Hacking The Korg Monotron

Make Magazine’s Collin Cunningham takes a look at hacking the Korg Monotron – one of the most popular platforms for basic synth DIY projects.
Some people think it’s the best analog synth that Korg makes. Some people say it’s the only analog synth that Korg makes. Either way – hacking it makes it better. 
If you like Cunningham’s intro to Korg Monotron hacking, you’ll want to check out 2CV’s video, below, which looks at adding control-voltage inputs and offers some extended audio demos.

Tattoos, Rolex Watches And Hacking: 10 Things We Just Learned About Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey

Jack Dorsey, the inventor and chairman of Twitter and co-founder of Square, just got the Vanity Fair treatment in a long (and awesome) profile by Facebook Effect author David Kirkpatrick.

If you don't have the time to go through it, here's a few things we noted:

His dream job is to be Mayor of New York.

This is a well-known part of Twitter lore, but Dorsey has been fascinated with cities and maps since he was a boy and sees his work to date as exploring the life of cities and human networks.

He's the second largest individual shareholder in Twitter; his "personal wealth" is probably above $300 million.

The first thing he does every morning is to text his Mom—kudos.

He has a 9 inch tattoo on the forearm which represents an integral (a math function).

Dorsey was always a gifted programmer. As a college student, to get a job at a dispatch software company, he hacked into the company's website and emailed the CEO and Chairman about the job; he was flown in within the week and offered a job.

In between working on dispatch software and Twitter, Dorsey became a licensed massage therapist and took classes in sewing and fashion.

In order to get Square employees to understand the importance of design and beauty, he takes them on weekly tours of museums and art galleries to look at "beautiful things".

Jim McKelvey, Dorsey's Square cofounder, was actually the owner of the company that gave Dorsey his first job at 15.

He wears Prada suits and likes Rolex watches, because they're one of the few watch brands which make all components themselves. (Have you thought about Patek Philippe, Jack?)

Here's the full profile →
Tags: Jack Dorsey, Twitter, Square | Get Alerts for these topics »

PS3 Modern Warfare 2 Hacking Patch Due March 8th

Just a tidbit before bedtime, as we know you guys are tired from all the Gran Turismoing and Resident Eviling*. Tweeting a few minutes ago, Infinity Ward’s Fourzerotwo has confirmed that “buggy as a buggy thing” (to some), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is due an update next week that should address the game’s now infamous exploits. Mr. Bowling tweeted:

Just received word that we expect the latest Modern Warfare 2 patch for PlayStation 3 to be available March 8th worldwide. Addresses hacking.

Xbox 360 and PC releases are currently pending.

*That doesn’t make me sound old at all.

CATANIA AIRPORT WEBSITE HACKED, MOROCCAN SUSPECTED

(AGI) Catania - The Postal & Communications Police Department of Catania, coordinated by the city's DA office, has a suspect.
The person investigated is a 22-year old Moroccan national residing in Lucca, who is considered to be responsible for the hacking attack that made inaccessible for a few hours the Websites of the Catania airport, of Confindustria's Catania offices and of several more important companies. The suspect is thought to be responsible for having illegally accessed the information system, damaging the data. After perpetrating a "defacement" type of attack, the hacker had boasted about his criminal act on a fundamentalist Islamic Website. Assistant Prosecutor Giuseppe Toscano and Deputy Prosecutor Vincenzo Serpotta issued several search warrants against the suspect and other people in his close circle of relations. The searches were executed by the Postal Police agents in collaboration with the men of the DIGOS (Security Police). . .

13 Nevada students charged in grade-changing scheme, allegedly hacked into school computer

19-year-old Tyler Coyner is suspected of stealing the password to the grade system at Pahrump Valley High School and selling it to 12 other students.
(Credit: WCBS)
(CBS/AP) LAS VEGAS - It has been the dream of many a high school student to change his or her grades with the click of a button. Apparently, 13 Nevada students attempted to do just that, and they got busted.

Nye County sheriff's deputies arrested the teens, who were allegedly part of a hacking scheme that let them change their own grades on their high school computer system.

Police named 19-year-old Tyler Coyner as the ringleader of the group. He is suspected of stealing the password to the grading system at Pahrump Valley High School, and then selling it to at least 12 other students.

Coyner changed his grades enough to qualify as the school's salutatorian in 2010, when he graduated from high school, police say.

After he gave himself the grades to get into college, he teamed up with 19-year-old Matthew Miller and a third student who was not identified because he is a minor, to steal a television from a Walmart in Pahrump to take with them to college.

Kinects in the Classroom: Hacking Meets Teaching

When you think of hacking, school assignments probably aren't the first thing that come to mind. But then again, you're probably not in Golan Levin's Interactive Art & Computational Design course at Carnegie Mellon University.

Earlier in the week, we covered a couple projects from the class involving hacking Microsoft's Kinect controller for Xbox 360. While Kinect hacking has been a popular topic in hacking and DIY circles (and here at GeekTech), it isn't something one normally thinks of as a topic of study, but Professor Levin worked the Kinect into his curriculum as a way for students to get creative--and to learn something in the process.
The Assignment

In late January, Levin assigned his students to "[create] a system that responds to signals or information interactively, in real-time." That is, the students were to write a program that could analyze the content of a video feed, and insert interactive elements depending on the video's content.

This is basically the concept behind augmented reality (AR), but not all AR software goes quite this far (many AR smartphone apps, for example, just overlay location information over video captured by the phone's camera): Levin's students would have to write programs that could recognize human forms or objects, in addition to simply overlaying items over video.

Students Nisha Kurani and John Horstman designed a hack that would make the "Boo" ghost from Super Mario Bros. follow you.

Levin had his class break up into groups, and he had a dozen Kinects for his students to use. The students then had roughly two and a half weeks to complete their projects.

And the results are impressive.
Why the Kinect

Levin cites Kinect hacks--many of which we've covered in this very blog--as the inspiration for this assignment.

"The Kinect sensor is an ideal teaching tool. It makes altogether new forms of interactions possible, it is inexpensive and it is readily available," Levin told me in an e-mail. "I was inspired by all of the numerous artistic projects and research investigations produced by individual hackers and coders all over the world--projects which, in my opinion, are more interesting than any of the commercially available software 'intended' for the Kinect. "

His students used various open-source programming toolkits to complete their projects, including the Processing programming language (which has been used to program various other Kinect hacks), as well as OpenFrameworks and Cinder. In the case of the project we showed you yesterday, some students also used other related tools, such as the ofxKinect add-on for OpenFrameworks.

Comic Kinect: for all those who wish life was a comic book from Maya Irvine on Vimeo.
Tools Aren't Quite There...Yet

But while these programming tools can be used to hack a Kinect, as Levin notes, they're less than ideal: "The main problem has been the unavailability of proper drivers and APIs for the Kinect. Microsoft has promised a Kinect SDK for release at an unspecified time this spring, but they're late to their own party. As of this moment, most of the Kinect libraries that we had to use were essentially hacked together by individual artists and hackers in the FLOSS community."

The Future

We here at GeekTech have been impressed by what hackers have been able to do with the Kinect with kludged-together, unofficial programming tools, and it might be just a taste of what's possible. As Levin put it, "The Kinect is a game-changer for all applications that use computer vision. So it (and other depth cameras) will have a massive impact in that area."

In this case, Levin says that the "class's objective was not (necessarily) to be practical, but rather, to expand the vocabulary of human interactions," but we've seen a number of other research projects that could one day prove practical, such as the Minority Report-style interface from MIT researchers, and the Magic Mirror hack, which could help medical students visualize the parts of a human body.

Although the Kinect itself is just a gaming peripheral, the underlying technology is capable of much more, and we can't wait to see what lies ahead.

Update March 5, 2011; 10:44PM PST: The story as originally published stated that Microsoft released the non-commercial SDK in late February, but that it came too late for Professor Levin's class. This is not the case: Microsoft announced in late February that the non-commercial SDK will be available sometime this Spring. We apologize for the confusion, and regret the error

Motorola Atrix 4G: Hacked To Work With All HDMI Connections

if you have just picked up your Motorola Atrix 4G smartphone but didn’t pick up the docking station that turns it into a laptop then you will be pleased to know that it has recently been hacked to work with all HDMI connections.

We have recently been talking about a few different devices that have been customized, hacked and overclocked such as the NES console that has had a makeover, an HTC Inspire that has been overclocked to 1.8GHz, the Motorola Xoom that has been overclocked to 1.5GHz and of course a NOOK Color running Android Honeycomb 3.0.

With all that in mind and these achievements mainly by the talented guys on the XDA forums it shouldn’t have been too difficult to hack the Atrix. It would seem that it wasn’t either. Phandroid’s Kevin Krause has written an article saying that ‘Fenny’ has made the necessary modifications to the APK files to run the Motorola Atrix 4G’s Webtop functionality enabling the functionality to run to any HDMI connection along with a few other bits so have a read.

If this interests you then head over to the XDA forums and follow Fenny’s instructions, there are many people replying saying that it works really well so it sounds pretty good. Will you be giving it a go?

What do you think of the work the guys at the XDA forum do? Will you be hacking your Atrix 4G? Let us know in the comments section below.

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