I will probably never figure out the original name for Go-Karts but here’s a really cool DIY electric go-kart someone has made and you might want to refer it if you want to make your own in the near future.

This year, the Summer Engineering Workshop team was interested in making an electric go-kart. (Some kind of obsession with things you can ride…) But to make things more interesting, we decided to add a 110F ultracapacitor into the mix. Capacitors store electrical potential energy; much less than a battery, but you can charge and discharge them more quickly. Research into automotive applications of capacitors (in hybrids, for example) has led to development of ultracapacitors with increasing energy density and decreasing price.

Research is research. We were also interested in having some fun. So, we wanted to see if we could very simply integrate an ultracapacitor into a stylish electric go-kart. One of the simplest ways to do so is to use it exclusively to store energy recaptured from the kart as it brakes. Then, put this energy at the driver’s fingertips in the form of a power “assist,” or, less formally, boost! While it’s likely not the best solution for full-size autos, we wanted to make a tangible demonstration that the technology is closer to reality than many might think.

The site is very informative and even provides free circuit schematics for the electricity parts, I highly suggest you to check this one out.

via make, DIY Page

Do you ever wonder how to make a Portable Movie Rail System for making your own homemade professional movies?

Well, now you can hack one of these cool portable movie rail systems yourself by following some of these pics which are pretty easy to understand.

We often  see chase
scene movements in film. This picture needs to be rather stable.

Professional rail system is heavy, and expensive to use. We find it hard to carry around
and use.
What we need is a low cost, lightweight and portable rail system.

On one weekend, my colleague Murdoch has done some research online. He
found that low-cost DIY rail system is very doable. And use only common materials at we see every day.

via bordesign

If you have bought older generation of iPods, you are in luck as Rockbox 3.0 firmware was just released to the public.

What does it do?  Basically it allows you to free yourself from iTunes and do a lot more with old equipment.

Since Apple has stopped developing the firmware for the older iPods (yes, they keep making new ones to make more money, how greedy!), this Rockbox provides users with alternative way to upgrade their old iPods.

I personally have the 40GB model of the iPod shown in the pic, I should be doing a short DIY write-up to tell you all how it went.

Looks like their site is down already but keep checkin’, it should be up later.

Rockbox’s developers say that the most important changes to the software won’t be particularly obvious to the average user. “The first players supported by Rockbox decoded MP3 files using a chip specifically for this purpose. This made things a lot simpler for Rockbox, but also limited the amount of formats supported to variants of MPEG audio. Newer players don’t use this approach, and as such, it was needed to expand Rockbox to do sound decoding in software on these players. This opens up the possibility of supporting a lot of different file formats, which is of course exactly what we did! “

via engadget, ostatic, Rockbox

Here’s a cool iPhone dev app called PhoneGap that allows you to develop iPhone Apps with Javascript and HTML for webmasters who know nothing about C.

PhoneGap is a free open source development tool and framework that allows web developers to take advantage of the powerful features in the iPhone SDK from HTML and JavaScript. We’re trying to make iPhone app development easy and open. For many applications a web application is the way to but in Safari you don’t get access to the native iPhone APIs, and the that’s the problem we’re trying to solve.
It is written in Objective-C and allows developers to embed their web app (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) in Webkit within a native iPhone app. We’re big advocates of the Open Web and want JavaScript developers to be able to get access iPhone features such as a spring board icon, background processing, push, geo location, camera, local sqlLite and accelerometers without the burden of learning Objective-C and Cocoa.

Here’s an example of how you could access iPhone data using Javascript:

Geo Location
//request location - this triggers a subsequent method call to gotLocation(lat,lon)
getLocation();

//GAP will invoke this function once it has the location
function gotLocation(lat,lon){
$(’lat’).innerHTML = “latitude: ” + lat;
$(’lon’).innerHTML = “longitude: ” + lon;
}

Accelerometer
//You have instant access to the accellerometer data via the accelX, accelY, and accelZ variables
function updateAccel(){
$(’accel’).innerHTML = “accel: ” + accelX + ” ” + accelY + ” ” + accelZ;
setTimeout(updateAccel,100);
}

via hackszine

Download PhoneGap

Well, I have been manually managing the dedicated server for this site for last 2 years or so but I found a better way to automate the server so it doesn’t ever go down due to overload.

One of the common problems in dedicated servers is the fact that load can go out of control and your web server along with it, causing you to hard-restart the server.

A better way to deal with this over-load problem is to shut down the HTTPD server (web server) before your server load gets to something around 2 to 5.

When the server load drops under 2, the script then can restart the server.

By doing this, you save a lot of headaches especially if you get “digged” or simply need the site up as much as possible.

Believe it or not, there’s no script that does this available free online so I made one for all you webmasters:


#!/bin/bash
loadavg=`uptime | awk ‘{print $9}’`
RESTART=”/sbin/service httpd restart”
# bash doesn’t understand floating point
# so convert the number to an interger
thisloadavg=`echo $loadavg|awk -F \. ‘{print $1}’`
if [ "$thisloadavg" -ge "5" ]; then
echo “Busy - Load Average $loadavg ($thisloadavg) “
httpd -k stop
elif [ "$thisloadavg" -le "2" ]; then
echo “Okay - Load Average $loadavg ($thisloadavg) “
pgrep httpd
if [ $? -ne 0 ] # if apache not running
then
# restart apache
$RESTART
echo “restart!”
else
echo “no restart!”
fi
else
echo “waiting…!”
fi


Save this code somewhere such as /root/checkload.sh.

Then add the following to your cron job.  (/etc/cron.d/sa-update for Fedora Linux)

*/1 * * * * root sh /root/checkloadsh

This will run the script every 1 minute to check the load and if load is too high, web server will be turned off, if it’s lower than 2 and web server is off, it will turn the web server on.

There’s a lot of things that can go wrong with your web server whether from extra traffic or whatnot, but this script will be handy and I do recommend it to anyone who’s having trouble with high-load web servers that go down often. (like this blog)

Now, go install this script, you will never have to worry about your web server dying from high load ever again.

You can also change the value of “2″ in the code to something higher such as 5 or 10, which will wait longer to shut the web server off if load goes high.

I didn’t write the code from scratch, I took 2-3 different scripts and mixed it up so here’s the resources I used for the code:

Load Average Script - This one is the main skeleton I used

Check/Restart HTTPD Script - This one I used to check HTTPD server before trying to restart it.

Cron Task Scheduler - I keep forgetting that the most left number is the minutes, darn.

NOTE - This is a simple solution to keep your dedicated server running on 1 server (like this one), if you can afford more servers, you will need to resort to load balancing the “servers”, load balancing here refers to balancing within 1 server.

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

Here’s a video of how to make a ghetto flame thrower using your jacked-up lighter and some spray cans.

Now, don’t go out there and burn off your dog, that is very BAD BAD BAD.

via metacafe

(Image of DVI Output on the back of your PC)

This weekend, I had the pleasure of hooking up my friend’s new 52″ Samsung LCD HDTV to his new gaming PC.

If you are like most people, you probably already know how to connect your PC to HDTV via an S-Video Cable.

Now, S-Video is perfectly fine for viewing your PC/laptop on your TV but it won’t give you “HD” resolution of 1080p, 1080i, or 720p.

Most S-Video outputs are only capable of producing upto about 1024×768 pixel resolution and that’s analog signals, meaning your signal will get somewhat affected by noise and not the best way to surf the web on your HDTV.

Now let’s say your TV is capable of HD AND you have DVI Outputs on the back of your PC as shown in the image above.

Then, provided you have a Video graphics card capable of 1080p (which means it can pretty much do 1920×1080 pixels on your HDTV), you will be able to get a perfectly crisp 1920×1080 pixels on your HDTV.

Now, to do this, you need a cable depending on how far your PC is from the HDTV.

The simplest way is to get a HDMI-M to DVI-M cable to connect the DVI side to the PC and HDMI to your HDTV.   Here’s a site I found that has really low prices on it. ($32 for 50 feet, I found a 5 foot cable at BestBuy for $60, don’t go there)

(HDMI-M to DVI-M cable)

Once you are connected, you should be able to surf the web pretty easily on your HDTV depending on how far you sit from it.

Here’s a re-cap of what I just told you in simpler terms:

• S-Video - 1024×768 Maximum resolution, Analog signals (suck)
• DVI (PC) to HDMI (HDTV) - 1920×1080 Maximum resolution, Digital signals (clean)

Required Hardware:

• DVI-capable Graphic Card
• HD-capable TV (HDTV)
• DVI(male) to HDMI(male) cable

Most people who have bought PC in the last couple years will probably have all the required hardware except the DVI to HDMI cable.   If that’s the case, I highly suggest you to buy one online.  Don’t buy retail, you will pay 3-5 times more for it.

There you have it, now you  know how to take full advantage of your HDTV and watch YouTube and other online videos crisp and clear.  Perhaps you are a genius already at this but for those of you who don’t know, I hope this helps you surf on your HDTV. (and take advantage over the crisp, clear 1920×1080 pixel screen)

Kipkay from Make shows us how to make a Scanner Camera with your flatbed scanner.  Above is a dog taken with the Scanner Camera.  Kind of a nifty way to make interesting images.

via make

In case you don’t know, there’s a program you can download that will let your Google Chrome Browser be updated with the “Dev” mode, which gets you updates as soon as they are available. In the “Beta” normal mode, updates will be delayed until they are considered “stable”.

Subscribing to the Dev channel

1. Download and run the Google Chrome Channel Chooser (http://chromium.googlecode.com/files/chromechannel-1.0.exe).
2. Click the circle next to Dev.
3. Click Update to save your choice.
4. Click Close.
5. In Google Chrome, click the wrench menu and choose About Google Chrome.
Note: On Windows Vista, updates from the About box require Service Pack 1. With 0.2.149.29 (the current release), on demand updates do not work in Vista SP1 if User Account Control is disabled.
6. Click Update Now to install the current Dev channel release.
7. Restart Google Chrome.

via Chrome Hacks