Hack a Day has a great video sent to them by a musician named Rob Morris, who uses the accelerometer data from his Wiimote to manipulate the sounds coming from his guitar. At the beginning of the vid, he shows how it can be used to change the pitch (using the Guitar Hero Star Power gesture), but then moves on to some crazier stuff, which involves using the actual Wiimote buttons to further distort notes and chords from the guitar, and it all sounds positively 8-bit. Morris says he uses a program called Max/MSP to send the Wiimote data to, then he sends that via MIDI to a whammy pedal which then manipulates the guitar noise. [Hack a Day]

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Here's one way to tap the parallel processing power in Nvidia's graphics cards: Wi-Fi security hacking. Russian hackers reportedly bored through WPA and WPA2 encryptions using a brute-force technique juiced with one of Nvidia's latest graphics cards (they don't say which ones). The card supposedly made the "password recovery" process up to 10,000 percent faster. The report's notably skimpy on the details, but if true, that's a whole lot of busted for Wi-Fi security. [SC via DSL Reports]

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It's always a kick in the nuts waiting for a page to load in mobile Safari when you know like half of it is for an ad. Luckily, there's a way to block most of them using this method from James Is Bored. It requires a jailbroken iPhone and bit of voodoo, but it's not overly complicated. Once you've got a jailbroken iPhone, you need to install OpenSSH from Cydia. And that's where the work starts.

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Hanging out at sites like Giz may have instilled in you an insatiable, pocket-emptying gadget habit. But now we're entering a new era—the old guys on the TV are saying that soon we may not even have pockets, let alone money for them. Don't panic though: You've probably got a wealth of gadgetry sitting underutilised in your living rooms, closets and basements, just waiting to be given powerful new (not exactly authorised) features. For free.

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Modders prodding around inside the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 have discovered that there is a lot of potential to add new functionality thanks to some areas with empty space. That having been said, MyDellMini member Tom Beauchamp used a pocket next to the Bluetooth adaptor to add a super-small GPS receiver. If using your PC for navigation sounds appealing and danger is your middle name, Beauchamp has provided a complete set of instructions on how to do it yourself. At the very least, the project illustrates the potential of the Dell Mini 9 as a hackable device. [MyDellMini]

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A bunch of programmer/hackers have come up with a driver solution that'll get your PS3 Eye off its lazy arse and functioning as a webcam for your PC. Why's this interesting? Because it's relatively cheap, and actually pretty high-spec'd: it can deliver VGA video at 60fps over USB2, which makes for neat webcam action. It's also got pretty wide viewing angle and low distortion, meaning it's perfect for multitouch applications—which the group's also working on. Much better than having the thing lying in a drawer unused after you last played an Eye-compatible game six months ago. [NUIGroup via Hackaday]

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Last week it was revealed that the Palin email "hack" was little more than a lucky guess and that a trail of evidence existed that would likely lead the authorities to an arrest. Apparently, this evidence has lead the FBI to the home of a 20-year-old student at the University of Tennessee named David Kernell. To make matters worse, David is the son of Democratic Tennessee state representative Mike Kernell. The apartment was thoroughly searched, but no criminal charges have been filed just yet. I suppose it goes without saying, but if Kernell is found guilty, this simple hack may bring both his life and his father's political career to a screeching halt. [CNET]

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It's not perfect, but we love the idea. One modder connected his Wiimote to Google Maps' Street View, allowing the Wiimote to track his jogging in place to guide him through the streets of Tokyo. As you can see, the flaw is that the image updates more like a slideshow than fluid video, as Street View vehicles don't capture a seamless picture. But we'll take exploring the backstreets of Akihabara at a low frame rate over fixating on that crack in the wall at ∞ FPS any day. Download the code free at Tokyo-Jogging's humble official site. [Tokyo-Jogging via Kotaku]

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Asus--makers of inexpensive Eeeverything--is now shipping illegal cracking software to make your computing life even cheaper. According to UK publication PC Pro, not only they have accidentally included a piracy tool with their recovery DVD, but they have also put several confidential documents and source code inside. So nice of them.

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After the Florida debacle a number of years ago, it really shouldn't come as a surprise that there are *gasp* vulnerabilities in the voting system. Take this hack of the Sequoia Voting kiosk for example. As you will see in the video, a trojan app can be easily installed via a USB key planted among a pool of keys used to initialise the system. While it is highly unlikely that a hack like this could be implemented in such a way that it has a major impact on an election, it is a frightening prospect nonetheless. [CrunchGear]

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