Doc Blades

Who Else Has Received This Fishing Email Claiming To Be From Gmail?

This special thing about this one is that the spam filters let it through. Usually those spam filters catch just about everything. I’m impressed.

It almost looks official. All of the links in the email go to their correct addresses at Google, except of course for the “Click Here to update your account” one.

It goes to some website at http://accupdategmail.110mb.com, which is a pretty good spoof of the gmail login page. Except that the space counter doesn’t go up, and it’s only at 2 gigs instead of the 7+ that we have here in 2009. If you’re fool enough to log in, the page captures your account name and password and dumps you back to the real login page.

Needless to say, I wrote a nasty message in the “password” section.

Adding USB output to an electric guitar

Bill Machrone, former editor of PC Magazine, has an excellent write-up about how to add a USB port to an electric guitar.

Why would you want to add a USB port? Well, say you want to record your shreds through your PC, but still have the option of hooking up to an amp or headphones without having to deal with that lag you get through the computer or the bad quality you get from recording through a splitter. The sound is captured right at the source, so the data your computer gets is high quality and you still have your out jack.

Machrone has a nice step-by-step build with some wonderful tips about such things as how to fix the frets on that cheap guitar you bought and where to place your router while doing the work.

The final product is very clean and professional, and he even adds some logo inlays on the cheap.

It’s projects like this that make me wish I had the patience and skill to more than simple hacks.

USB Guitar

Staple Free Stapled Paper

There’s something about stapling paper without any pesky staples that really appeals to me. I guess you can’t really call it stapled anymore. It’s more, say, bonded.

Regardless of semantics, it’s neat. And this is far from the first of it’s kind, but it looks the most robust. My previous experience with a staple-free stapler was a little disappointing. It only worked for stapling 2 or 3 sheets together, and even then the bond was flimsy.

But with this idea by Sherwood Forlee, I mean, just look at the size of that hole! There’s no way it could fail.

Unfortunately, it’s only a concept right now. I guess I’ll have to rely on little shards of metal for now.

More pictures at Yanko Design, and be sure to check out the rest of Sherwood’s (awesome name) designs.