Lab tip for power connectors

Hi there! Today I'll show you a simple but very useful tip for your hacking sessions in your home lab or local maker/hackerspace.

Probably sometimes you want to power some device from your laptop's USB or phone charger, but the device has a DC barrel power connector and there you go and make a USB A to DC barrel connector. Then, in some other day you actually need the same thing but with a micro USB, or a mini USB, or a USB B, or a thinner barrel connector, or a larger connector, or alligator clips, or a longer cable, or a shorter one, and so on... The problem is that after some time you'll end up with lots of connector converter cables and you'll still find yourself needing a different connector converter cable. Well, I'm going to share with you a simple solution to avoid making lots and lots of cables.

(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)

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Record Audio playing in your computer

Hi! In this post I'm going to explain you one of those things that the music industry doesn't want you to know: how to record audio playing in your computer. :)

Some years ago, back in the days when I was still using Micro$oft Windows XP, I remember that in the sound properties there was an option named "stereo mix" that would allow you to do record the audio being sent to the output of your sound card. However, from what I've read some time ago, that useful option has vanished from the sound controls in more recent versions of Micro$oft Windows.

When I heard about it I started wondering why would they remove a useful feature from the audio options. I googled about it and the history is that the music industry made some pressure next to sound card manufacturers, Micro$oft and Apple so that they would drop that feature in hardware and software, so that people wouldn't be able to copy music. If the history is true or false, I do not now, but, honestly, it wouldn't surprise me and certainly is a kind of measure that fits within the spirit of SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, etc. : limiting the freedom of people to get money at all cost.

However, using linux gives you back that freedom. Moreover, using the audio-recorder application you can do it in an even better way! :)

(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)

The audio-recorder application allows you to record audio being played by any program of your choice, instead of the final sound card output mix. To install it you can download the appropriate package for your Ubuntu version and computer architecture (32- or 64-bit) here.

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