• One or more wireless headphone sets with rechargeable bases (we used inexpensive Sony RF headphones)
• A soldering iron
• Two channel socket and plug connectors for power
• A miniature slider switch
• Some thin cabling
• Plexiglas and hot glue or other material to build speaker housings
• A dremel or similar to make openings in the speaker housings
  

This week we bring you Part 2 of The Magic Phone How-To: The Circuit. The Magic Phone is a project where both a DECT compatible wireless home phone and a GSM cellphone are placed inside an old rotary phone. In Part 1 of the How-To, we showed you how to reverse engineer the matrix on a phone circuit.

For the rotary mechanism to "push" the buttons on either of the two modern phones, we needed a custom circuit with a PIC microcontroller. If I had created a circuit without printing up a circuit board, the circuit would not have fit inside the rotary phone. So, to help me out, my friend Nicolas Leroy designed a circuit with surface mount components to keep the size down. Read on for the full text and photos of the creation of the circuit.

This How-To is the first in a series of construction instructions for a project titled The Magic Phone. I was inspired by the Port-O-Rotary from Spark Fun but wanted to take the project to the next level and with hardware I already had on hand. You may be able to extrapolate these instructions to different models of telephones, different telephony protocols, and even different projects.

So what makes up The Magic Phone? Basically, I first wanted to encrust a wireless home phone inside a vintage rotary phone. Here in Europe we have a standard for wireless handsets called DECT which has just been approved by the FCC for the US in April of this year. DECT compatibility is fun in a handset because you can take your phone to a conference or office building phone network which can then assign you a number within their DECT network.

The Motorola A780 is a Linux based quad-band GSM phone. Kernel hacker Harald Welte has picked up one of these phones and started poking around in the system. The first thing of note is that the phone doesn't use the typical lightweight tools found in most embedded systems. Instead of busybox or uClibc it uses their heavier counterparts. The phone also has a 2.4 kernel and switching to the 2.6 kernel is a long term goal. Harald has successfully built a compatible toolchain and has netfilter/iptables running on the A780. It should be possible to construct a firewall between the GPRS and the USB connection. Other hackers are working on adding the stock Linux Bluetooth codebase; this may be one of the first phones supporting A2DP stereo headsets. The future looks bright for hackers with new exploitable features emerging everyday like JTAG pads for both processors and debugging callbacks built into the factory code. Harald Welte will be presenting these and future discoveries at the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress in December.

Today's how-to will take you through the steps of getting from DVD to the new iPod (with video) on the Windows platform. Happy portable watching!

We started out with an old modem and ended up with a useful circuit to convert phone audio to regular line audio. This little hack is useful for those of us wanting to record Voip telephone calls for podcasts with good quality audio. Keep in mind that recording telephone calls without notifying all parties involved is against the law in many parts of the world.

What you'll need:
- an old modem with an audio transformer
- a soldering iron
- a throughhole circuit board
- a computer with mini jack audio in (and a Griffin iMic for older macs)
- an extra telephone cable

This in from Paris: Griffin is working full throttle to update its line of products for the iPod nano, for any of you interested. Currently supported products include the PowerJolt car charger, the TuneJuice battery pack, and the RoadTrip; devices being outfitted with the 30 pin iPod connector (instead of the older 4 conductor mini jack and headphone connector) for nano-compatibility include the iFM and the SmartDeck, with nano versions of both the iFM and SmartDeck slated for early November. The new RoadTrip, even though it is compatible today, will also sport an updated form factor for the nano's nano size. Griffin even went on to mention new products designed specifically for nano were on the way, but were reticent to give us info for fear we may release too many details. What? Us? Release details? Naaaaaaah. Besides, isn't that the attitude that cursed Griffin to only now be able to start work on their nano accessory line?

We hit up a Sony Ericsson product rep at this week's Apple Expo in Paris (yeah, it's not just Apple people in attendance), who with a little prodding confirmed for us a couple of rumors about some of their upcoming 3G phones. No (new) pics, but they did reveal that they're working on a new handset codenamed "Sakura," which will be an update to their swivel-style S700/S710 phone, and that the "Hermione", their much-rumored update of the P910, is most definitely on its way. They were able to confirm that the Hermione will have 3G (we're guessing UMTS), as well as a one or two megapixel camera, Bluetooth, and WiFi ("definitely WiFi"). They also mentioned that the keyboard on the Hermione will not flip down like on the P910, but will be on the phone body itself (true to leaked photos), and that the amount of memory on the Hermione will likely be "in the gigabyte range". The "Sakura" is slated to debut in Europe sometime before the end of this year, with the Hermione to follow in the first half of 2006.

Clocking in at a diminutive 5.75 x 5.9-inches with 3.1 x 2.3-inches of active sensing space, is the new mini PenPartner2 tablet by Wacom. Aimed at crumb-and-spill-creating laptop users, the baby of the Wacom family is a Europe only release (it'll run you about €41), and is Windows only and connects via USB (what a shocker, eh?). Yet somehow our desire for this device—even in tempting glossy black—could still be much higher if the active sensing zone were larger by comparison to the total size, but dems the breaks. Guess we'll just have to rock their 21UX 21.3-inch monster in the mean time.

Do you have a messenger bag or backpack you use regularly? Do you have a laptop or other device with wifi in said bag? Wouldn't it be cool to integrate wifi sniffing into your bag and not have yet another device on your keychain? Today we will show you how to take an existing inexpensive passive wifi detector and embed it into the strap of your messenger bag or backpack.

Creativity is the key with this hack! If you have basic soldering and sewing skills, you can finish this mod easily in an afternoon. A flickr stream with annotations for this project is located here. Images with flickr annotations are clickable (i.e. if the image is associated with the flickr stream it will link to to it).

The basic run-down of what we will be doing:
A. Opening up an existing wifi sniffer and desoldering the LED's.
B. Adding extension cables to the LED's so they can be used in the strap instead of on the device.
C. Creating a squishy switch to replace the wifi sniffer's "search for networks" button.
D. Modifying the LED's with small rectangles of plexi and attaching them into slits in the strap.
E. Restitching the strap and attaching the wifi sniffer in a corner of the bag.

We began this story by buying an older graphite 400Mhz G4 tower from ebay.de some months ago. The motherboard and the manufacturing of the AGP G4 series, codenamed "Sawtooth", are in our opinion quite good (i.e. there weren't huge amounts of AGP G4's that failed in weird ways over time). After doing some preliminary reading we found that doing a processor upgrade for a G4 can sometimes require messy heat sink paste. Some other mac proc upgrades use the same heat sink provided with your original proc. We decided on a choice that does not require thermal paste and has a larger new heat sink and fan included: the PowerLogix PowerForce47 G4/2.0GHz with 512K 1:1 L2 Cache Per Processor. (note: we were not remunerated by Powerlogix nor did we receive free merchandise for this how-to nor is this article a review of comparable mac proc upgrades). After some trials and tribulations with the processor upgrade, we simply wanted to put this information out there to help who it may, after all we never enjoy seeing macs in the trash.

In last week's installment, we showed how to get started with Csound.  This week we take it to the next step by constructing a homemade MIDI controller circuit and use the new device to control Csound in real time.

What you will need:
a computer on which you have Csound up and running
a MIDI adapter for your computer (usb to midi adapters are the norm here)
a microcontroller / breadboard / microcontroller programmer (in this example we will show some BX24 sample code)
a MIDI female connector (either a cable or circuit board mount type, also known as 5 pin din)
a 2N2222 NPN transistor
some resistors (10Kohm and 220ohm)
some sort of sensor or button or potentiometer or any combination of the above

Csound is a free language for sound synthesis and processing. It has a rich history and is still used today by musicians, composers and sound designers including Brian Eno, Richard James (aka Aphex Twin), NIN, DJ Spooky, and many more. Why is Csound still in existence today? It is a simple language which veers quickly to complex auditory experiences. This coupled with a quick learning curve has kept Csound a popular audio synthesis language since its creation in 1985 by Barry Vercoe.

This How-To is one of a two part installment. Part One is an introductory leap into Csound. Part Two next week will have you building a physical interface to control a Csound environment via Midi. Please note that this intro is a small daub of paint in the universe that is Csound creation. Many books, entire webpages, and courses have been taught on Csound. This introduction is meant to offer a glimpse into the rich world of audio creation and to hopefully inspire the reader to invest more time in Csound.

When Nokia announced their music player capable phones they neglected to mention the lack of support for external headphones. Since the release of the 6230 and its related family with mp3/aac playback support, many disgruntled users have made their own home-brew cables to plug in headphones. Today we will show one such mod for the Nokia HDS-3 cable. This cable ships with the 6230 and other Nokia phones capable of stereo playback.

Synergy is an open source and free software project that allows one to share a keyboard and mouse across multiple monitors on separate computers and even between different operating systems. You may be a prime candidate for Synergy's superb um... synergy if you code multi-platform software, use more than one computer at home such as a laptop and a tower, or if your computers have different functions (media server, net machine, etc.). Personally we do all of the above and were in dire need of a swift way to dispose of our old keyboards and mice to make way for all sorts of fun new usb gadgetry.