I think we can agree that “USB light back” is not a common tech term among the geeks out there.  What I mean is a LED system powered by USB which provide background lighting to your TV or monitor.

USB light back takes your TV one step further by supply complimentary tones and colors to what is currently being displayed on your TV.  Gives you a theater effect.

The only way to fully understand, is to watch:

A quote from the creator:

The software analyzes the image on your monitor and transfers its data by USB to the Lightpack board. This board lights the surface behind a monitor, TV or laptop by means of RGB LEDs of the corresponding colors. The effect reminds us of the illumination of Phillips Ambilight TVs most of all.

The lightpack is available for all via Google Code download link.  For the more advanced, but an very effective tool to enhance your TV experience.

Granted I didn’t think of this concept, but looking back, it’s odd this USB hack took as long as it did.  Hacker, Jonas Wagner, was able to rig his Microsoft Kinect to a USB missile launcher.  From what we’ve read, Jonas wanted to control a missile launcher with his Kinect, only problem is that he didn’t have access to missiles.  Next best thing was a USB missile launcher.

To give him some feedback about position, the first thing Jonas did was mount a video cam above the USB missile launcher.  Next step was polish up his Python skills and incorporate the libfreenect library for control.

Using his hands to position the USB missile launcher, Jonas can rotate the base unit, angle the barrel up or down and fire the launcher – all thorugh his Kinect.

Video after the jump of Jonas shooting his brother[?]

Tim from Imagitronics posted a neat little USB hack about taking gadget traffic light and connecting to it via USB.

He retrofitted the generic blinking traffic light with a USB module and wrote a simple Mac application to change the status of the red/yellow/green lights.

This project was born out of the frustration after being constantly interrupted by people who could not tell that he was already busy. I think it a great idea.

What I’d like to see is the traffic light also be used for email notifications.  Say green means you have less then 10 emails, yellow means

It’s standard for mobile phones to sync and connect with your computer with limited or no access to the memory for storage.  As with our Zune hack for making a Mass Storage Device, here is a tip for the Windows Phone 7 as well…

The caviet to this tutorial, is that you can only perform the tweak to your computer which you sync the Windows Phone 7 device with.

To get started, do the follwoing:

• Open the registry editor on your PC by typing regedit in your Start menu
• Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB; search for ZuneDriver

Now you will modify three entries (note, if you have multiple WP7 phones, you have to do it for each one)

• Change ShowInShell from 0 to 1
• Change PortableDeviceNameSpaceExcludeFromShell from 1 to 0
• Change EnableLegacySupport from 0 to 1

Note:  Perform registry entries at your own risk.  It’s best if you back up the Reg before starting.

Do you see something odd about this picture?  Maybe the fact an LED is illuminating from a USB connector with no PC in site?  Ya that’s it.  Good job Sherlock.

So what we have here is a How To or USB Hack on running an LED from a Super-capacitor.  If you are non-technical, then we basically mean a very short lived battery to run the LED.  A super-capacitor has the ability to store energy for longer periods of time over traditional capacitors – yet still not long enough as with batteries.The concept of this tutorial is to wire a super-capacitor to a USB socket whereby your computer can charge up the capacitor and when disconnected you’ll get about 10 minutes of LED illumination.

Granted there isn’t much day-to-day use with this USB hack, but just a fun little project if you have the time.

Over on the Instructables website there is an updated USB tutorial which includes

Here is a 7 minute video on how to wire up any USB port and suck the power right out for that USB gadget you dreamed up at 3am.  For DIY projects, USB hacking is one of the most popular forms of taking something ordinary and making something unique.  So if you’ve never tried a hack or USB tutorial, this is a great building block for yourself.  Enjoy!

Source: YouTube.

Over the past several weeks we’ve read reports about the PS3 Jail breaking solution via USB whereby the jailbreak tricks the console into thinking it’s in debug mode and thus gives you access to the device like never before.

The PS3 jailbreak would allow the use of illegal games as well as homebrew games to be played on the console.  In addition, the hack also blocked mandatory updates from Sony which could overwrite the hack and secure the device once again.

Jail breaking like this is nothing new, in fact we’ve heard about it with the iPhone for [literally] years.  However, with the PS3 it was a bit different.  It was different because the PS3 has been a platform which has remained unbroken or un-hacked [if that's a word] for nearly a decade.  That is a feat no other gaming company has