Pete writes – “Preserving the Knowledge of the Ancients? I’ve found that most of the technical books published before about 1964 never had their copyrights renewed, so now are in the public domain. So I am endeavoring to digitize and post some selected books relating to the “vacuum tube age” of electronics here.” This is a great collection – Thanks Jason! Link.
MAKE will be at this in world – “The next Second Life Future Salon is this Thursday the 23rd at 3:30 PM PST with Michael Frumin from Eyebeam OpenLab, “a home for artists, engineers and hackers pioneering open source creativity” in New York City. We’ll stream live audio of Mike discussing his OGLE project (OpenGLExtractor) for taking 3D screen captures from virtual worlds and moving the 3D data into Maya, an industry standard 3D program. So far this has been done with Second Life, World of Warcraft, and Google Earth. See also Eyebeam’s Maya2GoogleEarth importer, where objects from SL have already been placed in GE.” [via] Link.
Micke Gustafsson’s amazing case mod for his son – “My son loves Spiderman so naturally when I asked him how he wanted his new case themed, he didn’t even blink. Spiderman it is then. Thankfully, Spiderman has been around in various forms for over 40 years, including comic books, TV shows and several highly successful Hollywood blockbuster films. This meant there would be a large body of artwork on the Internet I could use for inspiration.”Link. The complete how to has a lot of photos and tips on engraving cases.
Terrie has a good how to on making hanging bird feeders – “Use flag-holder brackets, paint bucket hooks, and conduit/tubing to make it easy to hang your bird feeders where they’re visible but still safe from the neighborhood cats.”Link.
Jeez, Spark Fun has another spiffy part I really want to tinker with, an ultrasonic range finder – “The EZ1 Range Finder is surprisingly simple to use, and astonishingly accurate. Point it at a wall, find out how many inches you are away. Point it at your hand, find out just how long your arms really are…”Link.
Sparkfun electronics has a pretty good Maker-style challenge – “This is a 640×480 pixel resolution CMOS camera used in the Samsung E700 cellular phone. While 0.3 mega pixels may not sound like a lot, this module is one of the smallest, lowest cost CMOS imaging modules currently available to the embedded market…We would like to announce a $200 prize to the first user capable of capturing an image on the new CMOS digital camera. This 640×480 camera is extremely small, low cost ($19.95), and based on proven cellular technology. Unfortunately we don’t have much technical info to go with it. Up for a challenge?”Link.
Volvo has robots that reproduce the same steering/driving movements to better test the towing performance and stability of their cars – robot truck drivers aren’t to far away it seems! [via] Link.
Josh sent us word that MAKE made it to Reader’s Digest! – “The Readers Digest March 2006 edition has a section titled, “5 Things We Don’t Want You to Miss” – In it they recommend Make magazine which has all kinds of technology projects and other stuff you can, well Make.”Link.
