[Wordpress] Register hooks hacks
on 07/05/2008 - like it?

On the way to launch Live Clöthing, I had to hack this morning the register action hooks for Wordpress, that don’t work as simply as excepted.

‘register_post’ action

You won’t be able to add more errors in $errors if you do not make it global in register_new_user() of wp-login.php:

function register_new_user($user_login, $user_email) {
global $errors;


‘user_register’ action

For some strange reason, $user_id is not available, you’ll need to add this hack to read it in your hook function:

$user_id = (int) func_get_arg( 0 );


Tags: action, hack, hook, register, wordpress

[RepRap] Mechanical machine and Wii hacks
on 22/01/2008 - like it?

Great news today for RepRap at Las Indias: the mechanical machine has just been ordered from BitsFromBytes, and it should arrive in Madrid in 3-4 weeks.

Fully assembled and tested, in a wooden crate for easier transportation, I’ll hope to have the time to make some demo at the end of the month.

What’s missing:

• electronic: we already have all electronics, but it has became a bit obsolete over the last few month, it would be great to upgrade it to Arduino platform;
• experimenting: we’ll need to melt stuff then, and see how it reacts. Faboroni, another fabbing project, has made a recent experiement with various cooking material (chocolate, cheeze, …). And I’ll need to find a source to buy some plastic polymers, or make our own.

Then, will it be possible to plug your wiimote in RepRap?

Johnny Chung Lee has release a lot of really cool wiimote hacks, and the Reprap Forum is now looking how they could be used

Tags: bitsfrombytes, hack, mechanical, reprap, robot, wii

[Arduino] BBVA blogs-blinker
on 10/01/2008 - like it?

After a lot of debugging on bbvablogs.com, I needed serious fun to keep it up, and suddently I found the perfect project to remove the dust on my arduino board: a blinking led that would tell us when someone is visiting the website!

More links about this project:

• WebVisitors Blinker: original idea found on Make! blog
• Arduino XMAS hitcounter: same idea, bringing the remote server processus, and moving a motor if you need more fun
• pySerial: Python module to access arduino board

Tags: arduino, bbva, blinking, electronic, hack, led

[CCC] 24C3 best conferences so far
on 03/01/2008 - like it?

The issue with decentralizing my living place it’s really hard to be at the right place at the right time. As an example I missed the 24C3 conference in Berlin last week, which was replaced by Wii session, not too bad :)

Hopefully, all these lost moments tends to be more and more digitalized, so here are the conferences I found the most interesting so far:

• What is terrorism?: a german woman speaking about the experience to see the police busting her house to take her boyfriend away, under the suspicion of terrorims, with various accounts about the intelligence methods in place to monitor her family and friends. Conclusion: keep your mobile phone switched on if you don’t want to be suspected as a terrorist. [mp3]
• Hacking in the age of declining everything: a hacking environmentalist session, where everyhting on Earth seems to go to disaster, and how certain societies deal with it, or not. A climate-change speech, oriented to geek audience, with a great speaker. [mp3]
• Design noir: Electronic engineering is easy enough today to provide some power to individual purpose: someone launches an idea like tv-be-gone, and anyone can modify it to his/her own benefit. Repeat the process to switch of your own external world annoyance. [mp3]

There are plenty more of conference I want to listen, mostly concerning Storm malware which made a big buzz during 2007. Here comes interesting links from 24C3 if you want to discover other interesting sessions:

• Sessions index
• Conference recordings

Tags: 24c3, ccc, climate, conference, design, hack, mp3, session, terrorism

[Wordpress-Mu] Community Tag Cloud
on 24/11/2007 - like it?

A new and better plugin, MuTags by MrHenry, is now available on Wordpress Mu forums

Because the last version of Wordpress-mu is quite new, there is no proper plugin to start using new tag system available with Wordpress 2.3 system.

Here is a quick hack I’ve put in wpmu-functions.php to display a proper tag cloud of all blogs, please send me feedback and tell me if you find any bugs:

Code for get_community_tag_cloud()

Copy this funtion in your /wp-include/wpmu-functions.php and then add to your theme:


get_community_tag_cloud($display=true);


For more updates, please follow the Mu Forum thread about this hack.

Tags: cloud, code, community, hack, mu, php, tag, wordpress

[Idea] Twitter Timezone
on 11/11/2007 - like it?

One of the interesting part with Twitter is its worldwide use. On my Twitter, I usually get European twitts at the end of the afternoon, and South-American twitts during the night.

Comparing my twitting habits with those of my friends, each one of us could have a twitting timezone, that we’ll be surely different even if you live in the same ‘real’ timezone.

Here is a screenshot of what could be the result:

It could be easily done using the API, unfortunatly, Twitter reduce the API use to one request per minute, so it’ll take one hour to build such a timezone with all your 60 friends… but I’m pretty sure someone will have fun to do something like this soon.

Tags: api, hack, timeline, twitter

[Arduino] 3D LED Cube
on 14/10/2007 - like it?

After a first try with tiny space between LEDs (see last post), here is another try with enough space to build a proper cube, still following MakeZine instructions.

The fun parts were to add transistors to the board, allowing to get more power for each led level, and the programming: Persistance-Of-Vision and binary manipulation for led on/off switching.

If you need it, you can download the arduino program related to this circuit.

Tags: arduino, cube, electronic, hack, led

[Arduino] Playing with LEDs
on 12/10/2007 - like it?

The original project for tonight was to build a 3D LED cube, and the not-so-clever idea was to compact it the size of a normal dice.

Big mistake: first it was hell to solder all the tiny intersection of led cathods, then there is no way to pile up the array of leds if you don’t let space between them… maybe there’s a solution to that, and I’ve not find it yet.

Anyway, it was ready to connect to Arduino board, and to try to program this new led-matrix. Easy and fun, only problem is debugging messages while verifying source code on Arduino software that doesn’t help much, I’ll have to learn more about its syntax limitations.

Here is the result, 5 days before returning to Toulouse to visit Claire:

Tags: arduino, electronic, hack, led, matrix

[Spime] Distant touching
on 26/09/2007 - like it?

Internet communication has not reached its limit yet: we have text, sound and video easily available. Few years ago, some people tried to develop odor extension, but I’ve not seen this really breaking through yet.

Because I need to communicate with someone, and I miss something, I was thinking about adding another sense to our internet communication: touch.

Since then, I’ve been playing with the Arduino card (see previous post), and play to connect it to an USB massage gadget. By internet, both gadget will communicate, each personn allowed to make the other gadget massaging more or less quickly.

Today I’ve discovered that Thomas Edwards has already complete his touch project!

From there, I’ve found many interesting links that will greatly help in my own project, hoping that knowledge will flow in both directions:

• Phy2Phy: a wiki about physical interaction over IP, with lots of useful information to develop your own hardware, and because interaction is not limited to touch;
• Touch source code and more technical information

Tags: 2007, arduino, berlin, communication, electronics, hack, interaction, spime, touch

[Electronic] Arduino board
on 21/09/2007 - like it?

Wanting to do a fast electronic prototype of an idea I had last night (more description about this idea in a later postà, I discovered this morning the Arduino project.

What is Arduino?

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

What to do with it?

It’s basicly the Processing.org wet dream:

• You make and verify you program in Processing (or similar IDE from Arduino)
• You connect your board to your computer via USB and send the program to it
• You disconnect it, find any external power source (batterie or plugged), and you app is running on a small hardware machine

Now you can add enough outputs (led, motor, …) and inputs (switches, potentio-meter, …) to make any physical hack. Smaller version of the board are also available!

And Berlin is the best place to live to get this working, everything is available in shops, and this one was particulary cheap: 27€

How to install it?

This board is working on Windows/Linux/Mac platform, but I had some difficulties to make it really plug&play on my Mac. Follow Gck instructions on Arduino forum if you have some problems too.

Tags: 2007, arduino, berlin, board, electronic, hack, prototype