BUT PLEASE DO NOT VOTE FOR PALIN!  JUST DON”T VOTE IF YOU WERE GOING TO VOTE FOR MCCAIN.

Press Release from FBI here:

(KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE)–David C. Kernell, 20, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Knoxville, Tennessee, for intentionally accessing without authorization the e-mail account of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Friedrich of the Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney James R. Dedrick for the Eastern District of Tennessee announced today. Kernell turned himself into federal authorities for arrest and will be arraigned today before the Honorable C. Clifford Shirley, United States Magistrate Judge, Eastern District of Tennessee.

The single count indictment, returned on October 7, 2008, and unsealed today, alleges that on approximately September 16, 2008, Kernell, a resident of Knoxville, obtained unauthorized access to Governor Sarah Palin’s personal e-mail account by allegedly resetting the account password. According to the indictment, after answering a series of security questions that allowed him to reset the password and gain access to the e-mail account, Kernell allegedly read the contents of the account and made screenshots of the e-mail directory, e-mail content and other personal information. According to the indictment, Kernell posted screenshots of the e-mails and other personal information to a public website. Kernell also allegedly posted the new e-mail account password, thus providing access to the account by others.

If convicted of the charge, the defendant faces a maximum of five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and a three year term of supervised release. A trial date has not been set.

“Cyber crime is the FBI’s top criminal investigative priority. We would like to thank all of the Internet service providers and others who partnered with us to bring this matter to a quick and successful resolution,” said Richard Lambert, Special Agent in Charge, FBI, Knoxville Field Division.

The case is being prosecuted by Section Chief Michael DuBose and Trial Attorney Mark Krotoski of the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section in Washington, D.C. and Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Weddle of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Tennessee. The case is being investigated by the FBI’s Anchorage and Knoxville Field Offices.

An indictment is merely an allegation. Defendants are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty in a court of law .

As a resident of San Francisco, I can say how much I hate tow trucks since they towed my car without warning. It just happens that tow trucks “wait” around parking lots to tow cars.

Okay, that said, here’s a cool DIY air suspension system made for tow trucks, I hope it doesn’t make it to the market, I really don’t like technology improvements for tow trucks. I think people in tow trucks are one of the “lowest” grade jobs out there along with parking meter people. Don’t get me wrong, tow trucks are just really “bad” in San Francisco.  If they start doing things more “legally”, I’d have to change my mind though, but that’s not going to happen in this bad economy-era.

Gadget Freak James Kinney was looking for a way to take the pressure off the back end of a tow truck when it’s carrying a heavy load. If you can equalize the pressure of the truck bed so all the weight is not on the back end, there will be less stress to the truck’s suspension system. Kinney developed the air suspension system, called the Mechatronic Microcontroller, in his mechatronics’ class at Colorado State University. The gadget uses a resistive touchscreen from an electronic Sudoku game to select the ride height of the tow truck’s bed to make it level, thus spreading the stress of the towing weight evenly across the truck’s suspension.

via make

Do you have a home with lots of birds?  Well, you can refer to this DIY on how to make a birdie food shack so you can watch your birds close-up and help them eat nutritious foods.

we’ve been wanting to get a bird feeder to hang outside our living room window for some time now. (hopefully it won’t drive our cats nuts!) this little feeder was inexpensive and easy to make, and we were able to customize it with paint to look like a little snack stand at an amusement park!

via designspongeonline

Here’s a cool DIY showing you how to use ceiling medallions as wall art, great idea for your home.

The lightweight urethane medallions were simply painted in subtly varying shades of yellow and easily mounted on the wall of this living room. The medallions are affordable, around $20 to $30, so it’s quite an attainable way to bring “art” into your home. Another thought? Pick up a medallion with a circular opening in the center, and have a glass cutter make you a round mirror to size, and you’ll have an ornate mirror at a fractional price.

via casasugar

Ghostbusters Cadillac Ecto is for sale on eBay.  Current bid is at $45,000 but I think it will go well over $100,000 for this authentic Hollywood classic.

In August of 2006 I purchased the original Universal Studios Ecto-1. The car was stripped of all the Ghost busting equipment and sold as an ambulance and with a little negotiation I was able to get all of the roof rack parts and the original light bars. This car was used at the park for over fifteen years for the Ghostbusters Experience, parades and display inside the Florida park. This car is one of three Sony/MGM authorized Ghostbusters 1959 Cadillac Miller Meteor Ecto-1. There are the two original cars used in the films and this one built exclusively for the Universal Studios Theme parks. This car has a rich history and thousands of fans have been photographed with this car. The only major change made to this car was the roof rack. We modified the roof rack to resemble the screen used Sony Ecto-1 original car. Other upgrades are cosmetic and mechanically it’s very sound.

via neatorama, ebay

I’ve read books of 2 of the most unique creators of operating systems, that is Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, and Bill Gates, the creator of Microsoft Windows.

Of course, I did get the feeling that Bill Gates was a money-hungry, arrogant, geek-vampire from his book while I got the feeling that Linus Torvalds had bigger things in mind like creating open-source operating system platform and spread of free knowledge.  I think when I was growing up, Linus Torvalds was one of my heroes while Bill Gates too, but Bill kept making bad operating systems for money.

If it wasn’t for Linus, I don’t think we would have Firefox, Google Chrome, and pretty much open source software in general.  (or at least they won’t be as popular)  This is that one guy who made the best open-source operating system and boosted the open-source community by gazillion miles.

Well, to cap it off, here’s an interview with Linux Torvalds on his thoughts with Linux as of lately:

I’ve used different distributions over the years. Right now I happen to use Fedora 9 on most of the computers I have, which really boils down to the fact that Fedora had fairly good support for PowerPC back when I used that, so I grew used to it. But I actually don’t care too much about the distribution, as long as it makes it easy to install and keep reasonably up-to-date. I care about the kernel and a few programs, and the set of programs I really care about is actually fairly small.

And when it comes to distributions, ease of installation has actually been one of my main issues - I’m a technical person, but I have a very specific area of interest, and I don’t want to fight the rest. So the only distributions I have actively avoided are the ones that are known to be “overly technical” - like the ones that encourage you to compile your own programs etc.

Yeah, I can do it, but it kind of defeats the whole point of a distribution for me. So I like the ones that have a name of being easy to use. I’ve never used plain Debian, for example, but I like Ubuntu. And before Debian people attack me - yeah, I know, I know, it’s supposedly much simpler and easier to install these days. But it certainly didn’t use to be, so I never had any reason to go for it.

via oreilly

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Here’s a cool wireless E-book from Amazon, the Amazon Kindle.  The Amazon Kindle allows you to access the Amazon store via its EDVO connection (meaning you don’t have to connect to WiFi) and buy books that will get downloaded to your Kindle.

I think you can say this new Kindle is more like the iPod for books.  Of course, I really like it except the fact that the Kindle is still in black and white.  But if you are a book-fanatic and you have thousands of books in collection, you might want to consider this E-book that can hold almost 200 books.

Aside from buying books, you can also read blogs, access Wikipedia, all this paid for by Amazon. (the EDVO connection)

Well, if you like it, knock youself out and get one at Amazon here.