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A month ago, we saw a marvelous demonstration of troll physics from YouTube user [Fredzislaw100]. In his video, we saw a circuit of three switches and three LEDs wired in series and but not acting like the should. A lot of the comments for this post elicited reasonable explanations like modifying the battery or pure camera wizardry via After Effects. Thankfully, [Alan] stepped in and showed us how it was done. The solution uses two AC power sources with diodes in two of the switches and LEDs and inductors in the third pair. [Alan]‘s build was rather large compared to the original video, so we were wondering how this circuit could be made invisible.

[Fredzislaw100] just posted a video on how he did it. Like [Alan]‘s build, it uses two AC power sources, diodes, and inductors. In contrast to every single guess about where the circuit is hidden, the majority of the build is inside the battery connector. [Fredzislaw] did some amazing work hiding a 74LV132 quad NAND Schmitt trigger inside the battery connector. The diodes were easily hidden on LEDs 1 and 3 with some red nail polish, but we’re amazed by the inductor built into the LED seen in the title pic.

So there you go. With a ton of electronics know-how and an extremely steady hand (and a microscope), you too can build your own troll circuit. Check out the video after the break.

[Jaroslav's] camera didn’t have a feature to measure the speed of its response in different modes so he figured out his own method. Using the microphone on his webcam he recorded the sound made by the mirror and shutter movements, then used Audacity to analyze the camera’s performance.

When you get right down to it, this is a fantastic idea. Audacity, the open source audio editing suite, has the ability to show each captured audio track next to each other. That makes it easy for you to precisely align the clips, and has in-build time measuring features with fantastic resolution.

He tested a whole bunch of different settings on a Canon EOS600D DSLR camera. In the image above you can see him comparing performance between different ISO settings. He also looks into different brands and sizes of SD storage cards, as well as the time difference when storing raw image data versus JPEG encoded data.

Even though abstract expressionism died out several decades ago, robots are still chugging along dripping nihilistic pigment onto a cold, uncaring canvas. [Liat] and [Assaf] created a robot named The Originals Factory to create paintings in the style of abstract expressionism, a style of painting that is arguably best represented by [Jackson Pollock] and his ‘drip paintings.’

The build is surprisingly simple – there are four containers filled with C,M,Y, and K pigments. Pumps transport these paints to a print head mounted on an aluminum rail above a canvas. The software portion of the build is rather interesting. Instead of pixels, the image is rendered in ‘vixels’ – vertical lines of a specific length and color. Although we don’t see any examples of more precise work, [Liat] tells us The Originals Factory can be used to plot graphs on the canvas.

Check out a video of The Originals Factory squirting paint down a canvas after the break.

Lenovo is offering the IdeaPad A1 tablet for under $200 again, Newegg has a few good deals on refurbished Andorid tablets, and J&R is knocking $70 off the base price of a 13.3 inch Asus ultrabook (although it's still pretty expensive). Here's a roundup of some the day's best deals on mobile devices. Lenovo IdeaPad A1 7" Android 2.3 tablet...

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Deals of the Day (1-27-2012) is a post from: Liliputing

News has been bubbling today about Jon Rubenstein’s departure from HP. While we’re sure there will be all sorts of speculation surrounding his leaving, it seems that he has just decided to take some much-deserved time off after spending almost …

Barnes & Noble has been playing a bit of cat and mouse game with NOOK Tablet hackers. When the company released the 7 inch Android tablet in November, it didn't take long for hackers to figure out how to sideload apps, root the tablet, and even install the Android Market. Then Barnes & Noble pushed out a software update which...

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Root a NOOK Tablet with just an SD card is a post from: Liliputing

It’s not $99 or $149 as in the famous HP firesale, but Woot! has refurbished 32 GB HP TouchPads for sale right now.

It’s kind of strange that Woot! has the TouchPads on sale today, since it has been reported …

It's tough to find a high quality tablet for less than $100 now that HP has cleared its inventory of discontinued TouchPad tablets. But there are a growing number of not-entirely-awful tablets that can be yours for less than a hundred bucks. One of the latest additions to that category is the IdolPad form Idolian. It's a 7 inch tablet...

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Meet the IdolPad, a $100 Android tablet that doesn’t look altogether awful is a post from: Liliputing

This temperature display may not knock your socks off, but it’s a simple demonstration of how you can used vector graphics as a web readout for data (translated). [Luca] wrote this four page tutorial to help others, he makes it look really easy, and the sky’s the limit on eye candy once you get he basics in place.

The first step is to create the dynamic SVG (vector graphic) file using Inkscape that will be used by the webpage. This starts with a static background, in this case the grey parts of the thermometer which will not change. Over the top the blue parts were added, with just a bit of XML editing to give those parts a hook which will be used in the next step. The demo above will have a moving blue bar and changing numeric output to match data coming in from a temperature sensor.

An SVG file is just a text file that is rendered as a graphic when loaded. [Luca] shows you how to used the identifiers set up when making the graphic to dynamically change the size and value of the blue parts with server-side PHP before sending the graphic to the browser. With that in place you just need to give the PHP file access to the data. He shows how to use the Pachube API but you could just as easily get this via serial or otherwise.

Microsoft's Kinect system adds motion-sensing technology to the Xbox 360 game console, allowing you to use your entire body as a game controller. The software company will start shipping a Kinect for Windows system in February for $249, allowing new forms of input for Windows-based software. Now Microsoft is also reportedly working to develop a Kinect system that works with...

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Microsoft bringing Kinect motion sensing to Windows 8 laptops is a post from: Liliputing

Research firm Strategy Analytics estimate that about 10.5 million Android tablets were shipped in the fourth quarter of 2011. That's more than a 300 percent jump from a year earlier, and the increase in Android tablet shipments means that Android devices now make up about 39 percent of overall tablet sales. But one thing that wasn't in Strategy Analytics original...

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Amazon and B&N tablets could account for 40 percent of Android tablet sales is a post from: Liliputing

If you’d like a pseudo-mechanical way of producing a droning synthesizer sound, [gijs] is your man. He made a small synthesizer out of nothing but an old hard drive and a few components.

Whenever a disk platter is spun manually, the spindle motor inside the drive produces a few out of phase sine waves on its connections. [gijs]‘ synthesizer compares and amplifies these sine waves and sends them out to a speaker. The result is a strange droning chiptune-esque arpeggio.

The circuit for the build is soldered directly to the hard drive enclosure Manhattan style. Because the output of the spindle motor produces out of phase sine waves, [gijs] thought it would be a good idea if he could capitalize on some phase interference to alter the timbre of his synth. The entire build is mounted to a wall with hinges to one side so the speaker can be moved around. It isn’t much of a change, but we can here some wave forms cancelling each other out.

Check out the video of the build after the break. There’s also a few audio samples available on the project page.

Motorola started taking pre-orders for its latest Android tablets a few weeks ago. Now the company has actually started shipping the Motorola XYBOARD 8.2 and 10.1 tablets. Motorola is selling the WiFi-only versions of the tablet, but Verizon will also offer models with 4G LTE mobile broadband. All told there are four different models available: 8.2 inch tablet with 16GB...

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Motorola XYBOARD WiFi tablets now shipping is a post from: Liliputing

Tizen has been getting a bit of press this month over a possible merger with Samsung’s Bada Operating system. If you’re not familiar with Bada, it’s not actually an operating system, it’s actually middleware. Bada is an application framework that …

In the interests of open communication in shared spaces, [dan] made a public text box that serves as a terminal to the @publictextbox twitter account. We could see something like this being useful in a hackerspace or other hang out to announce to the world the happenings of the resident makers and builders.

The software setup is very simple and can run on just about any old computer you might have lying disused in a corner. The app is built with Processing, and the code is extremely simple and easily modifiable. Even though the case is a lovely cardboard number, the Twitter Box can be dressed up as any imaginable form. We’d love to see a nice TARDIS blue, but we’ll leave that up to [dan].

You can check out the demo of the Twitter phone box after the break. Alternatively, you could re-tweet this post and take part in a load test for the @publictextbox.

Samsung and Apple have been busy going at each other in patent suits and Friday a German court has ruled that Apple hasn’t violated one of Samsung’s technical patents as part of a broader patent dispute.

“We are disappointed that …