Lady Ada, crazy-lady-hacker I met at Maker Faire 2007, has made a new fun kit that consists of a pencil that will “sing” when you draw stuff.

Our friends at Adafruit have released a fun new kit called the “Drawdio” — adapted from the original Drawdio design by Jay Silver – which lets you create a pencil that makes noisy almost-music via the variations in the resistance of graphite pencil lead. It’s $20 plus shipping. I just ordered one so I can recreate my middle school notebook sketches to literally hear the music of the anime spheres.

via bb gadgets, DIY Kit Page

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Here’s a cool hack showing you how to unblock blocked caller-ID numbers.

*This is informational purposes only.  Do not use this hack unless you are a law enforcement agent.

In a demonstration video, a hacker tweaks said asterisk box with some new configurations to strip out privacy flags, forward the call to another number, and ultimately reveal caller ID information which, surprisingly, is still available. This isn’t meant to be easy, but if the terms “prepend,” “SIP trunk,” and “asterisk box” don’t scare you away, go ahead and watch the video after the break.

via engadget

If you are a hacker, DIYer and you don’t want to buy an ultrasonic repellent, you can build your own using free schematics on the web.

The one above from electronic-circuits-diagrams

Well, to promote our new hack search engine, GooHack, we will be doing “GooHack searches of the Day” daily and try to find some interesting new hacks for all you hacker readers.

So to start out, I did a Goo Hack search on the term “Goo” and found some interesting stuff:

How to make glow stick goo - Lol… I really need this guy next time I am at a rave.

The future of Goo - Yey, goo is officially awesome and being continually improved by companies.

How to make Nasa-grade Space Goo - Don’t you just love Goo?

What is Goo exactly?

Goo is a term for a slimy, shapeless mass. - according to Wikipedia

Here’s CHDK, an aftermarket firmware you can download to your Canon digital camera and turn it into a super-camera.

Good thing I have 2 Canons, I will have to try this hack out and report back to you on how well the time-lapse feature worked.

The Canon Hacker’s Development Kit, aka CHDK, is a firmware enhancement that supports an impressive array of Canon digital cameras. I emphasize the enhancement aspect of CHDK because the tool is non-permanent and non-destructive, meaning that you load it onto your camera whenever you want to use it; CHDK makes no changes to your camera, and turning it off is simply a matter of restarting your camera. Installing CHDK involves copying a couple of files onto your camera’s memory card; permanently removing it from your camera entails deleting those files. It’s simple and powerful (sort of like hacking your router firmware) but even easier.

via LifeHacker

Well, since I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.5, I’ve had to let go of Ultimate Tag Warrior. Actually, I thought Ultimate Tag Warrior was working until today, when I found out every URL such as http://zedomax.com/tag/lasers, was giving me a 404 error.

Well, being an old school I am, I did even try to downgrade back to my favorite Wordpress 2.2.3, which results in catastrophic failure with the wp-categories… Damn it!

So I did look through the internet and basically Wordpress 2.5 has a built-in function to let you import Ultimate Tag Warrior tags.

Even though it should have gone smoothly, I did encounter LOTS of problems as the built-in function was very basic and did not support importing of 47,000 tags, which is what this site has.

The first problem I had was that I keep getting the following message:

Done! 13331 tags were read.
Reading UTW Post Tags…
Done! 45824 tags to post relationships were read.
Adding Tags to Posts…
Done! 0 tags were added!

Now, as you can see everything worked until the last line, “Done! 0 tags were added!”. I was so furious to know why it wasn’t working, so I even downgraded to Wordpress 2.3.1-RC, which others were saying that it worked.

Now when I tried to import, I did get this error message:

WordPress database error: [Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes]

This one is easy, this simply means your MySQL server is not set to handle large amount of data.

So I did change the max_allowed_packet size to 1 gigabyte like this by add this line:

set-variable = max_allowed_packet=1024M

(Yes, 1 gig should do the job I thought…)

Well, it turns out that after this change, I don’t get the “0 tags were added” message, but the screen “hangs” at the last step of the import screen…

As a more of a good hacker than a developer I am, I finally decided it was time to hack the Wordpress itself.

When I looked into the import php file, utw.php which is under wp-admin/import directory of your Wordpress blog.

It turns out that the import program is very basic at most and the programmer didn’t even consider large chunks of data.

So instead of doing 1 MySQL query, I changed it so it only fetches 100 data bits at a time.

If you are having problems like me with a large tag database, you can change the following function in utw.php like this:

function tag2post ( ) {

// get the tags and posts we imported in the last 2 steps
$tags = get_option(’utwimp_tags’);
$posts = get_option(’utwimp_posts’);

global $wpdb;
$startvalue=0;
$endvalue=1000;
$ct=$startvalue;

$tags_added = 0;
while($ct<$endvalue) {

$posts_query = “SELECT tag_id, post_id FROM ” . $wpdb->prefix . “post2tag”.” LIMIT “.$ct.”,100″;
$posts = $wpdb->get_results($posts_query);

if($posts) {
// null out our results

// loop through each post and add its tags to the db
foreach ( $posts as $this_post ) {

$the_post = (int) $this_post->post_id;
$the_tag = (int) $this_post->tag_id;

// what’s the tag name for that id?
$the_tag = $tags[$the_tag];

// screw it, just try to add the tag
wp_add_post_tags($the_post, $the_tag);
$tags_added++;
echo “Num: “.$tags_added.” - “.$the_tag.”<br />”;

}

}
$ct=$ct+100;
sleep(0.1);
}
echo “HACKED by Max Lee from http://zedomax.com yey!”;

// that’s it, all posts should be linked to their tags properly, pending any errors we just spit out!
return $tags_added;

}

Download my UTW.php here (rename utw.txt as utw.php)

Now, my recommendation is to run the Step 3 of the UTW import by taking 2000 tags at a time. You can change the value of $startvalue and $endvalue to control the range of your imports.

FInally, I did get all my precious tags imported, now you can install the Tag Suggest Thing and some other cool stuff from the UTW.

Phew, that was a long 4 hours of hacking Wordpress. Although I am very impressed at the new Wordpress 2.5, functions like the Ultimate Tag Warrior import could be improved dramatically through use of smarter programming and AJAX.

What I do recommend that Wordpress developers do is use AJAX to fetch at most 1000 tags at a time and then update the screen and the database to protect again freezing or users having to re-configure their MySQL server.

I also found out that if your PHP setttings for max_execution_time is low, (mine was at 10 seconds), this can be a problem as the import process takes longer than 10 seconds for big databases.

So change it like this in your /etc/php.ini file:

max_execution_time = 90 ; Maximum execution time of each script, in seconds
max_input_time = 95 ; Maximum amount of time each script may spend parsing request data
memory_limit = 128M

Then you can change it back after import.

Now, I’ve outlined all the possible problems you can have while importing your “large” number of tags.

For blogs with little or less than 2000 tags, the default Wordpress importer shouldn’t be a problem but for people like me with over 10,000 tags, this is a big problem but I am sure Wordpress developers will update it in the future. Check me out as I tried to get help from Wordpress Forum, but I did figure it out eventually myself.

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Remember the Wii Robot? Well, check out Robot catapult. It’s tight.

Every hacker wants a budget to do bigger, cooler hacks. Well, we got our budget, all $1000 of it, and decided to turn a borrowed industrial robot into a catapult, a hack we’d been hoping to do for a long, long time. We’d been joking about throwing heavy objects with one of these robots ever since we saw the payload specs and an anvil in the shop

via MakeZine

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Wow, Japan has some awesome technologies but this one is really really really cool…

John from The Hacker’s Bench has put together a selection of crazy clocks, this water clock that is located in Kanazawa Station is my favorite. It uses jets of water to either display the time or messages. If you know where we can find some more details of the build I would love to hear from you. Make sure you watch the last 5 seconds of the video to see it close-up.

via

Check out some of the cool circuit board earing and keyboard cufflinks if you are a hardcore hacker! Thanks Nicola for the tip!

Thought your might get a kick out of my DIY geekware over at www.acornstudios.ca

I’ve just finished updating with a whole bunch of new creations that I think your readers might like if they are into fun geeky gifts. All hand made by me up in Edmonton, Canada.