Make: Online: March 2005 Archives

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Archives: March 2005

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March 31, 2005

MAKE on NPR's Science Friday!

Makers! Set your RadioSharks! This Friday (April 1st) I'll be on the 2nd hour of NPR's Science Friday with Ira Flatow talking about DIY projects and lots of fun projects you can do with stuff around your house. More information about Science Friday can be found here as well a station locator with times with streaming info here.

Cigar Box Guitars

Wow, two tobacco based projects in a row. Here's a pretty cool site that shows you how to make a Cigar box guitar. Check out the Hall of Fame with mentions of Jimi Hendrix, Carl Perkins, Gov't Mule, Albert King and Ted Nugent. I have an old Cigar box with bolts in it, once I work through those bolts- I think I'll make one of these.

DIY Marlboro Amp

Amps, iPod chargers and mice made of Altoid tins, Atari 2600 cartridge getting a new life as flash drives- just about anything can be used a great project case. Even an empty pack of cigarettes. Here's a neat example of an under $30 DIY pocket amp on an Archos 20 Gb mp3 player with open sourced Roxbox firmware, and Etymotic ER-6 headphones. The surgeon general has determined that this project is smokin'.

PSP Playstation Portable changes background colors (video)

Smash's World points out that the PSP will change colors based on what month it is. 12 colors in all, January = Grey, February = Dull-Yellow, March = Lime-Green, April = Pink, May = Dark-Green, June = Light-Purple, July = Tealish-Blue, August = Blue, September = Purple, October = Gold, November = Brown, December = Red. Here's a quick video I shot of this (save this file to your local system and/or PSP in MP_Root/100MNV01 folder to view). Ideally we could add more parameters like changing color based on battery life, connection, time of day and full/empty status of the memory stick...

March 30, 2005

MakeShift last chance!

If you have your copy of MAKE, be sure to enter the MakeShift challenge (page 170). After a relaxing night of camping in the deep woods, you return to your car to find that it will not start. The battery is dead. "Someone" left the parking lights on overnight. You are 50 miles from the nearest road and have limited food and water. You try to call for help, but your cellphone is out of power and out of range. Snowy weather is scheduled to set in by late evening. The situation is serious. Makeshift winners will get a SWISSMEMORY USB Victorinox 512MB device, as well as a Make T-shirt and 1-year subscription, if you win. This is your last chance to get in some last-minute entries before the deadline 3/31!

MIT Media Lab mega post

MIT's Media Lab always has a lot going on to inspire. Hacker in the trenches Dick@MIT reports in with some great links and descriptions of some of the projects and experiments. Balloon speakers, Self powered remotes, text projection, augmented reality, 3D object scanner, light slinky and a ton of videos...

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The Minty Mouse

Make Flickr pool member drewish of Bicycle POV fame posted up a couple images of a minty cool mouse he made. Ingredients: One Altoids tin and one Logitech USB optical mouse. Not shown: Dremel, mini-hack saw, two-part epoxy, random plastic bits, 4 hours of my life.

eBook making on the PSP

There are few ways you can get eBooks on your PSP. One way- you can turn the PSP in to a web browser and hit a HTML page that has an eBook, but an easier way is to use a print utility called PaperLess printer to make images of any printable file or PSPPhoto which makes photos that are properly sized for the PSP. Here's how to make eBooks using PaperlessPrinter from GameFries, here's where to get PSPPhoto and here are a ton of great digitized Manga for the PSP. Last up HowToons on my PSP!

More Maker Fair pictures

During Etech we had our Maker fair, which we've described as a Science fair- with beer. I'm finally catching up with finding more of the photos out there in Flickr land, blog posts and posting some of our own- here are some great photos from photographer Emily Nathan. We're already planning some more events like our first Maker fair, stay tuned!

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March 29, 2005

The Atari 2600 iPod battery pack

Altoids and old Atari 2600 cartridges make great project cases. Earlier Brendan Dawes's made a USB drive out of an old Atari cartridge and now here's a great step-by-step from Teach42 that shows you how to make a battery pack for an iPod using Combat.

Instant Message Dolphins

OMG! LOL! I can't wait add Flipper to my buddy list...Seadragon allows you to emit underwater whistles and to acquire underwater whistles. You can now try to communicate with many species of whales and dolphins. Seadragon could be described as Instant Messaging for dolphins and humans. It does not translate whistles. It tries to recognize them, it gives a name to unrecognized ones, and it is up to you to figure out their meaning, if any. It allows you to emit whistles underwater and to see the text names of whistles emitted by cetaceans in response to yours. Download it here.

GameOptics first impressions

Earlier I had mentioned I ordered one of the GameOptic devices from ThinkGeek. It arrived, and wow, I really like this USB LCD info-gadget. Here are some pictures of some of the things it can do. I hooked up my web cam and set it to upload pictures to Flickr when someone messaged me (photo). There are about a dozen other projects I'm going to do with this little guy and the developers of product have been really receptive to more ideas and hacks.

March 28, 2005

Make: Video test (for PlayStation Portable - PSP)

We're testing our new video feed- I made a quick video (MP4) that shows the ways many PSP hackers discovered to use a PlayStation Portable (PSP) as a web browser using a game called Wipeout Pure, an awesome DNS/PSP Portal from FugiMax and all the great info from all the PSP tinkerers out there. Follow the directions here to actually do this and to watch our test video. Save this video file to your local system and play on your Mac/PC or create a new folder on your PSP Memory Stick called MP_Root and inside that folder another folder called 100MNV01 and place the M4V83876.MP4 file in there. On the PSP go to videos and play it. Keep in mind, it's just a quick and dirty test. If you're in to more testing-- subscribe to our RSS 2.0 feed podcast/videoblog aggregator style and have any audio, video and files we post here downloaded automatically. Make:Audio coming soon!

March 27, 2005

World's safest car, only one made

Andy Saunders has spent the last 12 years restoring the self-proclaimed world's safest car, the Aurora. Designed in 1957 by an eccentric New York priest as the world's safest car, it flopped and only one was ever made. It has foam-filled bumpers, roll cage and seats that swivel 180 degrees before a crash.

Zelda Classic

Ever like a game so much you made another one to keep playing? Zelda Classic is a tribute to (what we think is) the greatest video game of all time: Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda. It has been developed into an exact replica of the NES version that we all know and love. Beyond that, Zelda Classic allows the development of new quests that can use either the traditional graphics or enhanced graphics, as well as new enemies, items, and challenges. You can download user created quests (and here's how to load them). Runs great on the little oQo!

Using the PSP as a web browser round up...

The Playstation portable has only been out a few days here in the states and there is already a really cool hack for it- using it as a web browser. There are a few ways to do this and here are a couple- all require (for now) the game "Wipeout Pure" and redirecting the traffic via a proxy. Wombat Mobile has a great how-to here for Windows users... and here's one if you have a FreeBSD machine- roto/moxy have some info. While I don't think this is any scientific indicator of success- the portable gaming console that has the most hackers will "win".

Nambers

Makezine.com is easy to remember, but sound.sky.walk.car.mysteryrobot.com sounds cooler when you use Nambers. A namber is part name and part number. Each number between 0 and 255 has a namber. For example, 1 is fun and 213 is star. I really like this idea, the nambers are simple words that represent the DNS of your site. It would be neat to make little hieroglyphics Stargate style so you could get to a site with a big pictogram dialer. Or for kids, a "see and say" web browser.

March 26, 2005

Retro Flash Drive

Flash superstar Brendan Dawes made a flash (memory flash) USB drive out of an old Atari cartridge. "...occassionaly I yearn for stuff that was oversized and just made you want to reach out and touch it. So I took an old Atari 2600 cartridge and put inside a 128MB Flash drive! It's incredibly stupid, and is the polar opposite of what Flash drives were invented for, but I love it!".

Resurrect Your Old PC for Music- with Linux

Here's a great article about turning that old PC in to an internet-enabled CD player, DVD burner, and MP3 jukebox using Knoppix. I get asked about this a lot "What can I do with an old PC" and this is a pretty good use and Knoppix is a great way to get started. We interviewed Kyle Rankin who wrote "Knoppix Hacks" and hopefully in the next week or so we'll be releasing the interview(s) with him and others for our Make:Audio series.

Russian Roulette for the Pocket PC

I'm not sure it's worth $17.99, but I really love this application because, well, it's uselessly dangerous. Russian Roulette is an application for the Pocket PC that will soft reset or hard reset the device when you take your chances by betting your device's data.

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