Mr Joshua writes “Here’s a video Tutorial from PYRO1234321 on how to make home made lock picks.” This is a great in-depth guide running 25 minutes. Also check out other lock-picking related videos submitted by woofcat (lock picks, competitions and pick guns).” Wow, these videos are pretty comprehensive, the beginning sections on the tools and (cheap) materials are really interesting. [via] Link.
Earlier we posted about some of the cool Mac hacks and mods at Macworld, but you need to check out Macmod, they’re the folks who put all Macmods together for the show! – “MacMod was at this years Macworld…and we have pictures to prove it! We are pleased to offer more than 120 pictures, including the Necronomicon PowerMac, MacMod Server, iTablet, Wallstreet Road Warrrior, Evangelion Mac mini, and the Mod of the year Real Wood iPod. There are a lot of great new product pictures (Mac mini clone anyone?) as well. Stop by our new gallery to view the pictures.”Link and gallery.
Nice use of a mint tin! – “This site features projects and circuits for building stereo microphones from low-cost Panasonic electret microphone capsules. Included are Mid-Side, XY, and Blumlein microphone setups. In addition, there are interesting related circuits and links to sites with microphone information and parts sources.”Link.
Brendan writes “I’m working on a little homegrown project centred around a creative use of a wireless webcam. Key to the project is the portability of the webcam. But there in lies the snag – power. I could go the iSight – laptop route which would work, and no need for power cables but ideally I’d love to have something that wasn’t as bulky. So anyway I was thinking would it be possible to wire up some hand crank power to a wireless webcam? Even if it only gave power for a half hour or so? Have you ever seen anything like this?” You could just wire up a 9v battery with a 5v voltage regulator (or whatever voltage the wireless web cam requires). Post your suggestions in the comments!
The Goldfish Online has some really interesting LEGO logic gates – “…designed working NOT, OR, NOR, AND, and NAND gates. Using two NAND gates I have produced a NAND gate latch or Flip-FLop. The natural follow on from these is clocked logic, full-adders and ultimately a genuine “computer” device. At the moment all these gates essentially just demonstrators. They work, but because of the limitations that arise through gear slippage, the real practicable use is probably not that great.” The details of logic gates can be found here – Link.
Fanjita writes “Following on from Tetris for GTA, I’ve put together a small package of source and useful tools for developing homebrew to run with the GTA loader. This package will allow you to replace tetris.bin with your own binary, and makes it easy to deal with some of the issues in the GTA environment. I’m hoping that developers (especially v2.6 owners) will use this package to develop simple homebrew to keep v2.6 users entertained while they wait for their firmware to be fully exploited.” Link.
Incredible engineering, math and robotics – “NASA’s Stardust sample return mission returned safely to Earth when the capsule carrying cometary and interstellar particles successfully touched down at 2:10 a.m. Pacific time (3:10 a.m. Mountain time) in the desert salt flats of the U.S. Air Force Utah Test and Training Range.” [via] Link.
RFID Toys looks excellent! And it’s written by MAKE pal Amal Graafstra – “The book contains step by step guides to building various RFID based projects, and stresses the concepts involved as well as the steps themselves. RFID technologies covered include passive, low frequency 125KHz tags and readers, passive high frequency 13.56MHz, up to active, UHF 900Mhz tags and readers.” Thanks Matt!Link.
Wow, what a week for new books, here’s another I’m looking forward to (also from the folks who publish MAKE) “Only a Game takes readers on a fascinating exploration of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) based on the experience of gamers and authors Mark Wallace and Peter Ludlow. When Ludlow’s online persona — an investigative journalist named Urizenus Sklar — began reporting in his virtual newspaper on underage cyber-prostitutes, real-life crimes, strong-arm tactics and scams that had become rife in the popular MMOG “The Sims Online”, the game’s creators (Electronic Arts and Maxis Software) found an excuse to ban Ludlow from the game.”Link.
Adam Tow writes “The big news coming out of the 2006 Worldwide Newton Conference is that the NewtonOS is running on a Linux PDA! You heard that right, we’re one step closer to having a Newton running on non-Apple hardware. At the 2004 WWNC, Paul demoed Einstein, an emulator running on Mac OS X… At the 2006 Worldwide Newton Conference, we demonstrated that the soul of the Newton is not trapped within aging hardware. It’s ready to burst out and transfer its elegance and functionality into a new line of devices.” Wow, check out the picture of the Newton OS running on a Sharp Zaurus. [via] Link.
From the same peeps that publish MAKE. I’m really looking forward to this book – “What does it mean to grow up with videogames? Even though videogames and computer games play a large role in the daily lives of millions of people, little has been written about the impact this activity has had in shaping the lives of those who play them. In Transmissions from Imaginary Places, 20 people close to the gaming world offer entertaining and thought-provoking essays and anecdotes on games and gamers, and how this often-obsessive activity has changed the world.” [via] Link.
Dennis on the Amiga forums is building a mini Amiga. He writes: “I bought a Spartan-3 FGPA development board, learned Verilog (after finding out that VHDL was not my cup of tea) and started working on Minimig. Minimig stands for (very originally ) mini Amiga. My aim with Minimig is to built a complete OCS A500 (with some extra grunt and features like 4Mbyte ram and fast 68000 processor) on a circuit board about the size of a floppy drive. Loading of programs will be done by means of a MMC flash card, which holds the .ADF images of the floppies like a sort of hardware UAE!” [via] Link.
Mr Joshua writes “Here’s a video Tutorial from PYRO1234321 on how to make home made lock picks.” This is a great in-depth guide running 25 minutes. Also check out other lock-picking related videos submitted by woofcat (lock picks, competitions and pick guns).” Wow, these videos are pretty comprehensive, the beginning sections on the tools and (cheap) materials are really interesting. [via] Link.
