Find Our Latest Video Reviews on YouTube!
If you want to stay on top of all of our video reviews of the latest tech, be sure to check out and subscribe to the Gear Live YouTube channel, hosted by Andru Edwards! It’s free!
Verizon doesn’t want you to use your EV-DO phones as BlueTooth modems, but really - who cares what they want? While it was previously thought impossible, DavesiPaq has put up information on how to hack into your Samsung i730 to use it as an EV-DO modem over BlueTooth or USB. Like many other phones, it involves using the username “yourtendigitnumber@vzw3g.com” with the password “vzw”. Unfortunately, there is a lot more to this. Check them out for the full details.
Read More 
| Samsung i730 EV-DO Modem Instruction
Edit: The issue between DavesiPaq and engadget has been cleared up. Aside from that, the comment above did not come across correctly, and shouldn’t have been made in the first place.
The wonderful people over at ReadyMade just posted one of the greatest bio-hacks I’ve seen yet - the RE-CLINE sofa. Check out these instructions detailing how to make a sofa out of sod for your backyard. Perfect for those lazy summer nights when you are out watching the stars. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to keep your couch trimmed though!
Read More | Re-Cline
Advertisement
So I know that Japan is renowned for it’s zen mentality, and ninja hoards, but this is amazing. Some people in Japan have made an art form of carving pencils into various shapes and chains. These are all normal pencils that have been painstakingly carved. I can’t begin to imagine the tools used, or how steady a hand this takes!
Read More | Pencil carvings
Read More | More pencil carvings
Latest Gear Live Videos
Check it out - this guy removed the casing a standard Nintendo Entertainment System, and put the innards into a custom-built LEGO shell. The result was a fully playable LEGO-ized retro NES. Double retro!
Read More | Spoocher
This is yet another cool way to waste time at the office. The instructions for building your very own Office Bow of Death have arrived - you can destroy those in cubicles across the office after building this contraption. The best part is that it is made of supplies you can find in just about any corporate environment.
Read More | Office Bow of Death
Now this is neat - Playfeed has a story on a Flickr plug-in for Xbox Media Center. Basically, it gives you just about every Flickr function available from the website within the confines of the XBMC application. To install the plug-in, you just download it and FTP it into the Xbox.
Read More | Playfeed
Crazy J - The Guitar Playing Machine
Posted by Oscar M. Cantu Categories: Misc. Tech, Mods / Hacks, Music,
This is a pretty awesome project involving some electronics and a musical instrument. The guitar player is composed of two mechanical systems that interact to play a range of 29 musical notes. A plucking mechanism with six independently controlled picks is mounted over the body of the guitar and a fingering mechanism with an array of 23 fingertips is mounted over the first four frets of the fingerboard.
Read More | Crazy J Guitar Playing Machine
Chalk up a victory for people the world over who spend an hour picking a spot to hang a picture, hammering in the nail, then staring at it to be sure it is even. The Picture Wall Company sells the Perfect Picture Wall - basically a lifehack comprised of a one sheet template that you affix to your wall with adhesive. Follow the template instructions which show you where to place ten included frames, and you are set. You can score one for $349 USD shipped.
Read More | Perfect Picture Wall via Cool Hunting
This just sounds cool, although I think it might be something that I use once or twice, and then never use again. Nonetheless, I am sure there are people out there who could come up with some great uses for a Roomba API:
What sort of add-ons could you have for the Roomba?
Angle: For the Roomba, there is a group that’s working very seriously and looking at the idea of using the Roomba as a physical avatar. I might log into a Web page and see what the robot sees, hear what the robot hears and be able to drive the robot from my Web page. Over time, there’ll be probably more of this type of interest. The rate at which it becomes economically interesting? I’ve no idea. We’re putting up the APIs and doing what we can to encourage people.
So maybe it was a little too hard to make a Skype phone, with all the tweaking and testing required. Now here’s a great DIY for anyone that loves Skype and other VoIP apps but hate the funky looking headsets. If you’re not too afraid to solder some wires and love to put things together, this tutorial will show how to save some dough and make your own Chat-Cord. A Chat-Cord allows you to connect regular telephones to your computer to use with Skype and similar applications – you can even use cordless handsets. Imagine being able to talk to your friends through the use of Skype all over your house with the use of a cordless handset – how cool is that? You can be sure we’ll making one of our own.
Read More | Grynx
