...I'm happy with the kids being comfy with a computer, but we've set some basic rules for it. Notably, they can't just play all those flash games all the time. And sometimes, if they don't do their homework, we disallow it entirely, or - happily more commonly - we give extra time for good behaviour or for some homework that needs more googling.

But I'm a geek, and I'm not at all interested in trying to do any of this manually.

So I wrote (and recently re-wrote, since a disk crash destroyed my original) a simple internet usage tracker for them, which allows me to set usage limits per kid, and which tracks how much time they use online, and forcibly logs them off if they go over the limits. It's a stupid program, but it works pretty well (if you run Linux, of course ;), and since I had to rewrite it I asked some of the git people for help with the simple graphical UI that shows the kids how much time they have left.

So for any other Linux user with kids and git, and who wants to do the same, here's a pointer to the git summary page: tracker.git, and you can get it with

git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/tracker

if you want to play around with it. It's not fancy, it has no docs, no installation instructions etc, but if people are actually interested, I'll be happy to help. Why? Because I've always noticed that my own projects get so much better if others are involved, even if it's just as a user...

Living Room Baja Buggies by John Mouton. With wireless cameras on board, these radio-controlled racers give you virtual reality telepresence. Page 96

Taffy Pulling Machine by William Gurstelle. Make a simple mechanism that stretches delicious candy while it stretches the limits of multidimensional math. Page 106

The Pixelmusic 3000 by Tarikh Korula. Re-create a mid-1970s video trip by plugging this box into any TV and audio source. Beneath the fake wood paneling, a Propeller microcontroller simulates Atari's classic music visualizer. Page 114

Solar Power System Design by Parker Jardine. How to use solar panels to supplement your home or workshop electricity needs. Page 160

You can subscribe to MAKE to get in on this project action (use code CMAKE for $5 off) and you'll also get access to the MAKE digital edition, it's exactly like our print magazine, but online (no DRM), shareable, printable and can be accessed from just about any computer. Back issues of MAKE are also available in our Maker store.

The point of this room (pun intended) was to get the kids into a closed room, then have spikes emerge from the ceiling and have the ceiling start to lower downward. It required a sturdy 4' x 7' x 10' frame, thirteen carved foam-cast skulls, 26 flexible foam spikes and a false ceiling. I almost gave up on the project because, of all things, I couldn't find a good way to make the spikes. Eventually, I figured out a way that worked. The finished room was a big hit and really creepy. Well worth the effort.

More about making a DIY: Crush Room

In the Maker Shed:

Animated Ghost Kit

Running out of space in your big Arduino project? Good news! Finally, after months of backorders, one can now buy the latest improvement to the 'ATmega8′ line of chips: the ATmega328's.

The '328 has 32K of flash, and 2K of SRAM. Basically its got the capacity of an ATmega32 but in a slimmer package. These chips are notable for their ability to drop-in replace the ATmega168. So that means if you have an Arduino or compatible clone, it is a easy 2 minute swap.

If you have an Adafruit wave shield or GPS/datalogging shield, and you're annoyed that the FAT16 libraries eats up so much flash and RAM, upgrading will definitely fix the problem.

I've merged my previous updates to the Arduino bootloader to the most recent release and also fixed 2 annoying bugs that have prevailed this long. (1. the missing signature bytes when using the bootloader directly and 2. the broken EEPROM code). Download the '328-compatible bootloader files here.

There are 250 preprogrammed chips are in the Adafruit webshop or you can get blank chips from Mouser (but be warned that they're backordered till mid-December)

Ranjit made a one-minute tutorial on turning a diet coke can into an ocarina - the "Diet Cocarina." Doesn't sound great, but hey, it's a start!

At IDEO we're all about building to think. Learning from books and websites and product demos is cool, but we think the really good stuff comes when you get in there and start messing around for real.

In the case of multi-touch interfaces, that meant building a system we could start prototyping on. What we wanted was:
-a multi-touch display large enough to facilitate use by several people at once
-an API for flash that would let us quickly prototype multi-touch interfaces and applications

It took us about 5 weeks to get everything together. Kyle, one of our all-around gearheads, had already been building a drafting-table-style FTIR system in his garage which helped kick-start us.

Those that know me know I am a sucker for multitudes. Many of anything intrigues me more than single things ever could. So it wouldn’t be much of a surprise to find out that I took 2925 dice and formed them into a bitmap image of the Madonna. Thats the Madonna, and not just plain ol’ Madonna.

This ZigBee radio module has a 32-Bit ARM Processor and its architecture reduces component amounts on the PCB which ultimately reduces power consumption and the overall cost of these efficient modules. This package needs an external crystal and there's room for an optional 50 Ohm antenna as well. The two onboard ADCs and 8 general purpose I\O pins make this an even more handy interface than the current ZigBees to get started with wireless projects.

FreeStar Pro 32-Bit ARM-Based Radio Modules via Electronics Lab

Last month, Esquire magazine published a cover that contained an E-ink screen. I was really looking forward to it, actually... so much so that I marked it in my calendar to make sure I picked one up around the corner. There was quite a bit of hype about it, and a lot of people wrote about it on their blogs and websites, and Esquire even encouraged hackers (does that include me?) to play around with the screen. The local store had a couple of copies left over this past week, so I grabbed one, and decided to see what I could do in a couple hours of playing around.

Creating a swan out of hundreds of smaller origami pieces is currently popular among the younger generation in Asia. Your loved one will appreciate this gift because you put in a tremendous amount of effort, dedication and patience. This is definitely a sign of love's labor. Preparation: First you need to fold 500 individual triangular pieces, which are the backbones of creating the swan.

Also, looks for our MASSIVE DIY Halloween contest in a couple days, it's the biggest and best on the web!

Lastly, our DIY Halloween issue is available. Last fall we released a special Halloween edition of Make. We sold thousands. Our warehouse gang tell us we still have some remaining stock. Here's your chance to get this classic!

DIY HALLOWEEN from the editors of MAKE and CRAFT brings you 40-plus DIY projects for the holiday that's made for makers. From the craftiest costumes to amazing animated props and the latest in computer-controlled haunted house effects.

• Headless Marie Antoinette costume
• Mechanical ghosts and ghouls
• LED and laser jack-o'-lanterns
• Creature makeup and blood-spurting wounds
• DIY coffins and tombstones
• T. Rex rooftopper
• Flaming LED skulls Kid-tested haunted house tricks
• A special "Ghoulbox" section with Halloween kits, tools, and gadgets.
• Plus demonic decorations, hideous party snacks, and profiles of extraordinary makers and their creepy crafts.

Using the VonHippel module and a simple c program compiled for the ARM, BUG can talk to the Arduino (in the picture, the USB cable and USB to serial chip on the breadboard are probably superfluous as the VonHippel has serial on it).

There's a new Bay Area hacker space, NoiseBridge, in the Mission District:

We want to provide infrastructure and collaboration opportunities for people interested in programming, hardware hacking, physics, chemistry, mathematics, photography, security, robotics, all kinds of art, and, of course, technology. Through talks, workshops, and projects we encourage knowledge exchange, learning, and mentoring.

As a space for artistic collaboration and experimentation, we are open to all types of art - with a special emphasis on the crossover of art and technology. From hardware labs to electronics, cooking, photography, and sound labs, anything that's creative is welcome.

We intend to have many interesting things happening at all times. Sharing is essential to making this work. A logical followup to this is to find a space to display our creative projects.

Read more about it on Jake Appelbaum's LiveJournal page.

The NoiseBridge Wiki [via LaughingSquid]

More:

• Other hacker space coverage on MAKE

If you want to crash a local parade of human-powered vehicles and soak unsuspecting onlookers in water or vaporized hot dogs, a pink camouflage tank is a pretty good craft to do it in. At least that's what 30-year-old Philadelphia gearhead Vin Marshall thought when he persuaded nine of his friends to build the 2,000-pound replica, complete with a functioning pneumatic cannon.

The trick was moving the tank using muscle alone. Computer models showed that it could fit hardware for six pedalers and yield about 1.5 horsepower. That's not enough to move tank treads, so the team used wheels instead. Then they gave it bicycle-like gearing to get more power from less exertion. A salvaged rear differential (which allows wheels to spin independently) from an old truck axle made turning more efficient.

What the heck do you do with the toilet brush right after you use it? Hang it up? Lay it in the sink or bathtub to dry first? Or maybe you have one of those brushes with a built-in base that keeps the bristles corraled when not in use. All of these alternatives kinda skeenge me out, honestly, and whether it's realistic or not I have a kind of horror of loose toilet brushes and the germs I imagine growing on them. So I often find myself standing over the commode with a freshly-used toilet brush wishing I had some more sanitary place to put it.

This is my Howard-Hughesian solution. A standard round plastic toilet brush is built into the lid of a barber's disinfecting jar, so that the lid forms a sort of "guard" for the brush when it is withdrawn for use. When you're done scrubbing, the dirty brush goes back down into the jar until the lid is back in place, submerging the bristles in disinfectant, where they are continuosly stored when not in use. I used generic barber's disinfectant from the beauty store, which comes concentrated and is diluted many-fold for use. The disinfectant is cheap to begin with; add to that the fact that the closed-lid design reduces evaporative losses to essentially zero and the expense associated with the disinfectant becomes trivial. You can also add detergent to assist in cleaning the bowl.

The tikitag starter package, together with the tikitag service on http://www.tikitag.com can be used to create your Internet of Things. With tikitag, objects can be made smart and applications can become accessible via a simple touch.

Usage: From linking your toddler's toys to Internet websites towards creating or customizing your own loyalty or renting service, the applications of the tikitag starter package are only limited by your imagination.

Contents: The tikitag starter package contains one USB RFID reader and 10 RFID tags (smart stickers).
System requirements: The USB reader works with PC Windows XP and Vista and with MacOSX 10.4 or later (Intel version only).
Technical: The USB reader works at 13.56MHz (High Frequency RFID) and has a readout distance of about 4 cm (1 inch) when used with the tikitag RFID tags.

This video shows how to build a "Spy Bug" transmitter with a mini microphone to capture all of the the "suspicious" moments you might encounter. Watch the video and see if you agree that we should teach it's maker how to solder a bit better.

This holloween costume from 1981 looks like an evil demon took over this guy's PC. Even in the days before Windows, you could still get a blue screen of BOO!

computer costume from 1981, via OObject

More about How To: Balsa-wood DSLR Camera [Core77]

Wondering what we did with our web server on a business card project from last week? It’s powering a giant LED graffiti wall. Animations can be user-submitted using the online designer. You can watch a live feed of user animations as well. The online interface runs on the Google App Engine for maximum scalability and resilience. In today’s How-to we cover all the ins and outs of building your own networked graffiti wall.

Even as I type this, the inky pages of our forthcoming Make: Books title, The Best of Instructables, are fluming their way through giant printing presses. Having been a printer for many years, I can hear the sounds and smell the ink from here. The book will be released at Maker Faire Austin, Oct 18th and 19th. We'll have a display of book projects in the Maker Shed and will be doing demos. The Instructables crew will also be doing demos in their area.

Putting this book together was an amazing process. We worked with all of the Instructables authors, several hundred people, to get their permissions, have them fix mistakes in their projects, take better photos, fact-check our layouts, etc. This proved to be very time-consuming and tedious, but it was also very inspiring. Everyone was so helpful and supportive. We got all sorts of encouragement and positive feedback, which kept us going as we burned oil late into the night. It really felt like the book was a nexus for several hundred people, enthused about DIY and the maker movement, to come together to make something truly great as an expression of that enthusiasm. When I read Phillip's wonderful piece here a few days ago, We can make things better..., I actually got a little verklempt. Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, but we were finishing up a project, this book, where I really experienced the power of that "can do" spirit, as a ground truth, and it really made me feel hopeful in a time that so many things seem to be coming unglued. Unglued? No problem. I've got the right adhesives and the C-clamps we need. I'll have this fixed a jiffy!

The book should be available by Halloween, and will be for sale at Maker Faire. You can pre-order a copy in the Shed at a pre-release price of $29.99 (regular price will be $34.99). The Maker Shed page also has links to some PDF excerpts from the book. The Instructables site also has a discussion area for the book.

The Best of Instructables Volume I
Our Price: $34.99
Sale Price: $29.99

Phantastron kits from Electric Western are in stock. They're a great way to get started with tubes, analog computing and DIY synthesis (pre-1950 style). We provide all you need, including a case and the safe and sane power supply. You just solder and drill holes and assemble (1940s turret board style!).

Oh, and I'm going into the shop today to pack one each to send to Collin and Gareth.

CONSIDER, in these economically difficult times, that inspiring model of creative home design, the college student. No, we are not kidding. Yes, we understand that you already know how to throw all your clothes in a pile on the floor.

But there is still much that can be learned from students who’ve managed to put together great looking places on what a grown-up might pay for a one-way ticket to Paris.

First and foremost is fearlessness. You’d be embarrassed if your friends knew you’d gotten a piece of furniture off the street. College kids call up their friends to get their help carrying furniture home from the street, and brag about it. Many are genuinely concerned about recycling and the environment, and delighted when they can turn construction cast-offs into the trappings of home.

Where others see garbage, students see potential: a wooden futon frame, less the futon, becomes a towel rack. An old-fashioned school desk and bench that might well have come out of a one-room schoolhouse upstate? Use it as a bedside table.

This 4 Oscillator Opto-Theremin is built into a standard Nintendo Gameboy using a Quad 4093 Schmitt Trigger IC, 4 1uf electrolytic caps, 4 Photo-Resistors in the 140k Ohm Range, and 4 Diodes. Check out the rather small video on the link below to see it in action and listen to the effect it produces. Pretty cool build with lots of details on each step.

4 Oscillator Opto-Theremin build into a Gameboy

Carlos of Neogentronyx is building hydraulic driven mech exoskeletons. He's currently seeking funding so he can grow his company into actual Mecha construction/research & development group -

This is the new Neo-Mech chassis I developed after having created and tested my previous Mech (Big-Red) as many called it.
I began the project back in early January of 2007.

The new chassis is 16ft tall thus far as I have not yet built the head.

I am going to be transferring all current hydraulics from Big-Red Due to a dry well of funding (lack of) to the new chassis.

More:
Land walker robot suit

THC/vonJeek proudly presents an ePassport emulator. This emulator applet allows you to create a backup of your own passport chip(s).

The government plans to use ePassports at Immigration and Border Control. The information is electronically read from the Passport and displayed to a Border Control Officer or used by an automated setup. THC has discovered weaknesses in the system to (by)pass the security checks. The detection of fake passport chips does not
work. Test setups do not raise alerts when a modified chip is used. This enables an attacker to create a Passport with an altered Picture, Name, DoB, Nationality and other credentials.

The manipulated information is displayed without any alarms going off. The exploitation of this loophole is trivial and can be verified using thc-epassport.

Regardless how good the intention of the government might have been, the facts are that tested implementations of the ePassports Inspection System
are not secure.

ePassports give us a false sense of security: We are made to believe that they make usemore secure. I'm afraid that's not true: current ePassport implementations don't add security at all.

RFID for Makers by Joe Grand in Theory & Practice. Build this kit to read radio frequency ID tags. MAKE 06 - Page 160.

From the MAKE Flickr pool, user JohnnyT writes:

We had a bumper crop of apples this year so I decided to build my own cider press out of lumber we had around the house and 3/4inch threaded rod. I mortised a nut slightly into the board which does the pressing. As you turn the screw the pressing board travels down the shaft. There are some saw kerfs toward the bottom of the press for the juice to flow out. The pine does effect the flavor slightly. It's not terribly unplesant, my wife didn't even notice it until I pointed it out. I'm guessing real presses are made of hardwood like Oak or Ash. I'm going to give it another run this weekend and I have been soaking the wood in water. I'm curious if that will help reduce or eliminate the slight flavoring of the wood.

This is a not-so-subtle reminder that it is apple season. I grew up near an orchard and get really homesick at this time of the year!

Florin writes in -

This article is part of the PCB Giveaway program that we have running here at Youritronics. Morgoth will get a free pcb manufactured by BKRtech for submitting this project. If you're interested in participating, read more on the program page.

These days most pharmacies use LED pharmacy crosses posted at their entrance to let people know there is a pharmacy there. The reasons are obvious, they look cool&hi-tech, they can be seen from distance and they can be customized really easy (well, easy customizing pretty much depends on how the manufacturer approaches things).

If you try to search the web about schematics or example codes for this kind of circuit you wont find any, and again i think the reason is obvious, the crosses are quite expensive and so is the profit for the manufacturer. So nobody is gonna post schematics for such a project, unless you're a hobbyist and you're having fun with electronics.

The project consists of one ATmega64, three ULN2003 and five 5×7 LED matrix from Kingbright(TA20-11EWA). I had the idea to build something like this but so far i haven't had the time nor the knowledge to get it done. So i asked Morgoth if he would like to participate in the project. I sent him the LED's, the drivers and the PCB and he started working. As you can see not many parts are involved , but the secret lies in the microcontroller, it's the programming that does the job.

The idea behind the GPS-A-Sketch was to create an open shareable design that many users could use as the foundation for a modular, user-programmable, portable, GPS receiver. As the technology comes down in price (A Garmin eTrex of slightly lower specs can currently be had for $130), this technology should begin to be used for alternative uses (other than getting directions to the Walmart).

Potential uses could be in entertainment (locative games), art, r/c robotics, tracking and hopefully some things I haven't even thought of.

The device should be easy to program (with user designed modular libraries), and allow for modular hardware addition, such as WiFi, accelerometers, sensors and interface components. I've chosen the Arduino based RBBB from modern devices as the initial processor, because of the vast resources and ease of use associated to the Arduino microcontroller platform, and the tiny form factor of the RBBB.

For now, the cost of a unit comes in at about $130 with the addition of an FTDI cable and shipping, bringing the total closer to $160 on a per/unit basis. Obviously there will eventually be ways to get this cost down below $100, including a single circuit board, and some shared bulk ordering on components.