"Hacking is disruptive, and whether you code software, write books, or film movies, I believe bringing anything new into the world is a disruptive act. By being novel and compelling, the new is likely to replace something else and that something else isn’t being replaced without a fight." Great stuff from Rands.

"The Shruthi-1 is a hybrid digital/analog monosynth. Its hardware design is deceptively simple, but the sonic range is wide: sometimes grungily digital like a PPG-Wave, fat and funky like a SH-101, videogame-y like a Commodore 64, weird and warm like an ESQ-1 ; but more often than not, truly original." Looks nice, not expensive at all.

"The Fretless Fader concept involves a cross fader which can move vertically as well as horizontally, allowing an extra parameter to be controlled simultaneously with the traditional fader movement – most notably, pitch. It’s probably best demonstrated in video..." Nice chat about productising this, but seriously, the first video is marvellous - it's "Drunk Trumpet" all over again...

Ben Heck made his own pinball table. And it's not some half-baked pinball table running off a connected PC, with off the shelf components; it's largely built from scratch, from the cabinet to the LED matrix (!). All running off a single microcontroller. He's a smart guy.

"How good is that?" It is super-good, that's how good.

"Cheating is hacking for the masses. It is one of many opportunities to ‘soft programme’ our technologies and culture without heavy reliance on advanced knowledge. Cheating creates an opportunity to play with design, think about it, and tinker around. By effectively unbalancing a game, we can move behind the screen to consider games through their limits. If you put too many assets on screen with the Sonic debug mode, the system would freeze and crash. In this it taught young players an important truth about games; that they aren’t infinite systems, but rather careful gestures reliant on an economy of elements. Cheats of the kind seen in Sonic fostered a generation of gamers to be both critical and respectful of what games are. Knowing that the level is one configuration among many comes from a point of view only afforded through cheating." David Surman is writing more about games, and it is a good thing.

"Yesterday was the inaugural papercamp in London, alongside its big sister bookcamp. I presented a half bookish half paperish presentation about travel guides. What I forgot to mention or make explicit: how there are totally different stages and needs for guide books – especially pre-booking, pre-travel, during travel, during holiday. So here is, from memory, what I talked about, with a few additions:" This was jolly good, an a neat branching point between the Paper and the Books.

"Our tireless multi-touch team is pleased to announce another bit of software meant to make your prototyping life a bit easier, via support for using a wiimote with our flash API to quickly turn any TV or projection surface into a multi-touch environment" Nice, simple, hacky.

"The Fuzebox is a fully open-source, DIY 8-bit game console. It is designed specifically for people who know a little bit of programming to expand into designing and creating their own video games and demos. A full-featured core runs in the background and does all the video and audio processing so that your code stays clean and easy to understand." Ooh, that could be interesting.

"As we move into a world in which we can manufacture things as cheaply as we print them, the skills that tinkerers develop-- not just their ability to play with stuff, or to use particular tools, but to share their ideas and improve on the ideas of others-- will be huge." Lots of good reflections from "Tinkering As A Mode Of Knowledge".

"My election party tomorrow will feature DMX controlled RGB LED lighting. The color of the house should reflect the electoral balance. The color will start purple, and drift toward either red or blue, depending on who’s winning." Awesome.

"Flaming Lips vocalist-guitarist Wayne Coyne brought with him what he dubbed the 'Guitar Hero guitar,' an Epiphone double-neck with the lower, six-string neck replaced by a five-button variant and wired to an oscillator. '[It's] because a lot of kids out there think this is actually the way you play guitar...'" Awesome.

"DS brut is an open source hardware prototyping platform for the Nintendo DS, developed by and for electronics enthusiasts, artists and game developers. By connecting the Nintendo DS to the outer world, the game console can be easily hooked up to a variety of sensors (e.g. GPS receivers) and can itself control all different kinds of actuators, servo motors and others."

"Very recently an anonymous poster on /b/ claimed to have hacked Sarah Palin's Yahoo e-mail account." 4chan members get into Sarah Palin's barely-disguised Yahoo mail accounts which she used for business.

"Having successfully built a soundchip out of a microcontroller together with my friends in kryo, I wanted to tackle the greater challenge of generating a realtime video signal along with the sound." Wow. An ATMega88 turned into a demo platform.

A brief - but useful - guide to getting data out of the Wii Nunchuck.

16x2 LCD and a d-pad, all wired up as an Arduino shield. Slap it on, and off you go. Looks fun.

"The EnerJar is an easy-to-build device that accurately measures the power draw of electrical appliances" Delightful - lovely form-factor (in itself, an act of recycling), simple to build, genuine usefulness. More like this, please.

the_decapitator: he finds ordinary bus-shelter adverts, and then graphically - and entertainigly - decapitates someone in them. entertaining! subversive! hurrah for culture hacking.

These rust and scratch stickers are designed to make your beautiful bike/car look rusted and scratched so that passing thieves assume it's not worth stealing due to its apparent shabbyness.

"For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon's unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid "illegal restorers"... pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s." Awesome

Using the Wiimote with Processing, Max/MSP, and a whole load of other things (via OSC) on Mac OS. Fun!

"Build the Models Your Parents Warned You Against". Sounds awesome!

"WWW::Mechanize and Hpricot on Steroids". An interesting looking screenscraping library; I'm a big fan of both HPricot and Mechanize, so it'll be interesting to put this to use at some point.

"From basic electronics to advanced computer hardware, you'll learn the magic behind the gear that makes it all run." PDF only, due for publication this month (August 2007). Could be interesting.

Earlier draft of subsequent book