Bob the Super Hamste writes "Fortune magazine is reporting that the company Zebra Imaging is producing a 3D hologram table that will project a 360 degree 3D image that doesn't require glasses. Funding for this project is being provided by DARPA for battle planning. The company expects it will take at least another three years for the table to be ready for commercial applications."

Barence writes "PC Pro has published a comprehensive guide to installing Android on a HP TouchPad using CyanogenMod's alpha Android release. The mod, which is based on Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) instead of 3.0 (Honeycomb, the source code of which is yet to be released) 'performs similarly to the Tegra 2-based tablets we've seen from the likes of Asus and Samsung,' according to PC Pro. 'The only real problem we hit was some apps refusing to install from the Android Market because they didn't recognise the hardware,' although there are ways around it."

An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times is running a story on people hacking the Nissan Leaf electric vehicle. 'Using Mr. Giddings’s home-brewed E.V. fuel-level display, Leaf drivers get the confidence to extend their driving range by 10 percent or more. His gauge, which displays the actual state of charge, reveals that the Leaf dashboard’s "zero bars" display comes on when the battery pack has several miles remaining.' Here's an interesting quote from one of the hackers, Phil Sadow, who was interviewed for the story: 'I don't like the term hacking because it's been portrayed by the media as something evil. To me, hacking is actually very American. Go out to the garage. Take it apart. Make it better.'"

Nate the greatest writes "It's been just over a month since the T1 launched and only a couple weeks since it shipped — and it has already been hacked. A video has surfaced that shows the T1 running a number of apps, including a new home screen, AW Launcher, and a couple of different reading apps. It can't run Angry Birds just yet, but this is still great news. There aren't any details yet on when you'll be able to hack your T1, but I bet they'll be filtering out fairly soon."

99luftballon writes "The OccupySF team have been running an ad-hoc computer network on the streets of San Francisco without a steady power source, no Wi-Fi and even the occasional police raid. It turns out the best way to keep the lights on is car batteries and pedal power."

MrSeb writes "Jonas Pfeil, a student from the Technical University of Berlin, has created a rugged, grapefruit-sized ball that has 36 fixed-focus, 2-megapixel digital camera sensors built in. The user simply throws the ball into the air and photos are simultaneously taken with all 36 cameras to create a full, spherical panorama of the surrounding scene. The ball itself is made with a 3D printer, and the innards (which includes 36 STM VS6724 CMOS camera sensors, an accelerometer, and two microcontrollers to control the cameras) are adequately padded, so presumably it doesn't matter if you're bad at throwing and catching."

yesakmac joins the teeming hordes of successful Slashdot submitters, with this excerpt from PC World that says the frenzied effort to port Android to HP's discontinued TouchPad has actually succeeded: "CyanogenMod also released a 'lower your expectations edition' release guide to let you know exactly what is working (or not) under the hood. Modders will be happy to know that basically all the TouchPad's guts are recognized. It supports dual-booting and fake SD cards in case you need to restore the TouchPad. What does not work, though, is the camera, which can only be used for video chat. Power efficiency is still an issue, too. As for the final build, CyanogenMod says they won't be giving a hard date, and that it will be ready when it is ready."

Slate has reprinted the piece that Ron Rosenbaum wrote for Esquire in 1971, explaining to the world that there was an underground movement of people hacking the phone system. (Rosenbaum is now a columnist for Slate.) According to the article's new introduction and followup piece by Rosenbaum reflecting on its impact — and to the New York Times obituary for Steve Jobs — this article inspired Jobs and Wozniak to start building blue boxes themselves, an effort that made them several thousand dollars.

First time accepted submitter aonsquared writes "A couple of months ago I managed to scoop up a cheap (£30) robot arm with a USB interface from Maplin (I'm in the UK). Following a wrist injury which left me without the use of my right hand for 4 weeks, I decided to build it for a little hacking project. Using Linux, libusb and other freely available tools, I have enabled the robot arm to respond to my voice commands. I've posted a full tutorial and downloadable source code, as well as a demonstration video. Hopefully, open-source voice recognition as well as devices like the Kinect (which has spawned hundreds of different cool hacks) can someday revolutionise the way we interact with computers and machines."

hypnosec writes "Smartphone maker Sony Ericsson has decided to work closely with developers creating custom Android ROMs for devices in order to learn from them. The company said in a blog post that it has decided to support an open source developer group called 'FreeXperia,' which creates custom Android ROMs based on the CyanogenMod for several Sony Ericsson phones like the Xperia ARC and Play. Sony Ericsson maintained that it does not approve of some of the work carried out by independent developers but was keen to work with people who were creating custom ROMs."

Zothecula writes "Those not content with getting a 2D top-down or 360-degree street level view of a planned route using Google Maps can now enjoy a virtual flight over the route thanks to Google adding a new Helicopter View. The new feature, which currently only works in a full browser and requires the Google Earth plugin, lets users see 3D view, and should come in particularly handy for walkers or bike riders looking for a more intuitive view of potentially tiring hills."

wiredmikey writes "Author Robert Vamosi writes an interesting piece on how security researchers are using open source 'prototyping boards' and other open source tools now available via the Internet for rapid prototyping of tools used in hardware analysis. 'The days of saying it would take the resources of a nation-state to discover or exploit vulnerabilities in a particular piece of hardware in an industrial control system or a healthcare environment are rapidly fading,' he writes. Vendors who do not test their products before selling them into the field are doomed to be targets of future research and, perhaps, attacks."

First time accepted submitter sydneyhype writes "Seven schools across Europe have been testing the effectiveness of 3D learning tools — specifically 3D projections of body organs in biology class. A study found test results jumped up by 17%. Prof Bamford says, 'Children can see how things function. Instead of learning about the heart statically they can see it in a solid way, literally see blood passing through the valves, see exchange of oxygen, rotate it, tilt it and zoom in.'"

dotancohen writes "Although the telephone has the 1-2-3 key on the top row, most calculators and keyboards have 7-8-9 on the top row. Switching between the two destroys muscle- and spatial- memory. Do any slashdotters use a scientific calculator with 1-2-3 on the top row? I've already scraped and resoldered my Casio fx-82 calculator to have 1-2-3 on the top, and remapped the numpad in Kubuntu, but if there exist any calculators like this already on the market, I'd buy two."

saccade.com writes "Andrew 'bunnie' Huang just posted an excellent essay, Why the Best Days of Open Hardware are Yet to Come. He shows how the gradually slowing pace of semiconductor density actually may create many new opportunities for smaller scale innovators and entrepreneurs. It's based on a talk presented at the 2011 Open Hardware Summit. Are we entering an age of heirloom laptops and artisan engineering?"

mikejuk writes "The whole world seems to be going in ARM's direction. The latest version of Windows 8 will run on ARM processors, Raspberry Pi is a $25 ARM based machine and now the open source Arduino platform has a new member — the ARM-based Arduino Due announced at the Maker Faire in New York. The Due makes use of Atmel's SAM3U ARM-based process, which supports 32-bit instructions and runs at 96Mhz. The Due will have 256KB of Flash, 50KB of SRAM, five SPI buses, two I2C interfaces, five serial ports, 16 12-bit analog inputs and more. This is much more powerful than the current Uno or Mega. However, it's not all gain — the 3.3V operating voltage and the different I/O ports are going to create some compatibility problems. Perhaps Intel should start to worry about the lower end of the processor world."

An anonymous reader writes "A group of electrical engineering students at UCSB teamed up with some chemists and built an $80 gadget that can check water for arsenic, measure the level of vitamin C in orange juice, and also do simple DNA biosensor tests. The electronics in a blood sugar meter could do all of those things, but their firmware isn't easily hackable. All of the circuit schematics, gerber files, and software for this project are available on their project website. Another team at Denver Metro College is working to improve upon their design. Eventually, it could be used as a teaching tool in chemistry classrooms, or possibly to do blood and water tests in developing countries."

First time accepted submitter AmyVernon writes with a small hack that "is supposed to boost signal strength by at least 2 to 4 bars," and which requires little more than a can of beer (or Orangina). She writes: "What you need: scissors, a utility knife, some adhesive putty and an empty beer can. The brand doesn't matter for the router, but I suppose it would be cooler looking if it were Asahi or Stella Artois than if it were Budweiser." Perhaps this will be added one day to my favorite (and very extensive!) list of low-budget Wi-Fi amplifying rigs.

donberryman writes "IEEE Times reports that Heathkit, the fabled electronics kits company, is going back into that business after a two-decade hiatus. The Heathkit website says that they will be releasing Garage Parking Assistant kit (GPA-100) in late September followed by a Wireless Swimming Pool Monitor kit. Amateur radio kits may be coming by the end of the year." I hope for real this time — I never saw for sale the HERO kit they promised a few years ago.

An anonymous reader writes "A man identifying himself as 'Timofiend' has posted a detailed walkthrough of how he built an impressive case mod that fits both a PlayStation 3 and an Xbox 360 into a mid-tower computer case. He used one of the newer Slim 360 models hooked up to an ATX power supply, and one of the bulkier old PS3 units, with its standard power supply as well. After arranging the internal boards, persuading the two optical drives to fit and loading up on fans to prevent overheating, he wound up with a very cool (and functional!) blend of gaming platforms."