hack » HunterDavis.com

Build Your Own Hide-A-Tablet Book

Hacking, Hacking and Robotics, News, Personal 2 Responses »

May 062011

As you probably already know, I’ve got quite a thing for mobile devices. My newest favorite is the Tegra 2 powered Viewsonic G-Tablet. Load up a custom ROM and an overclocked kernel and you’ve got a dual core 1.5ghz android tablet that’ll run with the best of them. Like most of the higher end tablets though, it’s pricey and easy to recognize. This makes it a pretty choice target for thieves. Rather than lower the usability of the device and leave it at home, I set out to disguise the tablet in some fashion. After browsing through the tablet cases available, I figured I could do just as well by building a hide-a-book. And that’s what I did! Read on for the full tutorial.

How I Saved For My Startup – Free E-book Released

News, Personal No Responses »

Nov 082010

Ideas are wonderful things. They can inspire us to work harder, dream harder, live harder. The ideas we have, these are free. Servers cost money. Health insurance costs money. Employees, computers, conference rooms, software licenses, these things cost money. Big time. So when you’re looking to nurture an idea into a business, these costs can seem daunting. For those not interested in (or who have no opportunity for) traditional funding methods such as angel investing and bank loans, how do you actually accumulate the funds necessary to really free your idea? This is the question I asked myself in late 2008. Flash forward to 2010. I’m the CEO of a (becoming successful) startup, completely bootstrapped. How did I go from cubicle worker (and part time hacker) to CEO (and full time hacker)?

front cover

Read on for the exciting preamble and the free E-book download of “Live for Free – The Chronicles of a Nerd Saving for a Startup”

rexVM – A virtualBox Appliance for Developing for The REX 6000

Hacking, News, Personal, Programs 13 Responses »

Aug 232010

As most of you readers probably know, I have been terribly remiss in my postings of late. That isn’t to say that I haven’t been hacking. Oh no. Bootstrapping a startup requires hacking all over the place. During the past week alone I’ve

Gotten to know my franchise tax agent on a first name basis
Authored contracts, which in my opinion should be written in python
Authored a research paper on novel methods for efficient bulk virtual machine storage and retrieval (stay tuned for that one!)
Reminded myself daily why I use git, while writing features integrating svn, cvs, etc
Created what, I am fairly sure, is the world’s largest openWRT/BCM5354 firmware image/executable set
Created at least 10 new project virtual machines

Which actually brings me out of my /startup header and back into :/publish . One of the terrific things about founding a startup (ducks!) is the flexibility you get while setting up your workflow. Long a proponent of integrating virtual machines into business processes, I have been enjoying the real freedom a robust virtualized system can provide. I’ll get into the detailed workflow later in the post. For those ‘first page only’ readers I’ll get to the golden ticket, I recently picked up a REX 6000 credit card PDA for 6$ at the local thrift.

REX 6000

Read on for (much) more and download links!

Finished building my first guitar

Hacking, Personal, Zipit Hacking 4 Responses »

Mar 292010

Mark brought over his copy of Make, and it turns out this last Makezine had a great article on building cigar box guitars. It sounded like a really interesting project, so we went off to the hardware store to purchase some oak timber. Many days/hours/blood stains later, the fruits of our labor emerged, tuned and ready to play. . Lots of hack potential, and an easy fix if I break something. Bonus, tablature looks fine in links browser on the Z2, though you will have to scroll quite a lot. I’ll see about getting gnome guitar working, should be interesting (mono bleh). Yet again another use case for the Z2 I wouldn’t have imagined.