Bruce Rosenbaum is a steampunk master. After turning his own Massachusetts home into a steampunk masterpiece, he’s opened his own business and is busy crafting digital/Victorian makeovers for homes, offices, and hotels.

According to Wired, Rosenbaum got the idea when he found a very old iron oven at an antique store. The oven is a sculptural piece of artistry, and its attention to craftsmanship inspired him to bring it home and re-purpose it. He upgraded it with a glass-top stove, which caused him to start a years-long transformation of the entire house.

Today, the house is filled with all sorts of technical marvels — which are neatly incorporated into 1800s-era creations. Rosenbaum, his wife and two sons own an ancient pump organ that’s been turned into a modern desk with built-in computer; a hot plate turned wireless iPad charger; a boat’s portal (with functioning valve wheel) that Rosenbaum made into a closet door; and loads more. No detail was left untouched, from the period lighting all throughout the house to the house’s stained glass windows.

It’s an astounding accomplishment, and one can only imagine the amount of time it took to salvage all of the antiques, gut them, put them together with modern technology, and then install them in the house to look as if they were made specifically for that space.

Wired says Rosenbaum is pitching a reality series to cable TV networks, which would be produced by one of the people behind The Biggest Loser. Sounds like a good fit for Discovery or The History Channel. Hit the link above to check out more photos of Rosenbaum’s amazing steampunk home.

It’s impossible to believe, but this is not a commercial product. It’s homemade.

DeviantArt user “tommyfilth” created this amazing Monopoly game, themed around the video game series Mass Effect. I’m in awe of this dude’s skills.

This Mass Effect Monopoly is just stunning. I mean, look at it! He made his own money, “Alliance Mission” and “Cerberus Task” cards (instead of Chance and Community Chest), property deeds, and game pieces. But all of it is themed around Mass Effect locations, finances, and factions. Standing in for Boardwalk? The Citadel, of course.

Tommy says he made Mass Effect Monopoly as a Christmas gift for his family. I can’t even begin to imagine how one would make something like this from scratch — especially the board, which looks like it was manufactured exactly the way real board games are made.

BioWare, get your people on the phone. Somebody needs to put this into production, stat!

Ryan Kelly's 'Portal' Christmas Tree

A Reddit user named Ryan Kelly and his co-workers put together one of the geekiest Christmas trees ever: the Portal Tree! Their clever creation appears to be heading straight through a portal, frozen in time at mid-fall.

After seeing Kelly’s Reddit post about his Portal Christmas Tree, io9 reached out to Kelly to find out how he did it. And lest you fear a real tree was split to accommodate their idea: it’s an artificial that came in three parts. Kelly and friends put the bottom two parts on the floor with the top part dangling from the ceiling.

He added rope lights around on the floor and ceiling, filled in some blank spots near the top with a garland, and used black poster board to give the holes the proper look. The only tricky part came with the upside-down tree branches, which were made to be held outstretched by gravity. Kelly and his friends had to use fishing line to hold the branches up.

In my mind, this begs the question: why didn’t they just install it right-side-up? Just flip the entire setup so that the tree appears to be falling through a hole in the floor — the top of the tree would be right-side-up on the floor, with the larger bottom part hanging from the ceiling. I suppose the bottom section would have been too heavy to hang safely from the ceiling. But it would have solved that pesky branch/fishing line issue.

Regardless, the Portal Christmas Tree is an ingenious bit of holiday engineering. ForeverGeek tips its hat to such dedicated geekhood. Well played!

Head over to io9 to see more photos.

I hope they bring the TARDIS.

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But don't worry, they're not very observant.

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Well. Somebody's bitter...

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A hacked sign from Gotham.

[Source via Reddit]

Secretly, the police are looking for an escaped leprechaun.

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They flew out of Mike Myers' butt.

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I would totally stop for this one.

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Must be nearing this chick's house: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTTwcCVajAc

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That guy is such a diva.

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Need more details. Are you a vampire? A ghost? Zombie?

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Only hardcore geeks are allowed to use this road.

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SRSLY PWNED!

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Watch your step.

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While driving? Seriously? That's like saying, "Prepare to breathe oxygen."

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If you're reading this, they're already hunting you.

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Watch for falling fire and brimstone.

[Source via Reddit]

Word, dawg.

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Now you know why there's no need to ask.

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She's enjoying a spa day with Zelda.

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A classic from MIT.

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Anybody know Mulder's cell number?

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It's not what you think. The Stake & Holy Water factory is just ahead.

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So you might as well stop at Starbucks anyway.

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Zombies are by far the most popular warning hacked into road signs.

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Where's Ash when you need him?

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A clever hacker in Lexington, Kentucky hacked into a construction road sign to warn Muggles that Death Eaters were on the rampage.

The sign was set to rotate two messages: “DEATH EATERS AHEAD,” and “MUGGLES BEWARE.”

You could easily theorize that this was a bit of viral marketing for the final Harry Potter movie, The Deathly Hallows, Part 2, which arrived in theaters at midnight on Wednesday — right about the same time that the road sign was hacked. But nope, this was a real instance of geek hacking.

Either that, or the Ministry of Magic was in Kentucky last night. The sign has since been returned to normal by Department of Transportation officials. Show of hands: who wishes they’d left it with the Potter-ized message?

[Image sources: Novain913 & Justdieprettyxx.]

Right up there with flying, or maybe wallcrawling, there may be no other superpower that fans covet more than Wolverine‘s claws.

Cosplayers love to wear fake claws, but they can’t actually pop them the way that Logan does. There have been fans who’ve managed to make fake claws that expand and retract, but this has always required a switch or lever, which undoubtedly dilutes the experience. Even Hugh Jackman, who plays Wolverine in the movies and uses the highest-quality faux-adamantium claws money can buy, has no idea what it feels like to make those claws pop out — his Hollywood prop claws are real enough, but when they pop on screen, it’s a CGI effect.

Well, those days are over. One very smart geek, who goes by the moniker “FingerRails” on YouTube, has finally figured out how to make claws, which are worn like a gauntlet over the forearm, that realistically pop. As he explains, he installed a release mechanism at the gauntlet’s bicep, so that flexing his bicep causes the claws to pop out.

Are you geeking out over this as much as I am? This is absolutely the closest possible thing that fans could come up with to mimic Wolverine’s signature weapons without actually installing them beneath the skin. (I’d be willing to bet that in the far off future, somebody will find a way to make that happen.) “FingerRails” says he made one set of claws in just two days. (He now has one set for each arm.) If they were that easy to make, you have to wonder why nobody thought of this before.

Oh, and in case you were wondering: the blades are real. He made them from steel, with the gauntlets’ frames being welded copper tubing. Above is a video showing the dual-claw-popping action in all its glory, while the video below follows the devices being made.

To prove it, he filmed this video in Times Square, where you can watch as he starts with a small bus stop screen and eventually works his way up to one of the giant-sized screens Times Square is known for, seemingly hacking into this well-known video display.

Some are claiming the whole thing is nothing but an elaborate hoax. They point to the big red balloon seen in the video, in particular, as evidence that it’s all a big fake, because a little investigation of the store in Times Square where the balloon supposedly comes from, revealed that that store doesn’t sell balloons. The hoax theorists believe the video was genuinely shot in Times Square, but that the signal that overrides the screens was added in postproduction.

What do you think? Is seeing believing? Real or not, it’s awfully clever.

Jaeden Amero recently showed off his creation and got a fair bit of attention for it. So what did he do? The process is something I cannot really comprehend – yeah, sue me – but in essence, he stripped down the game into the bare essentials.

While everything is still quite recognizable – there is no way that you can’t recognize the “Mario-istic” elements, really – you will find a whole of stuff “missing”. Here’s a landscape view – looks familiar?

How about this?

Considering that this is his first NES hack, you have to give it to him! If you want to know more about how he did this, check out Patater; and here is the download link to the Minimal Mario IPS Patch.

If you haven’t got any plans for the weekend (yes, I do realize that it is Christmas), this just might be the distraction you have been looking for!

I am in awe of these 3D pancakes. For a guy “just trying to make some cool pancakes for his daughter,” Jim (he only gives his first name) is a master, chronicling his daily adventures in pancake making on his blog, and I tip my lightsaber to him.

He also makes 2D pancakes that are quite impressive, such as this iPhone. But it’s the 3D ones that make me all kinds of giddy. I mean, have you ever seen pancakes that can stand up on their own before? Among Jim’s masterful creations: the dinosaur skeleton seen above, a crane, a ferris wheel, a biplane, a carousel, a volcano, a birdhouse, a campfire, a bridge, and even a toilet!

No one can argue that Jim doesn’t love his daughter, since he goes to this much trouble for her every morning. But am I the only one wondering what the heck his recipe is? I’ve made plenty of pancakes in my life and never have I come up with any that were what I’d consider “sturdy.” According to his blog, he overcooks them slightly, which give them more strength, and then uses uncooked batter as mortar to hold them together. He claims he even assembles them on the griddle!

In just two weeks, this guy used wood, polystyrene foam, PVC pipe, and a racing harness to build his own Power Loader exo-suit, as seen in James Cameron‘s Aliens. (Remember how Ripley used a big yellow metal suit to dispatch the Alien Queen at the climax of the film? It’s that thing.)

Being the extremely magnanimous guy that he is, “The Movie Geek” has posted instructions online so that you can build a Power Loader of your very own. From what I can tell, it looks like an inexpensive, surprisingly simple project. And you’ve got plenty of time to finish it before Halloween.

The video above shows off his finished product, facing down his own replica of the Alien Queen.

While Firefox is the slowest of all the browsers I like it due to the add-ons and the possibility to hack a lot of settings to suit my needs. Just by typing about:config you’ll get access to customize Firefox’s core settings. Of course this doesn’t come without a proper warning from Firefox.

That warning says it all, hack and tweak at your own risk.

The first hack is to speed up web browsing.

1. In the address bar, type: about:config
2. Locate and change the following values by double-clicking on them:
network.http.max-connections = 48 or 96 [default is 30]
network.http.max-connections-per-server = 24 or 32 [default is 10]
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy = 24 [default is 4]
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server =12 [default is 2]
network.http.pipelining = true [default is false]
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests = 8 or 10 [ default is 4]
network.http.proxy.pipelining = true [default is false]

Next you can minimize the amount of RAM memory that Firefox uses when the application is minimized. Firefox is known to be huge memory hogger so this one will probably help the ones like me who have only 2GB of memory.

In about:config filter config.trim_on_minimize
change value to true
if filter returns zero result
right click go to new and select "boolean"
Name the preference: config.trim_on_minimize
Set the value on true

I applied these two hacks myself on my Firefox installation, Firefox 3.6.3 running on OS X 10.6.3, so far it’s running without problems. But these customization should always be done with second thoughts.

For websites hack I use Greasemonkey which is by now familiar to all. I use it mostly on Facebook, Google Calendar and Google.

I’m now hoping that someone figures a way to block tynt.com. Tynt is a Javascript service applied to many popular websites like techCrunch, NYTimes, etc. Whenever you copy and paste text from those site it will add extra text and links depending how the websites have configured it. I’m 50/50 on this, a Read more link is fine with me but some sites abuse this service and give you a whole rundown of text and several links.

The only way to block tynt.com in Firefox is to install noscript or Adblocker. I’m not a fan of these add-ons so I’m hoping for a Greasemonkey solution. Meanwhile for Chrome there is a solution, Tynt Blocker. Only annoying about it it will give a pop up each time a new website using Tynt is visited instead of just blocking all and let the user make the exception.

If you want to dig deeper in about:config, check out Firefox hacking about:config complete list & tweaks.

Oh, the things people do to be different. Take this guy, for example. He went ahead and created one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen, and I highly doubt that anyone anywhere will ever own one of these shirts other than him. Why? Probably because it’s not machine washable, but things with a chipset rarely are.

Anyways, here’s how it works: The gentleman who designed this shirt – Chris Bell with the help of his wife Madeleine – uses an Android phone for his main source of communications. That connects to the t-shirt via a bluetooth dongle on the face, which then connects to an Lilypad Arduino. That in turn lights up a series of LEDs that are connected via conductive thread. Those threads run to screenprinted numbers on the side which show how many messages their are in the inbox. It counts by binary as well, so if he has three messages for example, he’ll have the “2″ and “1″ illuminated.

Check out the video. It’s pretty neat stuff, and it makes me a little bit jealous.

via fashionablygeek.com

The program doesn’t really do much yet, however, if he keeps working on this and someone bothers porting KDE we might have a fully functional graphical Linux OS on our PSPs soon.

Before you buy a PSP for that special gamer this Holiday season, you have to ask yourself one thing: do they homebrew? If the answer is yes, you better take care not to get a unit with a firmware over 2.0 — otherwise, no hackie. You can determine the firmware version by checking for a letter code above the UPC on the bottom of the box.

A-1.50
B-1.51
C-1.52
D-2.00 Unconfirmed
E-2.00 Unconfirmed (likely 1.52)
F-2.00
G-2.01

Currently the games that are supported (and confirmed) that had the 2.0 perquisite are:

• The Hustle: Detroit Streets
• Harvest Moon
• Pro Evolution Soccer 5

For the original article, updated compatibility list and instructions click on “Visit Site” below.

There are plenty of tools with which you can check your disk space. However, Linux already has a built in function to show you just what you need to know. Open a terminal window or push (ctrl+alt+F1 to go to console) and type:

# df

You will see something like this(your output may be different, depending on how many partitions/harddrives/cdroms you have mounted):

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3 78012484 17606992 56442660 24% /
/dev/hda1 101086 16400 79467 18% /boot
none 516808 0 516808 0% /dev/shm
/tmp 247919 7339 227780 4% /tmp

This one looks a bit unreadable, because size is represented in 1K-blocks, lets try to make it clean and more readable:

# df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3 75G 17G 54G 24% /
/dev/hda1 99M 17M 78M 18% /boot
none 505M 0 505M 0% /dev/shm
/tmp 243M 7.2M 223M 4% /tmp

Now the size is represented by megabytes and gigabytes … better? :) Now let’s create an executable file to show the disk sizes:

#!/bin/sh

DISC=$1
PARTITION=`df -h |grep $DISC |awk ‘{print $1}’`
SIZE=`df -h|grep $DISC|awk ‘{print $2}’`
USED=`df -h|grep $DISC|awk ‘{print $3}’`
FREE=`df -h|grep $DISC|awk ‘{print $4}’`

echo “Partition: $PARTITION”
echo “Total size: $SIZE”
echo “Used space: $USED”
echo “Free space: $FREE”

Simply copy & paste this script into for example into a file named info.sh(create it with VI or JOE or even PICO). Next, you’ll need to make it executable. To do this, use the following command:

# chmod +x info.sh

Now, to execute the file, you need to run it, and pass it the correct argument. For our example, we are going to use hda3. So, to execute the file, type in the command as below….

# ./info.sh hda3

Tadaaa :)

A guy named Matan Gillon has reported that he has successfully managed to boot up Windows 95 on his PSP by porting an open-source emulator called x86 to the portable system.

According to him, Windows 95 takes about 10 minutes to boot up but afterwards it’s pretty usable and you can even run some applications on it, however, for both Windows and Linux, he says you can only do so much with a mouse only, until someone makes a keyboard for the PSP both OSs are pretty limited.

If you’re interested in infesting your little beauty with Microsoft love check out his site and follow his simple instructions.

Original announcement on PSP-Vault.

Too bad the little processor will never be fast enough to handle Tiger…

This site shows you how to use a couple of inputs and XML files to get Google Maps on your own webpages. Not sure how legal this is, but it sure is fun to see people figure these things out.

Even cooler is that you can display custom HTML in the info popup window. Checkout the sample map to see it in action.

I don’t know what CDs come with it or if the drivers are compiled with the OS one but I think I’ll be allright.

If there are any tips, or good programs for laptops like battery management and such you can give I’ll be thankful for them.

One problem that the iTrip has always had is range. Usually once you get it 1-2 feet away from the antenna, you start to lose the clarity and quality of your signal.

Here is a simple “how-to” that shows you how to open up the iTrip and expose the antenna, increasing the strength of the signal and the distance from the antenna you can use it effectively.

Basically, using an exacto or small flat-head screwdriver, pry open the case, cut a notch in the top of it, and run the copper-wire antenna through that, then seal the case back up. Now the antenna is outside of the plastic case, which increases the range.

Link goes to a photogallery of the process.

Only crappy thing is that it requires the manual compilation of some packages, unless of course you have a cool distro that has an awesome package management tool (eg. Debian) then you should be home free.

If I ever get around to doing this I will let you know how it works out.

via Kottke