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iOS 18 Tips, Tricks, How-Tos, News

News: Google Bets $20K You Can't Hack Chrome

Since its inception in 2007, the Pwn2Own computer hacking contest has been challenging the vulnerability of mobile phones and web-related software. In 2010, the fruit of two full days of hacking came down to the exploitation of the following web browsers: Safari 4 on Mac OS X, Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7, and Firefox 3.6 on Windows 7. The winners walked away with the successfully hacked computer, plus a cash prize, but they left one Godly browser intact: Google Chrome. Even the savviest ...

News: Make a Playable Angry Birds Birthday Cake

On Monday, ElectricPig's Mark Cooper became something of an Internet sensation when he posted a video of playable Angry Birds birthday cake he made for his son Ben's 6th birthday. Now, with a little help from this step-by-step guide by Mark himself, you can make an Angry Birds cake to call your own! It's said that the original took 10 hours to build and 2 minutes to destroy. With the benefit of Mark's experience, however, you should be able to peel some time off of both those numbers.

News: Print Your Own Photorealistic Gadget Pouches

If you've yet to stumble across Photojojo, it's an awesomely addictive web newsletter for all photography junkies. I'm especially loving their recent photorealistic gadget pouch project because the finished product looks incredibly pro and as Photojojo keenly comments, "We’ve been seeing these little pouches in hipster gift stores that look like tacos, cassette tapes, pizza, etc. And we thought, 'That’s so easy, we could totally make those ourselves!'” Right on. The project is indeed easy to ...

News: Magic 8-Ball Booby Trapped with Camera Flash

Take $1.35 of thrift store bric-à-brac, toss in a few spare parts from your electronics drawer and mix it all up with an earnest desire to alienate your loved ones forevermore and what do you get? A booby-trapped Magic 8-Ball, that's what! Hacker arfink explains, "My idea was to make a Magic 8-Ball which would blind an unsuspecting victim with the camera flash. I had an old Honeywell thermostat at home which had a mercury tilt switch inside, and after cutting open the 8 ball and removing the ...

News: DIY Clap-Off Bra

If the whale tail cookies and edible undies weren't naughty enough, you've still got about 24 hours left before Valentine's Day to whip up one of F.A.T. artist Randy Sarafan's step-by-step clap-off bras. Inspired by the electronic singing panties and remote-controlled bras of the secret underworld of Syrian lingerie, Sarafan made a mission to "fast-forward lingerie technology in the West".

News: Self-Electroshocking as Art, Live

Daito Manabe is awesome. Last we heard of him, he was setting up Japanese school girls with glow-in-the-dark grills. Before that, he was playing himself like a human drum kit. And before that, he was just plain old electroshocking himself. In his most recent appearance, he takes his electro-pulsed facial twitches to the stage, with fellow artist Ei Wada, before an audience at Berlin’s Transmediale Festival.

News: iPhone App = Confessional Aide = Absolution (Yeah, Right)

I'm not going to lie. I was Catholic. But one of my reasons for my faithful departure was having to tell my innermost secrets— my sins— to a silhouetted figure behind a latticed screen. With the creepy enclosed booth structure and separation of sinner and confessor, its anonymity was clear, yet deceiving. You always knew the priest and he always knew you. If I wanted total privacy, was there really a need for this intermediary to God?

News: Handyscope, the $1500 Cancer-Checking iPhone Accessory

If you consider yourself a hypochondriac and subscribe to the "my iPhone can do ANYTHING" set, you may want to consider turning your iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4 into a digital dermatoscope. The Handyscope by FotoFinder uses hardware and an app to magnify your blemish scares up to 20 times (ew). Simply tag the images with your name and locale, and submit them via e-mail for diagnosis.

News: Trade in Your Grill for Japanese LED Teeth

In the far away land of Japan, gold is out, glow-in-the-dark is in. LED "grills" were recently conceived of by two Japanese designers/hackers for a winter advertising event at clothing store Laforet Harajuku. The LED teeth attachments quickly became a hot item. Foreseeably, one of the two designers demonstrating the teeth in the video above is the familiar Daito Manabe (our favorite "self-electrocuting" mad hacker). Manabe's partner, Motoi Ishibashi, came up with the idea when "he saw a video...

News: Seeing 3D with the Aid of Epileptic Eye Movement

Do 3D glasses give you a headache? This might hurt more. As in, I think I'm going to hurl just watching. Below, Francois Vogel demonstrates his rapid eye blinking method for 3D viewing. ...as if the electrodes on his temples could stimulate his eyelids to open and close in alternating synchronization with the refresh rate of the monitor! View more vomit-inducing 3D viewing, sans the glasses.

News: Door Locked? Send a Text Message & Open Sesame

When choosing a security system for the office, Billy Chasen decided to ditch the traditional lock & key barricade for something a little more 21st century. He hacked together a device that uses a web server, servo motor and some parts from Home Depot to enable locking & unlocking via text message. Chasen maintains a list which gives access to green lit office workers, who enter by simply texting "lock" or "unlock"... and voilà, open sesame.

News: Verizon FINALLY Offers iPhone (Link Round Up)

It seems like all of us Verizon users have been waiting for EONS, and it's finally happened. Today Verizon officially announced the iPhone 4 will be available for pre-order February 3rd for existing Verizon customers, and will be generally available for pre-order on February 10th. The device will start at $200 for the 16GB version, equipped with a new antenna and hotspot application that will allow you to connect your computer or any other device to the web.

News: Joystick Your iPad

Perhaps the greatest iPad accessory released thus far, presenting the JOYSTICK-IT, an attachable arcade stick to make the most of your iPad x arcade gaming experience. Sorry guys, this one isn't a DIY. Available at ThinkGeek for $24.99.

News: DIY Instant Indoor Skydiving

If you're like me, just the idea of skydiving triggers nearly-pee-in-the-pants petrification. But with a little imagination, plus Google Image Search and a projector, and all of us ninnies out there can pretend to do the real thing:

News: Massive Gawker Hack Reveals the Web's Most Stupid Passwords

This past Sunday, a group called Gnosis launched a massive hacker attack on Gawker media, one of the web's most popular blog networks (Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Jezebel, io9, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Deadspin and Fleshbot). 1.3 million registered users' passwords were compromised, and 188,279 of them were decoded and made public. The biggest takeaway? Many Gawker denizens use downright dumb passwords. (Guess they didn't see their own Lifehacker's story on avoiding such a thing.)

News: New Facebook Profile Page Released

While the new Facebook redesign doesn't include many usability changes, the visual tweaks are a definite improvement to the old design. Perhaps the best feature is the ability to scroll photo collections infinitely, as well as the new visual prominence given to your personal stats and photos (job, dating status, location, etc.).

News: Watch a 1,500-Pound Box of Cell Phones Crush a Chevy Camaro

You looked on as a 1,169-pound pumpkin flattened a Pontiac sedan, now watch a 1,500-pound box of cell phones smash a Chevy Camaro! Jalopnik reports, "A cell phone recycler took its YouTube promo campaign to a new level by dropping 1,500 lbs. of junked cellphones on a parked 4th-generation Camaro. The resulting mess answers a question only a Mustang fan would ever ask. The filmmakers later clarified that the Camaro wasn't in running condition ... and was bought by a member of the crew as a par...

News: Google Is Watching You

Google StreetView is watching everybody. In fact, Google captures so much, Jon Rafman has made art out of it. Rafman's blog 9eyes features the most interesting images found the cameras nine eyes (and no brain).

News: Touchscreen Made With Blocks of Ice

Far away in Finland, where the ice is plentiful and the temperature is bitter cold, the Finnish Nokia team have created the world's first touchscreen display made entirely of ice. Constructed with massive slabs of river ice, the display was first shaped into neat square slabs with a chainsaw, and then smoothed into a watchable surface with a powerful heat gun.

News: Touchpad Made with Paper and Pencil Scribbles

Who says nothing productive ever came out of doodling? Certainly not the hacker responsible for this fun (and at least somewhat functional) paper-and-pencil touchpad, which takes advantage of the natural conductivity of graphite: There isn’t much to explain here. It just uses pencil graphite on paper as a kind of two dimensional potentiometer. Four voltage dividers between 5v, 2M ohm resistors, the paper, and my grounded finger feeds signals from each corner into an Arduino. The Arduino does ...