Hack a Mr. Microphone to Make a Wireless Bug/Spy Microphone

Ok, I'm totally ripping this off Engadget, but I LOVE Mr. Microphone. It's just an awesome idea gone horribly HORRIBLY wrong. That and the commercials are AWESOME schlock!

So, let's say you need to get some spying done, but you have a VERY small budget, and those surveillance stores really creep you out. If you have a Mr. Microphone lying around, then prepare to start listening in on other people's conversations!

Instructables to the resuce!

Mr. Microphone Hack:

Mr. Microphone Hack! - The best video clips are right here

Pretty cool stuff!

I'm doing the math in my head for what it would take to use an old FM Transmitter I have (those things never work well in cities). Hmmm.... In-ter-est-ing...

Oh hell, just for kicks here's the Mr. Microphone commercial I love SO much.

Let's get this party started!

Muting your system sounds...

If you're not reading Lifehacker you really should be. They have a handy little post about making a laptop "quick mute" plug. Take an old pair of headphones, clip off just the jack (I would recommend taping of the ends), and whenever you want to mute your laptop (say at a coffee shop or library) plug it in to the laptop's headphone port.

Now I for one HATE system sounds. Blinks, blonks, bloops, bleeps, blee-blaws, etc, every computer I work on is muted from the control panel, but if you're one of those folks that HAS to hear a Dalek tell you "Exterminate!" every time you make a mistake, then this might be just the hack for you.
MacGyver Tip: Silence your laptop with snipped headphones @ LifeHacker

You KNOW you're a Geek When... SmartPhone Edition!

I promise this will be loosely related to audio in some small way...

So you know you're a geek when you look at the back of your phone and think "I could do better".

If you haven't figured it out by now I'm a gadget fanatic, and my current weapon of choice is the PPC-6700 smartphone from Sprint. I've been a Windows Mobile fan since the iPaq 3650 (or I could just say "for a while now" I guess), and when it comes to versatility there's nothing better out there right now (in the USA of course, but that's another post).

Full QWERTY keyboard, slider touch screen, highspeed data, this phone gets a lot of things right for a data device. The one thing this phone fails at is ... well ... being a phone. One of the main problems with it is the main speaker on the back isn't very loud. I've tried boosting the volume of the ringtones and alerts, but if the phone is in my back pocket I still might miss a call or email. This also means that the speakerphone setting on this phone is near useless, and the only way I could talk on the phone was with an ear piece.

The problem though isn't that the speaker is under powered, it's that the speaker is covered ... by plastic ... and a vanity mirror ... to take pictures of yourself ... and I'm kinda funky looking ... so I tend not to do that ... very much ... [ahem]


But no longer!



An electric drill, some super fine sandpaper, the mesh from some busted headphones, and about 2 hours of labor (hey I went slow, I love this phone), and voilà, Better phone! Extreme Makeover style! ... OK not quite but still, I am an AUDIO engineer...


Here's the before:


And here's the after:



I know it IS sexy!
cellphones, sound, audio, some audio guy, speakers, mod, ppc-6700, ringtones, volums