Bag of Beans

Use this handy site to calculate how much caffeine you’ve had.

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Engadget has a fascinating series of articles on lock security and lock picking.

The most popular locking mechanism in the world utilizes the pin tumbler design, first developed 4000 years ago in Egypt and then rediscovered and perfected a century and a half ago by Linus Yale. There are billions of these locks in the world and they come in all sizes, configurations, and security ratings. Some are secure; most are not, and even some high security rated cylinders can be easily compromised. All that is required to open many times of pin tumbler cylinders — the kind of lock that probably keeps the bad guys out of your home — is a bump key and a tool for creating a bit of force. The bump key shown above opens an extremely popular five pin lock, and the plastic bumping tool is produced by Peterson manufacturing, although many others are now being offered for sale. With these two cheap implements, anyone — and I do mean anyone — can get into your home or business in a matter of seconds.

• The Lockdown: Locked, but not secure (Part I)
• The Lockdown: Locked, but not secure (Part 2)
• The Lockdown: Locked, but maybe secure (part 1)
• The Lockdown: Locked, but maybe secure (part 2)

Related:

• Locksport International Guide to Lock Picking
• The Document Which Used To Be Called The MIT Guide to Lock Picking

Engadget has posted a great how-to for building an A/V switch box.

While “solid state” may bring bring to mind electronics from the 60s (or, in some cases, yet-unreleased flash hard drives), but in this case it simply means the actual switching is done with circuitry, not mechanically. Ironically, the circuits are activated with a mechanical switch, but they could be controlled electronically if you were so inclined.

In this How-To we’ll show you how to wire up your own A/V switcher which you can expand and use any way you’d like, for composite, S-Sideo, component, even VGA signals. Sure, you can buy a newer, really expensive TV’s with multiple inputs (even component), but for those of us whose credit cards aren’t quite up to that challenge, more inputs for less cash would be rather desirable. Let’s get started!

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