New Year’s Eve – Virtually!

79988978 41154DaeefIf you’re staying in tonight come join MAKE and Eric Rice in the virtual world, Second Life. The party will be at Spin Martin’s place (Eric Rice) – at the Spin Martin Estate in Palulop (117/231). Eric has set up numbers to call 1-818-237-5533 or toll free 1-800-978-KSSX and will be streaming music in world (or here and here). If you’re wondering what to wear to something like this, here’s what I’m wearing… Link.

NPR : Inside the World of ‘Do-It-Yourself’

Logo Npr 125Here’s MAKE on Talk of the Nation, December 28, 2005 “Looking for new furniture, clothes or a remodeled house? Maybe it’s time to “Do It Yourself.” A peak at the curious and creative world of DIY. Guests: Shoshana Berger, editor in chief of ReadyMade magazine. Mark Frauenfelder, editor in chief of Make magazine. Tom Silva, general contractor on PBS’ home improvement show, “This Old House”.” Link.

Picture tour of the Edison-Ford Winter Estates…

79403282 Cb976A005E MHere’s MAKE contributor Joe Grand (Grand Idea Studio, Inc.) and the Edison-Ford Winter Estates, 2350 McGregor Blvd., Ft. Myers, Florida. Tons of great photos. The estate is a very cool place with some amazing early prototypes of Edison’s work (one of the original hardware hackers). Certainly worth a visit if you’re ever in the area. Link. Hey Joe, nice shirt!

HOW TO – Circuit Hijacking

TracesLeadingzero writes – “Several projects on this site involve the modding of consumer electronics for new and inventive purposes. The NES tv remote for example used an old remote control as the base of the whole project. However, the circuitry inside was diverted to the controls of an old NES controller. This process of redirecting the internal circuitry of a component is what I call “circuit hijacking” because essentially, the circuitry is “hijacked” to a new location and purpose. This method is by no means new, nor is it even difficult but in this article I will attempt to described the best ways that circuit hijacking is accomplished so you can begin hijacking your own circuits.” Link.

Makers: Reviewed on Slashdot

MakerscoverJames Alguire has a review of our new book Makers on Slashdot – “Makers: All Kinds of People Making Amazing Things In Garages, Basements, and Backyards by Bob Parks, and published by O’Reilly, celebrates the basic human desire to create, to nail together two things that have never been nailed together before and see what it does. While I have worked in construction, built computers from scratch and done my share of soldering, I still felt a sense of wonder after reading about the 76 projects outlined in this book.” Read the rest of James’s review…” Link.

Make a Musical Ode to the Leap Second

ClockPeter writes “Since atomic clocks worldwide will add a leap second New Year’s Eve 2006, we decided we wanted to immortalize the moment in sound. Create a one-second piece of music and email it to us, and we’ll have the results by New Year’s. It’s the ultimate in economical music — meaning uncompressed audio (AIFF/WAV) is perfectly kosher!” Link.

Open source web based home automation

Mh LogoNCT writes “Here’s some great opensource DIY Home automation software, written in Perl with a Web interface. For windows or Linux/unix. It also works with the One Wire Weather station posted a few days ago.” MisterHouse is an open source home automation program. It’s fun, it’s free, and it’s entirely geeky. Written in Perl, it fires events based on time, web, socket, voice, and serial data. It currently runs on Windows 95/98/NT/2k/XP and on most Unix based platforms, including Linux and Mac OSX. Link.

Simon Says Christmas Wreath…

77406885 4106E9De63 SGood one for next year! Ryan writes “Most of us remember the popular memory game Simon from the late 70′s. In this hack, I converted simon to play on a christmas wreath. Bust this out next year along with some egg nog and impress your friends with a non-traditional wreath decoration.” Link.