Everyone seems to be thinking green these days, so I thought I’d be a self professed “hero” and build something that didn’t harm the environment for a change. (Aka… no more hybrid coal/orphan children soul’s powered go carts…) A few months back I was over at my girlfriend Angela’s house and I spotted this nice looking Absolut Vodka bottle in her sister’s room and I thought to myself… damn thats a lot of vodka… then I was like… damn… that would be a sweet lamp. So I told her to save it for me when she was done with it. 45 minutes later the vodka was done and Angela and I went to work making the lamp. Since Angela had no experience with electronics or soldering I decided this would be a good project to teach her some of the basics. The whole lamp took less than an hour to build plus the time spent shopping for parts, so I would definitely recommend it as an after work/school or weekend project for beginners. You can use any type of bottle you like, as long as the neck is wide enough for the components to fit into. (If the neck is too narrow, just use 1 led soldered straight to the resistor and power supply without using a circuit board, this should fit into almost anything)

Remember:

• LED’s are very low resistance devices and must have a current limiting resistor in series with them to prevent them from burning out.
• To calculate the resistor value use the formula; R = (Vs-Vl)/I , where Vs is the supply voltage, Vl is the required LED voltage, and I is the required LED current.
• If LEDs are connected in parallel each one must have its own resistor.
• LED’s are a type of diode (Light Emitting Diode). Diodes only allow current to pass in one direction, therefore LED’s must be connected the right way around to light up. Cathode (long leg) to positive and anode (short leg) to negative.
• Try to make solders as quick as possible, overheating can damage LEDs.

Parts List:

• 4 Superflux LEDs (Superflux LEDs are one of the brightest LEDs you can buy, they feature 5 LED chips in each square package.)
• 1 6 volt power supply.
• 1 Matching female connector for power supply. (With threading for easy installation on cap)
• 1 Perf board cut down to size using a hacksaw.
• 4 Resistors properly matched to LEDs.
• 1 Bottle.
• Soldering iron.
• Solder.
• Insulated wire.

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I was messing around with Motorola Phone Tools a few weeks ago with my friend Micah, you know… the usual stuff, unlocking the firmware, loading up free apps (pokemon yellow, zelda, and dope wars) when we realized that you can use your computer to send text messages through your cellphone. It seemed like a cool idea at first but it didn’t really help unless you wanted to send a really long message using the keyboard. We decided to test this function by copy and pasting some arbitrary text from the web a bunch of times into the phone tools window. We expected to get some sort of error regarding the length of the text, but low and behold we didn’t, It just sent the whole damn thing. I think It took around 5 minutes for my cellphone to receive all of chopped up messages (approx. 18 in total). It basically rendered my phone inoperable during this time and there was nothing I could do to stop it (other than turn my phone off). We immediately realized the implications of this exploit… Spamming friends!!! w00t, yay for annoying pranks lol. I think this could be a devastating and efficient attack on someone (especially a business person, or celebrity ), everyone is vulnerable and the best part is, all you need to know is the victim’s phone number.

P.S. Motorola Phone tools is also really useful for “legit” purposes. It can be used to unlock the Java settings on a phone, change the firmware, upload photos, backup your phone book, and create ring tones.

Download Motorola Phone Tools HERE

P.P.S. I think that this means that using this exploit is illegal… don’t try it.