Sometimes you find interesting things in the oddest places.

Like a funnel of crashing foam.

Or a new Jovian moon.

SLED v1.1 Serial RGB LED Lamp

Greetings! This is my last hail-mary #AwesomeAugust post before we roll into the decline and death of Summer here in the Northern Hemisphere.  Not that I mind, the last few weeks have been a bit hot and humid, and I don’t get my summers off to lounge around like some of you whippersnappers.  Behold!  The E-Mail Waiting Light! Yes, you’ve seen others, and there may be many like it, but this one is mine.  And it can be yours as well, if you follow the instructions posted on our Wiki.  This little gem will show everyone whether you are INBOX ZERO – or not.

Check it out here: http://wiki.nycresistor.com/wiki/E-Mail_Waiting_Light

PC Advisor: WPA wireless security cracked in 60 seconds

The WEP standard for encrypting wifi networks has long since been easily crackable. Now the next ‘uncrackable’ standard, WPA, can be cracked in 60 seconds. Expect more and better automatic cracking tools to follow, just like the WEP tools like aircrack-ng, wesside, etc. So apparently, WPA2 is now the gold standard, the one to beat. I’m guessing its only a matter of time.

Additionally, its now getting as easy to crack the GSM encryption used in GSM mobile phones, which is the most popular standard around the world: Huge GSM flaw allows hackers to listen in on voice calls

Its really time to start thinking about network security differently. Laptops are becoming ever more common, more and more phones have wifi, etc. Instead of trying to create a safe network, instead we need to think of our computers and devices as an island in rough seas. If you are smart about it, and follow good practices like turning off any network service that you are not using, you can even run a Windows box directly on the internet without problems.

Last weekend we had a party to celebrate Awesome August. I am sure some folks missed it. That really sucks for them, because it was probably the best party we’ve ever thrown. A great deal of awesome was experienced by all. Awesome beer, awesome projects, and awesome events… all with awesome people. I’ve tossed up a time lapse of the event. Sorry about the flag getting in the way near the end, that’s just bad planning on my part. I promise to do better next time, in fact next time pretty much everything will be better. So look forward to the the next event, it’s going to be epic.

Justin had a really fun project setup using the Spooky Box from last Halloween. Check out the twitter feed from the party here. Source code for this project is coming!

The Lite Bright also built by Justin, ( and a team of dedicated individuals ) was there and enjoyed by all. Here is a shot of it early in the evening before people went crazy with it.

Charles had a station set up with approximately one kilogram of Crayola Model Magic. Guests were encouraged to grab a hunk and make something of their own.

Charles also brought a Wimshurst machine he picked up at a school physics lab and repaired. In this shot we study the effects of electricity on George Washington’s head.

Also making an appearance was Ranjit’s automated piano working together with Eric Skiff’s Monome to produce a really awesome interactive piece.

Jared posted his Photos : Here

We also had a live DJ, and a few other projects I failed to mention. I know I missed a lot. Send me a note and I’ll add it.

Apparently at least more then any other american political group, it’s Opera.

Earlier this month I decided to use Amazon Mechanical Turk to test a hypothesis in which I posited that IE as a browser would bias to the political right, and other browsers (specifically firefox) would bias to the political left.  A lot of other interesting data surfaced including blockbuster performance of Firefox amongst Libertarians. Check out the whole analysis and grab the data!