More of Bunnie Huang's amazing series on manufacturing in China for makers (part one): today, it's a piece on understanding and designing to the constraints of the kind of manufacturing a startup can afford:

Trim and finish are difficult, and therefore a point of distinction when it comes to design.

Bunnie Huang: "Back when I was a graduate student there, I extracted security keys from the original Microsoft Xbox video game console. I still remember the crushing disappointment of receiving a letter from MIT legal repudiating any association with my work, effectively leaving me on my own to face Microsoft."

On his blog, Bunnie Huang — legendary hardware hacker turned entrepreneur — has begun a four-part series explaining how to have electronics manufactured in south China. This post focuses on the BOM — the Bill of Materials — where "Every single assumption, down to the color of the soldermask, has to be spelled out unambiguously for a third party to faithfully reproduce a design." — Read the rest

As you've no doubt heard, a large tranche of hashed LinkedIn passwords has been leaked onto the net. There's no known way to turn the hash of a password back into the password itself, but you can make guesses about passwords, hash the guesses, and see if the hashed guess matches anything in the leaked database. — Read the rest

Dale Dougherty says:

I'm excited about MAKE's Hardware Innovation Workshop, May 15-16, at PARC in Palo Alto. The workshop is an opportunity to explore what's shaping the newly emerging businesses that makers are creating.  Come meet the people who are leading this new wave of hardware innovation and contribute to the discussion about new opportunities in making.

Hardware hacker extraordinare Bunnie Huang explains why the new defense bill, which makes it a crime to sell a "counterfeit" chip to the US military, is going to place an impossible burden on retailers, importers, and suppliers:

To better understand the magnitude of the counterfeiting problem, it's helpful to know how fakes are made.

Though we're delighted to have our own online toystore up this holiday season, there are a thousand things we could recommend from elsewhere. Cutting it down to a couple of hundred, for our fourth annual gift guide, wasn't easy; this year was a fantastic one for books, games, gadgets and much else besides. From stocking stuffers to silly cars, take yer pick.

Boing Boing Gift Guide 2011

[Video Link: YouTube, PBS.org]

I traveled to Japan with PBS NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien to help shoot and produce a series of NewsHour stories about the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disasters. — Read the rest

CNet reviews the latest Chumby device, these being adorable little networked appliances that do a little of everything, with loads of engineering smarts and a wide-open platform that invites innovation from all comers. Chumby is the brainchild of Bunnie Huang, the author of Hacking the XBox — a brilliant engineer and great creative thinker. — Read the rest

Andrew "bunnie" Huang, who literally wrote the book on hacking Xboxes, was to be a witness in last week's first-of-its-kind trial for Xbox modding. However, the government prosecutor bungled his case so badly that he was forced to withdraw the charge and walk away, leaving the defendant unscathed. — Read the rest

U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez opened the trial of alleged Xbox hacker Matthew Crippen with a bang yesterday, berating the prosecution for calling government witnesses who admitted to committing crimes but asking these crimes to be kept secret from the jury; for their theories relating to fair use, and for a "laundry list" of other complaints. — Read the rest

When Bunnie Huang was in South China overseeing production on his versatile ChumbyOne device, he discovered a major quality issue with Kingston's MicroSD cards. At first, he assumed that he'd gotten a counterfeit batch, but further investigation proved them to be legit. — Read the rest

Bunnie Huang quotes a bit from an All Things Considered airing of some of Alain De Botton's The Enlightening Bridge Between Art and Work: "Two centuries ago, our forebears would have known the precise history and source of almost every one of the limited number of things they ate and owned. — Read the rest

Joris sez, "Turn any logo or words into a custom metal 3D printed branding iron. It snaps on over a lighter, you turn on the lighter for 30 seconds and presto you are ready to leave your brand anywhere."

I once sat in on a Bunnie Huang presentation about labor conditions in South China, and he described the factories where rubber logos – the Nike swoosh on the side of a shoe, the rubber designer's logo hanging from the top button-hole of a shirt — are made. — Read the rest

The Chumby One — the successor to the incredibly innovative Chumby device — is just about ready to ship, and is available for $99. Chumby is a cute, squeezable hand-held device that is wide open — everything from the circuit board designs to the software is open-licensed and freely downloadable. — Read the rest

Bunnie Huang reports on his trip to a mind-crogglingly gigantic mobile phone market in the industrial city of Shenzhen, on the PRC/Hong Kong border:

The other crazy thing about the mobile phone market is that it's not the only one. Windell said he found another market just as big but with a greater focus on finished phones, and then just today I walked into what looked like the New York Stock Exchange of mobile phones.

I hope you are sitting down when you hit "play." Joi Ito, the host of today's special Boing Boing tv episode from Tokyo, explains what you're about to witness:

This year, the Digital Garage New Context Conference and Ellen Levy's Silicon Valley Connect worked together on a program for visitors from Silicon Valley to Tokyo.

The Chumby — a squeezable wireless beanbag computer — is finally shipping! I've been playing with one of these for months now, and I'm really impressed with them. The little beanbag is completely open — from the flat-pattern for the bag, to the firmware for the device — and the way it works is, you subscribe to any of hundreds of "widgets" that Chumby hackers have made and published. — Read the rest

Andrew "bunnie" Huang — the guy who broke the Xbox and founded Chumby — has a great blog post today about Master Chao, a middle-aged Chinese man who has helped design thousands of everyday products that fill your gadget bag and home. — Read the rest

Wired News is sporting a gallery of photos of the vasty manufacturing cities of China, eye-melting panoramas of endless assembly lines and dormitories and cafeterias. I just attended a jaw-dropping talk by Chumby's Bunnie Huang about his tours of Chinese factories on the way to setting up Chumby manufacturing and every slide inspired a fresh weirdness. — Read the rest