Why print on boring old paper, when you can get your message across on some nice bouncy ping pong balls? The appropriately named PingPongPrinter can print dot-matrix messages directly onto the spherical surface of ping pong balls.

Builders Vern Graner and Rick Abbott of The Robot Group used a Parallax inkjet print head kit and the EFX-TEK Prop-2 controller board to bring their wondrous creation to life. As each ball leaves the hopper, it’s loaded onto a rotating platform, and sprayed with tiny ink droplets. 

The best part: the balls it prints are used as ammunition for the group’s other dastardly invention, the pneumatic, ping pong ball firing PONGINATOR!

[Nuts N Volts via Hacked Gadgets] 

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Here’s a cool hack which uses an old oscilloscope to play an accurate game of the arcade classic, Tetris.

Engineer Lars Pontoppidan created Scopetris using an AtMega32 micro-controller to drive the beam of an oscilloscope to mimic the game play of the classic Soviet puzzle game. 

Lars had to create custom circuitry and programmed the beam to produce a similar visual result to that of those old vector graphic games. The game is controlled using a traditional Atari 9-pin digital joystick.

Unlike some lesser oscilloscope beam hacks which use simple video games like Pong, Lars really went all out to create a game with the relative complexity of Tetris. Using his significant programming prowess, Pontoppidan programmed the circuit to manage each individual as an independent object, allowing it to behave very similarly to the original arcade classic.

Kudos to Lars for an outstanding scope hack.

[via Hacked Gadgets via MAKE]

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One of the most popular computers from the 1980s, the Commodore 64, is having a minor renaissance as an electronic musical instrument. The C64’s audio chip is famous for producing an array of warm, familiar 8-bit beats and blips.

As a result, the trusty C64 has become a popular platform for “circuit bending”, which is hardware hackers’ terminology for taking old technology, applying circuit modifications to output audio or video effects that the original device wasn’t necessarily designed to produce.

Now you can own your own circuit bent C64, without any electronic know-how. The circuit bending wizards from Bighead Electronics have made this extremely limited edition pre-modded C64, appropriately called the Bent64. 

The system comes completely loaded Paul Slocum’s Cynthcart, a custom program which helps the heavily modded Commodore produce a wild cacophony of retro noise as you press keys on the keyboard

The Bent64 is a ready-to-go electronic musical instrument, capable of cranking out 3-note polyphonic analog sounds, applying effects with a “whammy” tuning knob, and even stereo support if you can wrangle a second sound chip and install it in the provided socket. The Bent64 can even output a psychedelic light show through a composite video output, so you’re ready to rave out of the box.

Oh yeah, it’s still fully functional as a standard C64 with the flip of a switch before you boot up. So you’d better brush up on your Commodore BASIC.

[eBay Auction Page]

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So what happens when you take the system sounds from Windows XP and Windows 98 and carefully arrange them in a music sequencer? Something pretty unexpected, I’d say. This is truly a case where the whole is definitely greater than the some of its parts.

UK electronic music hacker Robbi-985 managed to take the usually annoying system sounds, painstakingly sequence them with ModPlug Tracker and turn them into a composition that’s actually not half bad.

While it’s certainly no Beethoven’s 9th, it is pretty amazing that he managed to get all those sounds to work so well together.

I can hardly wait for the Vista version to come out.

[via Cynical-C via Neatorama]

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While a few of us are are patiently awaiting the release of Apple’s application SDK for the iPhone and iPod Touch, crafty (and impatient) developers have found ways to run plenty of their own applications on the popular media players.

The latest code hack floating around the Interwebs takes the slick iTunes CoverFlow interface and lets you use it in other applications.

Developer Kevin Brosius has managed to create an application which provides an instance of the CoverFlow interface for use in other applications. Then, in keeping with the spirit of the iPhone dev community, just a few hours later, developer Layton Duncan leveraged the code to troll through the directories on your iPhone and generate an application menu using CoverFlow.

Want to give the code a shot on your jailbroken device? You can grab Kevin’s UICoverFlowLayer code here, or Layton’s application menu binary here.

[via iPhone Atlas]

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Prepare for a bloody good time. My favorite hack-and-slash game of all time is finally getting its due with a real next-gen update. Ninja Gaiden 2, long in the works from Tomonobu Itagaki and the video game artisans from Team Ninja finally has an official release date.

The latest installment in the Ninja Gaiden series is officially slated for U.S. release on the Xbox 360 on June 3, 2008. Don’t live in North America? You won’t have to wait too long — Itagaki says the rest of the world will get the title in “early June”. 

Expect the game to be even more challenging than the amazingly difficult original, and expect lots and lots of blood and gore this time around. In addition the the release date, Itagaki revealed another big surprise today - the game will add a cool recording feature which will let you save your best Ninja moves and share them on Xbox Live for all to see.

For the next couple of months, give your fingers plenty of rest, because they’ll be covered with button-mashing blisters come this June.

[Pre-order Ninja Gaiden 2 from Amazon]

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UTIII is one of the few console games out there that really lets gamers create their own unique maps. I don’t mean just moving a few things around like you can with Halo 3’s Forge mode. Nope, with the right tools, you can make your own completely custom environment, letting your imagination run wild. Take, for example, this great LEGO map that the guys over at PS3Fanboy found.

Created by Unreal Tournament 3 mod-man Lord Simeon, the map features a totally destructible LEGO block environment. The map features about 20 types of LEGO blocks (including those little yellow dudes), built into structures you can blow to smithereens, thanks to the game’s excellent physics model. 

Remember when you were a kid and you’d build some awesome LEGO creation, then smash it into pieces? That’s what it reminds me of. You can grab the entire mod, packaged up for US or European consoles here.

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Have some old computer gear lying around? Why not do what this guy did, and turn it into something useful once more.

By taking an old Apple 5-1/4″ floppy drive he found at a thrift store, then working some electronics wizardry on the interior, modder Jeff Kobi took this old piece of tech junk and gave it new life as a retro-styled amplifier.

At the heart of the revamped drive is the hacker’s favorite Sonic Impact 5066 T-amp, capable of cranking out amazing clarity and boldness with just 15-watts per channel.

Wanna make your own? Check out Jeff’s step-by-step tutorial over on Instructables.

This clock tells time not in hours, minutes or seconds, but in years. It’s designed to very, very slowly make its way around the dial as you age.

Each number on the dial corresponds to a 7-year period of your life. By taking a standard clock mechanism and slowing it to 1/61320th of the speed of a standard timepiece, artist Betrand Planes’ Life Clock is able to tell time over an 84 year period before it makes one full rotation around the dial.

If you manage to live through a full 360-degree sweep of the year hand, you’re doing pretty darned well.

[via VVORK via Inspire me, now!]