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Archives: February 2005

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February 28, 2005

Warcraft Keyboard

Zboard makes a keyboard that you can pop in all sorts of custom key sets designed for games. My wife who is addicted to World of Warcraft picked one up. Here are some photos of it. It's USB, has a connector part that seems hackable, I'm going to see if I can make another keyboard just for other stuff.

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February 27, 2005

Google Toolbar

I was just writing up an overview on the latest Google toolbar and why I like these types of user added edge-o-vations when I saw a post over on BoingBoing by Cory Doctorow which pretty much sums it all up. If you haven't seen what the beta Google Toolbar does, here are my screenshots of it in action. I think a lot of folks will add this to their arsenal to make the web more useful for them, on their own screens, along with a dozen or so add-ons many of us mix into our browsers.

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February 26, 2005

Mobile Home Entertainment...

We've been hard at work on the next issue of Make (issue 02) which has a lot of home entertainment projects. This gave me a chance to revisit my Media Center PC a bit and try some new things with it. One cool thing that just hit- MSN TV Remote Record. This allows you to use any web browser to tell your Media Center PC what to record. Lots of other recorders have this feature, but this is new for the MCE. Click here to see a ton of screenshots and photos I took. With this feature, along with Orb Networks (one of the services I use for the MCE) I can set a recording and watch it later, all through my Mac, PC, phone or other device while away from home. It's not perfect, but we're getting closer!

And a remimder-- If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe! You'll get issue 01 along with the rest of the issues for the year. You can also pick up the first issue from Amazon too.

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February 25, 2005

Green Laser!

I am testing out a GHL-100XX 160mW+ green laser from LaserGlow.com. Laser power is measured in milliwatts, your standard red laser pointer is usually less than 5mW. This one is not only 30 times more powerful, our eyes are more sensitive to green light, so it appears even brighter. I really like using lasers for star pointing- Mark was telling me was helping his daughter with an astronomy project and needed to point out which stars in the sky were actually planets- this is where these lasers literally shine. Other uses- alignment (in day light) and doing really cool time lapse photos. With a laser like this one there are also some fun experiments- here's a photo of the laser "burning" a hole through a red plastic cup. I'll have some other photos soon, along with some projects. It goes without saying but I feel compelled to post this, never point a laser at people, cars, planes, robots, etc...

Upcoming Make:Audio

We're getting very close to rolling out our first Make:Audio series- this week while visiting the Make Magazine compound I interview Kyle Rankin and Derrick Story. Kyle is the author of Knoppix Hacks. We talked about what it is, where to get it, how to run, some hacks and some cool things folks are doing with it. Later- all about digital photography. Derrick has authored numerous books on digital photography- we chatted about tips to take better pictures, iPhoto 5, favorite digital cameras and what's ahead for digital photography in 2005. Stay tuned!

February 24, 2005

Recording vinyl to digital

Dan, our Associate Publisher here at Make Magazine says "I'm about to tackle my wife's vinyl LP collection. I just purchased a PowerWave from Griffin. Now I'm looking at software. I'm sort of leaning toward Peak LE 4.1 and SoundSoap from bias. Thought I'd check in with you. Know anything good/bad or otherwise of these products?".

In the past I've only needed to record a couple things, so I used an Archos under the watchful eye(s) of a couple robots. Anyone have suggestions for Dan? Post them up in the comments!

February 23, 2005

Detecting Cosmic Rays on planes

On my flight today, I was chatting with a fellow who worked on CO2 lasers-- since I happen to have my USB Radiation detector I figured this would be a good opportunity to detect the Cosmic rays coming in to the plane with interested parties. It worked (photo here). The detector picked up 80, 120 and 240 Muon Count Rate (cpm). I haven't dumped all the data and looked it up yet- seems harmless of course, but it was really neat to detect stuff while high above the clouds at 20,000 feet. When I get time, I'll map the data with GPS, Sat photos and altitude- kinda like war driving for radiation.

February 22, 2005

Blinged out Motorola MPX-220

For the holidays, I bought my wife a gift certificate for NYCPeach to bling out her Motorola MPX-220. I am pretty sure this is the first one NYCPeach has Swarovski cyrstalized, usually they do SideKicks and iPods. We worked with them over the phone, sent it off a couple weeks ago, and here are the pictures- in all its iced out glory. I still want to make my own version.

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More Shuffle stuff

Last week I posted some photos on the iPod Shuffle waterproof case that I had pre-ordered. I'm working on a few DIY iPod cases and accessories, so it's usually good to check out what the pros are doing. Today, my iPod Shuffle armband showed up (photos here). It's pretty good, but I think it's a little bulky for how small the Shuffle is. Expect a homemade version of this soon. Lastly, check out out these silicone Shuffle cases on iPodLounge, pretty spiffy.

Printing on the cheap is safe

I've been watching the Lexmark vs Static Control Components (SCC) pretty closely and it looks like Lexmark won't be using the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) to keep us from getting less expensive printer cartridges anytime soon. A little background- Lexmark tried using the DMCA to keep a company from making cartridges that would work with Lexmark printers. They did this by stating there were copyrights on the programs used on the printer and toner cartridge and if you made your own, you're violating an anti-circumvention law. The reason this alarmed me is I think we're going to see lots of manufacturers do this with cell phone and laptop batteries in addition to any "replaceable" accessory like power cords. The markup on these items are so high, some companies would love to only have us use their own "protected" versions. I tend to make my own chargers for any device I can, not being able to, or not being able to buy a less expensive alternative would be a drag. So- although this seems to be over, keep an eye out. Speaking of...next week I should have an "interesting" charger posted up, just waiting on the last part to ship.

February 21, 2005

Etech reminder!

If you haven't already, be sure to book your travel and register for O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference March 14-17, 2005 in San Diego, CA.

Citizen engineers are throwing their warranties to the wind, hacking their TiVos, Xboxes, and home networks. Wily geeks are jacking Jetsons-like technology into their cars for music, movies, geolocation, and internet connectivity on the road. E-commerce and network service giants like Amazon, eBay, PayPal, and Google are decoupling, opening, and syndicating their services, then realizing and sharing the network effects. Professional musicians and weekend DJs are serving up custom mixes on the dance floor. Operating system and software application makers are tearing down the arbitrary walls they've built, turning the monolithic PC into a box of loosely coupled component parts and services.

The Make Magazine crew will be there, details to follow on that. See you there!

Skatebots hit the ice

Over the weekend the Discovery Channel had some footage from last year's SKATEBOT competition. The University of Calgary's SKATEBOT event pits autonomous LEGO robots against each other in the ice rink. Contestants all have the same LEGO parts in addition to 2 razor blades, the real ingenuity is how the students choose to move the bots around. Some chop their way, others push, one called the dragonfly mimicked the motions of their human skater counterparts. I couldn't find an updated page for this year's event, but if the 2004 page is correct- the next one should be in March of 2005.

February 20, 2005

Flickr on TiVo action

Each week there seems to be more and more great applications using the Flickr API. I've used a lot of photo sharing sites in the past, but Flickr is where it's at-- being able to tinker, mashup what and how photos are viewed is as important as the photos themselves. The latest cool app spotted via Waxy.org is the Flickr / TiVo HME experiment. With this, you can view pictures by tags, groups, sets, users and photos recently posted. If any of you out there use this, point it at our group pool! Make:TV!

Make some gravity waves

The Einstein@Home project is now open for general participation! Much like the SETI@Home and folding@Home efforts- this project uses the idle time of your computer to work on a distributed computing project. Einstein@Home searches data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors to detect waves that ripple the fabric of time and space which may confirm predictions by the General theory of Relativity. You can read more about the project, gravity waves and other distributed computing projects here. If you'd like to join the Make Magazine team, visit our team page. Here's a screenshot of the screensaver from the Einstein@Home application as well the 3 computers I'm running BOINC projects on (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing).

February 19, 2005

Tablet PC Geiger counter

I have a Tablet PC for robot and "wearable" type projects. I'm working on an article for Make Issue 03 that will pull a lot of cool things together like mapping, cosmic rays on airplanes and USB Geiger counters. Here are a couple pictures of some testing from the Maker Flickr group pool. If you haven't joined the group yet-- join in and post up!

Un-DRM'ing the Senseo Coffee Maker

Weekends are about coffee in my home. The Philips Senseo is a coffee maker that makes one cup of coffee at a time, insert single serving Fight Club reference here. I saw one at the store a few days ago and remembered reading about analogies to its "protected" coffee pods that keep you locked in to Philips pod system like DRM on many music players do. I never really thought about buying a Senseo, but today on the del.icio.us bookmarks a guide showed up on making your own coffee pods as well as a universal version. So, now I am thinking of getting one and writing this up for a future issue. Has anyone made their own pods out there? Is the Senseo that good?

February 18, 2005

Fan Made Films

I'm really getting in to "fan made films" lately. Most are Sci-Fi and starting to become fairly high quality. While I was at the Seattle ComicCon I was surprised to see DVDs of all the ones I've viewed in the past for sale on tables with lots of other DVDs you can't "buy" anywhere. Waxy.org posted a link to this one, a Thundercats fan film which is a fun watch. Other ones I've downloaded and used to test video playback on phones, devices, etc... have been Grayson, Duality, Fanimatrix, Hidden Frontier, and Starship Exeter. If you have any other cool ones post'em up!

MakeZine feeds

Terrie our webmaster tells me we have some new RSS/Atom feeds! Gentlefolk, start your aggregators.

You can subscribe to the Talk comments section (RSS and Atom).
Comments from articles (RSS and Atom).
There are also icons and autodiscovery links for these on both pages. We have a summary of all feeds here.

Rockbox OS for Archos provides cool functions

WFMU is a public radio station in New Jersey that has great eclectic programs . For instance, one show plays old Edison wax cylinders. The station also has an excellent blog, called Beware the Blog. I was reading a entry on it about high-end MP3 recording equipment, and in the comments section, someone mentioned the Archos Jukebox Recorder, a 20Gb MP3 player that you can buy for about $250. The interesting thing about this device is the alternative operating system for that's been created by a community of Archos users. It's called Rockbox. The commentor says "The replacement interface can even play games like tetris and solitaire. (It can announce menus by a robotic user-configurable voice...it can even play videos that are converted to a special format - though on a small LCD the results are far from satisfying.)" This sounds really interesting. If you've had experience with this system, please tell me about it by posting in the comments.

February 17, 2005

Slashdot Make 01 review and IMterview with Mark

Alex Moskalyuk over on Slashdot has a review of our first issue of Make Magazine. He gave it a 10 out of 10. I really like this part "Make is the magazine for people who like to look under the hood, who like to work on do-it-yourself projects and who feel great accomplishment when a project is over, even though its practical usability might be questioned". Mark was IMterviewed over on Gizmodo about the magazine as well.

February 2005 Home