Tag: hack

Steven Sasson invented the digital camera, then Kodak promptly ignored it

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In 1975, Kodak asked one of its younger employees to play around with charged coupled devices to see what he could make. Turns out Steven Sasson invented the first digital camera: He quickly ordered a couple of them and set out to evaluate the devices, which consisted of a sensor that took an incoming two dimensional light pattern and converted it into an electrical signal. Mr. Sasson wanted to capture an image with it, but the C.C.D. couldn’t hold it because the electrical pulses quickly dissipated. To store the image, he decided to use what was at that time a relatively

It’s like The Grauniad, but for teh Internet!

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Quickly, head over to Stef Lewandowski’s latest hack, tehguardian.com. I was telling Pascal Auberson and Bill Thompson, two of the other hackers about the fact that I owned the domain, and there were about seven of the Guardian team in the room, and well, wouldn’t it be really funny to demo something on-stage that was a hack on their site? And we riffed about what it could be, and somehow we found ourselves laughing about how it would be wonderful to take the piss out of the reputation that the Guardian, probably unfairly nowadays, has for typos in published articles. By inserting our own

Microsoft encourages developers to hack away at Mango

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We say tinker away with Mango and enjoy the juice… But beware the fine print — unlocking phones may void your warranty. Microsoft’s Bill Cox on All Thing D, showing yet again that the Microsoft Dev Team want people to hack around with Windows Phone to see what it can do. Stories like this are going to help developer adoption, detoxify Microsoft, and help build up trust between Redmond and the hackers. Which is a great thing to do. Oh and if you don’t want to hack, they’ve said every phone will get the mango update in the fullness of

Best in Show at Over the Air 2010! Parrot Drones, iPhone controlled racing cars and mad ideas at Over the Air 2010

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Yesterday at the Over The Air hack-a-thon, I was part of the team that won both the Best Hack in Show and the Paypal X Challenge. This is the story of that hack… Picture by Benjamin Ellis. First up, a huge, huge thank you to the rest of my team at the Hack-a-thon from this weekend’s Over The Air Mobile Development event. My hacks traditionally have a huge vision, and that needs an ad-hoc team with a huge range of skills. So to Simon Maddox, Sam Machin, Rachel Clarke, Robert Lee-Cann and Karl Turner my thanks yet again not only