Hacktastico!

This is the beginning of a hopefully reoccurring segment called Found Hacks, where I bring up some cool hacks and mods I’ve found on other websites.

Today’s Found Hack is from spritemods.com [via HackedGadgets]. It presents step-by-step instructions on making a hardware dongle that attaches to an HP printer and changes what the display reads.

“A nice thing about the HP laserjets is that they have a little display, and you can use PJL, a sort of controlling language, to change what’s displayed on it, using a bit of code that runs on a PC.

For the microcontroller itself, I decided on my good old pal the ATTiny2313. I could have used an other avr, but I’ve got dozens of this type laying around and theyre cheap enough, so I decided on this one.”

This is a really cool hack and I can’t wait to try it out.

Also: There is a software hack to do this sort of thing over a network. It’s a little less safe because you could mess things up pretty bad.

As a budding fixie rider, I’ve often  found myself searching Craigslist daily for the best deals on parts for the bike I’m building. This is kind of cumbersome because I have to scan through a whole bunch of posts before I find something that’s actually close to what I’m looking for. I figured that there had to be a better way for me to keep track of what was popping up in craigslist.

The answer is RSS feeds.

An RSS feed is sort of like the updating headlines you sometimes see on news websites. We will be using RSS feeds to keep an updated list of a certain search term on Craigslist. This method can be applied to any RSS feed in particular, but a tutorial on this use was requested of me. To start, go to your local Craigslist site and type in the search bar what you want to keep track of. For this example, I’ll use turntables.

First go to your local craigslist site and type in whatever you’re looking for in the search box to the left.

Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the orange RSS button on the lower right. Also, if you wanted to track only those items in a certain price range, you could do so by typing in your range at the top of the page before clicking the RSS button.

You will then be brought to a new page that will look a bit different than the normal Craigslist page. Make sure you’re using Live Bookmarks, then click the “Subscribe Now” button.

A small window will pop up asking you what you’d like to name the feed. I’d suggest something short, but descriptive because you will only be able to see about 16 or 17 characters once it’s in you toolbar.  Finally, check to make sure that the folder selected is the “Bookmarks Toolbar” folder. This way, you wont have to dig through your bookmarks to find your feed.

Click subscribe.

Congratulations, you now have an auto-updating Craigslist RSS feed!