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I saw on ladyada’s site a new SIM reader project she cooked up, it looked cool so I decided to give it a shot. You can view the project here: http://ladyada.net/make/simreader/index.html

I have put together my copy, but I forgot to order two parts when I placed my order with Mouser. So once I order them I can test it out. Here is a pic of the completed product (save, the two missing parts).

If you would like to purchase this kit (or just the PCBs), you may visit Adafruit.

I’m not a big fan of bluetooth and I’ve only used it like five times on my old Pocket PC, but I have seen some cool things come from it, mostly exploits.

I found this awesome how-to that lets you snoop onto those bluetooth enabled phone earset thingys. You can even do it when the person isn’t using it for a call to hear what it going on around them. Talk about some high tech eavesdropping.

Needless to say, once I get some bluetooth gear, I will definately try this out.

Check out the video here on WonderHowTo.com

So a little update on the spy cam not that anyone cares, but I got a little bored and worked on it some more today and i have a couple other different ones in the works too. what I’m going to do next is mount it inside of a hat and maybe mod the screen to flip down from the bill of the hat or a dual screen hat with front and rear view. I also plan to make the camera cable longer on one of them and make sort of a pseudo fiber optic cam for peering around corners and under doorways and such.

I was listening to Newsreal yesterday and heard about the daily hack and I decided I would post mine which I’m sorta proud of.

So I’m sitting at home just after the holidays and I’m waiting for some batteries to charge so I can go play with a couple of new R/C cars that I picked up at Toys-R-Us.

My idea was to strap an old digital video camera on top of one of them. It started off with me actually scotch taping the old digital camera to the top of the R/C car and setting it to record while I drove it around, which was kinda neat, but then I started thinking of ways that I could control it remotely. I ended up buying a few more parts and putting together something really cool that can be used for exploring all sorts of places you’re not supposed to be.

In the pics you can see some of the variations of the remote cam car that I put together.

Parts included a VR headset from Sharper Image that sports two tiny LCD screens at a resolution of 640×480, I connected it to the wireless 2.4gHz camera receiver and powered the receiver via a portable Black and Decker battery pack about the size of the receiver itself.

I stripped a couple of the other R/C cars for parts like radio receiver and servo motors and then mounted the camera to one of the extra drive gears. Next, I mounted the receiver and servo motor from the extra car onto the main camera car so that i would be able to turn the camera a full 360 via remote control.

Some of the parts took some dremmel modding, drilling, and grinding to fit just right but when it was all finished it worked like a charm. The camera get about a 300 foot range out in the open, a little less if you’re inside a building with obstructions, and it also sports IR leds for night vision which gets about 30 feet of vision in total darkness, and it also has a 5 hour rechargeable lithium ion battery.

All in all this little project has turned out to be very fun and gets a lot of reactions from people when I take it out in public. I can also split the feed and have it hooked up to my Archos player for recording or I have it connected to my HP 2133 mini note UMPC that I can throw in a back pack and tether to my cell phone and allow the video feed to be viewed remotely via online and control the laptop with a mini bluetooth pda keyboard that I keep folded up in my pocket.

For the more curious types of people, there has always been the want to find out what kind of data is hidden on those mag stripes on the back of your drivers license, credit cards, and other ID cards. I’ve been dabbling in magstripe gear for a couple of years now and it’s really astonishing the kind of info they will put onto a college ID card.

What do you need to read magstripe cards? Only a card reader and some free open source software. You can even make a reader if you want to save money!

Once you’ve got a reader and the software, it’s really easy to use. Depending on which reader you have, you either have to run StripSnoop in character mode (if your reader connects through your keyboard port) or just run it normally if you have a serial card reader. To run it in character mode, just use -c for the arguments when you run the program. Once you run the program, all you have to do is run your card through your reader and it will output the data that is on that card.

There are a few things to keep in mind. Depending on your reader, you may or not see all the info. If you have a track one reader, it will only read track one (of the three on the card), if you’ve a track two reader, you’ll only see track so and so on. There are only three tracks on magstripe cards.

I’ve been told if you just move the card up a few millimeters you can read another track, but that has yet to work for me and my two readers.

For information on how to read the data that is given to you with StripeSnoop, please see this documentation:

Track Format of Magnetic Stripe Cards

Magnetic Stripe Examples: standard cards