Make: Online: Home Entertainment Archives

Archive: Home Entertainment

June 12, 2009

The IT Crowd on DVD in the States

In early April of this year, a fairly significant event happened for my family. Geeky as it may sound, my husband, sons, and I were ecstatic to learn that the first season of The IT Crowd was available on DVD in a format that we could use here in the United States. My husband Bruce posted the news to GeekDad, and we all gathered round ye old plasma TV to enjoy the laughs. But it was over all too quickly. Were we doomed to Land of the Lost reruns on Hulu?

Thankfully, we're now looking forward to the end of this month, when The IT Crowd, The Complete Season 2 comes out on US format DVD on June 30th. Sure, you can watch it online or on the IFC channel, but we'll be happy to have the whole series on DVD, both for the funny 1337 extras and the subtitles, which my son uses (he wears hearing aids).

Word on the internets is that the 4th season of The IT Crowd will begin in July in the UK, and a Season 3 DVD may hit the States this fall. Bring on the IT Brits!

March 29, 2009

Solar joule thief cell charger

Photo from Petmar0 on Flickr

Pete responded in the comments to the the call for designs in the Rural Celly Charger article on Saturday.

How about connecting a joule-thief circuit (DC-DC upconverter) to a cap on one side and a small solar cell (like the ones in calculators) on the other? You pull off of the cap to the cell phone directly. If I remember correctly, most cell phones have internal Vregs between the battery and the rest of the circuitry, so that takes care of your OV protection. I'll see if I can build this, and then get back to you.

Within a few hours on his busy Saturday, he had a rough build tested and posted up. His photos of the build have been added to the MAKE Flickr pool. Obviously, a few tests on some quickly assembled parts do not make a working solution, but they do demonstrate the concepts behind the circuit that could be worked up in a more detailed analysis and build. Ultimately, it would be ideal to come up with a design that can be replicated across cultures and great distances with minimal and less than ideal tools.

Photo from petmar0 on Flickr

The original article on Women of Uganda Network, or WOUGNET, told of how a Ugandan woman built her own charger after an unscrupulous vendor nicked her good battery and replaced it with a nearly dead one. The design that she came up with uses five D cell batteries to pump some charge into her phone. That should be quite a bit more voltage than is really needed to fill up a cell battery. She and her neighbors could benefit from a buildable design that could be made from easily sourced supplies.

The comments offered a number of perspectives on the problem and possible solutions. As is the case in many rural communities, she has access to a bicycle, some supplies, and maybe a bit of know-how about electricity. It is likely that her experiment was more 'seat of the pants engineering' than a studied formal solution based on book based research.

Generally, DC motors are relatively plentiful in electrojunk. Old cassette players, CD drives, VCRs, and more are good sources for surplus motors, and it is possible that a design based on a motor would be easy to build in rural Africa. The resistor and transistor needed for the Joule Thief could be harvested from many old devices. A capacitor could be used to store the charge, and then we would need a fitting to connect it to the phone. It is likely that many of the phones in a given community are of similar design and a spare could be appropriated for a cell phone charger.

How can you add to this idea? Could you design and build a cell charger only from junk? If you did not have access to a decent soldering iron, how would you get your connections consistent? If you have an idea to add to this conversation, bring it over to the comments. If you can, build up a sample circuit like Pete did and show it to us through a post on your blog, or you can add it to the MAKE Flickr pool.

March 22, 2009

Helen O'Loy, the original DIY Bride?

Image from KuiperCliff

The Steven writes in the comments:

You say DIY bride, I think of Helen O'Loy by Lester Del Rey

Well, maybe you haven't heard of ol' Helen O'Loy either. O'Loy sounds a lot like Alloy, doesn't it?

Spoiler Alert: Don't read the wikipedia entry, it gives too much info.

Spoiler-less synopsys:

Dave and Phil are two pals who spend a lot of time together. Although Dave is a robot repairman and Phil is a doctor, they become increasingly interested in building their own robotic housekeeper. Finally they produce "Lena", a housekeeping robot who does a pretty good job of things, but she still lacks the common sense that comes from having emotions. After trying - and failing - with mechanical glands in Lena, they order a high quality Dillard's robot to experiment with. The results are good, but a little bit too real as their new creation, Helen, falls madly in love with one of them.

Maybe you want to read it for yourself, then Google Books is your friend. Or if you want to hold a real atomic version, then you can have that too.

Read any good robofiction lately?

March 14, 2009

Meatricity Christmas tree

MAKE Flickr pool member Whymcycles has contributed a great Meatricity powered Christmas tree build.

Colin pedals my Dad's '75 Schwinn Exceriser stationary bike..30,000+ miles, with a fixed magnet electric motor rubbing on the wheel.' All sizes' will show the simple clamp set up to hold the motor and the device itself to the fork leg. I used 2 old BMX 4 bolt handlebar clamps (Stems). The motor spins and gets enough juice to light 110 volt electric bulbs, or Christmas lights! 0 carbon footprint, the motor can be tilted away to let the bike function minus the generator. The only weld is a 'x' cross of two seat post segments to which the stems attach. Plumbers metal tape would do just as well with bolts hold tight.. Built Fall of '05. Made merenque..beat the eggs with the electric mixer plugged into the bike! yum.

What novel ideas have you tried out recently? What can you power without plugging in to the wall? Join us in the comments, and show off your great ideas in the MAKE Flickr pool.

January 14, 2009

Vintage television acquired

Let it begin! My wife picked up the RCA Victor 21" television last night from our friend. I unloaded it and set it in the hallway; it's a little bit bigger than I envisioned, and even cooler than I'd hoped. The giant channel knob on the side turns the channel indicator display inside a little window above the TV screen. Seems like that needs to be incorporated into the project. Maybe it'll correspond to the "next customer" tickets I hand out at parties.

I only had a moment to poke around, but there are three speakers mounted behind the stylish fabric, and a switch on the back that goes between "TV" and "PH". This is so you could plug your phonograph into an RCA jack and play through the set. Neato!

There have been so many excellent, creative ideas in the comments of my first post on this project, thank you so much. If I can settle in on a direction to go, I'd like to chronicle the build here, with an eye toward carting the finished project to the 2009 Bay Area Maker Faire in May (providing I do a decent job on it and it's Maker Faire-worthy, otherwise I'll deny any of this ever happened).

January 12, 2009

Seeking vintage television conversion ideas

I'm picking up a broken 1957 RCA Victor Deluxe 21" B&W television from a friend who's moving tonight, because she knows I like mid century design and rebuilding things. So, what to do with it? Secret bar with hinged top, hydraulic lift, and dry ice? Blond wood wormhole portal through space-time? Puppet theatre??

I've seen people build aquaria into them here, and retrofit an LCD panel into them here.

I'd love to hear your ideas in the comments.

January 5, 2009

Reprogramming pinball machines

MAKE Projects Editor, Paul Spinrad, sent me a link to this project and the following message:

Some CS / Game Development students hacked a Lord Of The Rings pinball machine, taking full control of its sensors, actuators, and display, and reprogrammed it to play Pinhorse -- like the basketball game, but you try to match your opponent's pinball shots in a certain amount of time, guided by the playfield lights and display. Control comes from a Linux PC and a Parallax microcontroller. Here's the project page with a video and academic paper. Naturally, they had to do some heavy-duty reverse-engineering.

The video narrative is a little hard to follow, but it does look like an interesting, challenging project.

Project "Programming Pinball Machines" [Thanks, Paul!]

December 30, 2008

A tribute to the VCR - The VHS era is winding down BUT there are many things you can do with a VCR and the tapes!

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VHS era is winding down - Los Angeles Times...

The last big supplier of the tapes is ditching the format, ending the long fade-out of a product that ushered in the home theater. Pop culture is finally hitting the eject button on the VHS tape, the once-ubiquitous home-video format that will finish this month as a creaky ghost of Christmas past.
After three decades of steady if unspectacular service, the spinning wheels of the home-entertainment stalwart are slowing to a halt at retail outlets. On a crisp Friday morning in October, the final truckload of VHS tapes rolled out of a Palm Harbor, Fla., warehouse run by Ryan J. Kugler, the last major supplier of the tapes.

"It's dead, this is it, this is the last Christmas, without a doubt," said Kugler, 34, a Burbank businessman. "I was the last one buying VHS and the last one selling it, and I'm done. Anything left in warehouse we'll just give away or throw away."

Goodbye VCR, while your format is over - I still see years of projects with you ahead. Each week I see a dozen VCRs tossed in the trash in NYC. Sometimes I rescue some of them, other times I just wish I had more time to do things with them. Here are some projects you can do with an old VCR as well as the old tapes. If you have others, post them up in the comments. We'll start out with the VCR cat feeder projects and then move on to other fun ones, a VCR has gears, motors and precision electronics - a treasure trove for a maker.

VCR Cat Feeder on MAKE: television
A MAKE: magazine favorite! Here's a quick peek at John Park demonstrating how to use a motor from an old VCR and use it to drive an automated cat feeder.

Make Pt1527
Make Pt1528
VCR Cat Feeder
Liberate a motor from an old VHS deck, attach it to a food chopper, and program the deck's recording timer to fill Fluffy's bowl on schedule. Voila! Your own programmable pet food dispenser.

Vfd Amp
VCR display turned amplifier
5Volt turned an old VCR's vacuum fluorescent display into a headphone amp, here writes - "VFDs are common on VCRs. I have a few of them I took from some broken VCRs. Last night I was working on how I could use them as vacuum triodes. I don't have much experience with real vacuum tubes so I had to invent some, possibly wrong, arrangements, but I finally got something".

Block Diagram
Control your VCR with a text message
Frisnit shows you how to control a VCR with SMS (cell phone) - "Imagine it, it's 3:15 on a weekday afternoon and you've just realised you've forgotten to set the video to tape 'Pet Rescue'. Usually you would be condemned to an afternoon of misery and disappointment, knowing you had no heartwarming cute animal stories to come home to. But not any more. Below I describe a simple interface between a T28 mobile phone (ME) and Matsui VX770 VCR to allow remote recording of programmes."

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Make PCR out of a VCR - The VCRVO
North writes in I decided gut the VCR and use it as a computer case. This would replace the functionality of the DVD player and video recorder with one unit that looks more like a VCR than a computer (thus keeping the wife happy). My initial goal was to get Freevo running on it, so during the build I affectionately referred to it as my "VCRVO" project. Here are the steps I took..

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Made - Solarroller, bot from from junk parts.. VCR...
The prolific Maker family' - Thethompsonfive writes in with the solarroller bot built from MAKE 06... - "Here it is, my completed Solarroller from Make #6. I got the parts bag from Solarbotics and scavenged a VCR from someone I work with. I've built a bunch of robot kits in the past, but I have to say that starting out with a pile of junk and some components and getting a working robot out of it brings a much greater sense of accomplishment than any of them ever did. "

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HOW TO - Make a wind powered LED out of a VCR
Charles was inspired by all of the nonsense about the format wars lately, and after breathing a sigh of relief that the HD-DVD Blue-Ray fiasco ended he was reminded of the VHS and Betamax war of yesteryear. It occurred to him that he still had an old VCR in his basement and was wondering what to do with it... It turns out that you can make some pretty cool gadgets from the innards of a VCR. So, he posted a tutorial about how to make a wind powered LED out of a VCR.

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DIY Video tape encoding station - Ryan made a video tape encoding station setup using some old gear he had laying around and a Neuros MP4 Recorder. He's recording the tapes at 320 x 240 at super fine quality and the files produced are beautiful. As a bonus they play perfectly without conversion on both Zunes and iPods.

Sonic Fabric - Alyce Santoro, creator of sonic fabric, has demonstrated her amazing 50% cotton, 50% audio tape creations to an already aurally stimulated dorkbot audience. Alyce found she could take recycled 1/8th inch audio tape and place it directly into a weaving loom to create a flexible yet strong blend of tape and fiber that amazingly still holds its magnetic properties once woven. With this sonic fabric, she has created dresses, handbags, and other clothing which all retain their magnetic audio qualities. She was also able to actually play for us some of the fabric using a hacked up portable tape player. The audio sounds more like record scratching as the tape head is moved across it, but that's because of the random nature the tape enters the weave of the fabric. She's looking at possibly recording onto the fabric after it has been woven to produce recognizable audio... perhaps music or vocal recordings or just sections of fabric that produce certain tones. I think VCR tapes could potentially be used for an application like this.

November 27, 2008

HOW TO - Make a "TV-B-Gone Hat"

TVBGone
Turn off TVs by just looking at them - By Mitch Altman....

“Hey, you mind turning that thing off?” Simple enough question, but I got tired of people looking at me like I’m from Mars. When a TV is on in the room, I can’t think. I just stare at the thing and drool.

So I invented TV-B-Gone, a key chain that stealthily turns off just about any television. When the TVs turn off, people turn on, engage in conversation, read, eat, and perform all sorts of human activities. Peace happens.

I recently teamed up with prolific kit maker Limor Fried to create a $20 kit version of the original TV-B-Gone key chain. This version works up to 40 yards away, and it’s totally hackable; the entire project is open source and documented at ladyada.net/make/tvbgone. Here’s how I built one into a baseball cap that lets me look at almost any TV, touch the top, and watch with glee as it shuts off.

Read full story

November 20, 2008

What happy people don’t do - Watch TV?

What happy people don’t do - Watch TV... I wonder if the Cornfield Electronics paid for this study? :)

Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers — but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television, a new study finds.

That’s what unhappy people do.

Although people who describe themselves as happy enjoy watching television, it turns out to be the single activity they engage in less often than unhappy people, said John Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the author of the study, which appeared in the journal Social Indicators Research.

While most large studies on happiness have focused on the demographic characteristics of happy people — factors like age and marital status — Dr. Robinson and his colleagues tried to identify what activities happy people engage in. The study relied primarily on the responses of 45,000 Americans collected over 35 years by the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, and on published “time diary” studies recording the daily activities of participants.

“We looked at 8 to 10 activities that happy people engage in, and for each one, the people who did the activities more — visiting others, going to church, all those things — were more happy,” Dr. Robinson said. “TV was the one activity that showed a negative relationship. Unhappy people did it more, and happy people did it less.”

More:
Mkad4-2-2
Super TV-B-Gone kit, the happy maker. A great beginner kit to get started in electronics, hack it, mod it, be happy.

November 10, 2008

HOW TO - Max out Apple TV's potential with Boxee

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Nice Boxee write up at Gizmodo, how-to max out Apple TV's potential with Boxee...

This is a guide that, if followed, will unchain your Apple TV from its cruel iTunes tether, turning it into the useful living room conduit of music, video and web-based content it should have been all along via the media center software Boxee. Boxee can be installed fairly easily via the ATV's USB port to bring Hulu and Comedy Central streaming, playback of any video or music file anywhere on your network in virtually any file type imagineable, and a bevy of internet A/V sources like Flickr, Last.fm, NPR and BBC podcasts and tons of others—all upping the usefulness and fun of Apple's notoriously underachieving box by a factor of 10, easily. If you have an ATV, Boxee is a must-install, and it's 100% free. Let's get started...

November 5, 2008

The end of TV: Boxee + Apple TV + Hulu

The end of TV: Boxee + Apple TV + Hulu, a review of Boxee @ Tux Geek...

People want to do much more with their iPhone then Steve Job allows. So they jailbreak it. The same goes for the Apple TV. While it is a great and relatively cheap media center, it has restrictions, just like the iPhone. Wouldn’t it be nice to play xvid videos, stream shows from Hulu, listen to LastFm, Twitter the name of the movie you are currently watching or see what music your friends are listening to on your big screen TV connected to an Apple TV? Well, you can do that with Boxee!
Boxee is an open source media center, with social networking features, currently in an invite-only alpha stage. It is a fork of XBMC, a media center initially designed for the Xbox, but then ported to run on all major platforms. Boxee runs on Linux, Mac, and soon Windows. You can put it on your AppleTV with a grandma-simple “hack“, with no adverse effects.
What does it do?

As other media center software, Boxee allows you to browse and play media files (movies, music, photos) from local hard-disks or DVD drive and can stream music and videos from the internet or other computers in the network (SMB/SAMBA shares). It supports 1080p HD and it reads virtually any type of media, except DRM files.

Boxee scans your default media folders and downloads the related meta-data and artwork for your music and video files. Unfortunately, it doesn’t import your iTunes or iPhoto libraries - a big loss for Mac users.

When playing a song you can choose to see the lyrics (especially useful for a karaoke night) or display information about the band or artist.

October 31, 2008

HOW TO - Make a USB remote control receiver

Remir
Nice how-to at Hack-a-day from Ian on how to make a USB remote control receiver, he writes...

Now that we listen to MP3s, and watch XVIDs or x264s, a computer is the entertainment center in at least one room of most homes. Unless you have a special HTPC, though, you’re probably stuck using the keyboard to pause, change the volume, and fast-forward through annoying Mythbusters recaps. PC remote control receivers range from ancient serial port designs (who has one?) to USB devices not supported by popular software. In this how-to we design a USB infrared receiver that imitates a common protocol supported by software for Windows, Linux, and Mac. We’ve got a full guide to the protocol plus schematics and a parts list.

September 26, 2008

Participate in the US Presidential debate with crowd narration

Johan writes in...

A Neuros community member has created a technology for superimposing chat on top of a TV broadcast, called 'Crowd Narration' using the Neuros OSD. Users won't need a Neuros device to participate at http://narration.neuros.tv/ but their chat text will be sent in real time to participating viewers watching the debate through their Neuros OSD.

September 8, 2008

RealDVD - Copy DVDs?

RealDVD is being touted as one of the only legal ways to "back up" DVDs. It seems to make a copy on your drive, keeps the DRM and adds more Real player style DRM.

Here's the funny part about all this - awhile back (1999) a ton of people were sued and got in trouble for trying to back up their DVDs, it still happens to this day although rare.

That said you can't build a DVD jukebox without getting sued.

Most people nowadays rip DVDs using many of the free open source tools (lots of posts on MAKE about that). Back to 1999, when the encryption(s) on the DVDs were broken allowing copies to be made (DeCSS) - they key actually came from the XingDVD player, from Xing Technologies, a subsidiary of RealNetworks. I'm pretty sure to this day 2600 magazine cannot even link to the DeCSS program, source, or anything.

I'm sticking with HandBrake.

August 14, 2008

Easy Scrabble susan

Jenny @ CRAFT points us to this easy scrabble lazy susan using a bracket, some illustration board, and fuzzy furniture feet.

HOW TO - build an adjustable projector mount

If you find yourself transporting your video projector to new locations often, a sturdy and versatile mount is a must -

This projector mount will hold your valuable beamer securely while allowing you to point it most anywhere you would need. The components can be found at Lighting/Grip or Photography resellers. The parts as described here run about $130 - not cheap, but well worth it to protect and properly utilize your expensive video projection box.

- not cheap, but really not that bad when you consider pre-built alternatives of comparable quality. - Build a projector mount that will go anywhere

More:
Build Your Own Projector Mount...

August 4, 2008

What is this toilet paper contraption?

Make Pt0872
This 3 beds, 1 baths house was available in Wausau, WI - when browsing through the photos you can't help to wonder what this toilet paper contraption is and if it's included. Post up your guesses in the comments, winner gets something cool from the Maker Shed.

July 30, 2008

Home automation round up

Here's a round up of just some of the home automation projects, kits and more found on MAKE! If you do home automation, post what you've made, used or bought in the comments!

You could make your own "proximity based power system"...

Make Pt0861
Make - Volume 08 - Smart HVAC (Page 140).

MIDAS: Homemade Dorm Room Home Automation System.

Md Stamp
Home automation with the Basic Stamp.

Experimenta
Use old pda as interface for home automation.

Make Pt0860
Homebrew Home Automation Project.

Rackbox - Extreme home automation.

Files Linuxjournal.Com Linuxjournal Articles 085 8513 8513F1
Wireless Webcam For Homebrew Automation/Security Project.

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Home Automation hacks (Wiki). A couple cool hacks here - X10RfConfiguration - essentially converts the fairly unreliable powerline X10 to a more reliable (under many circumstances) RF X10 at virtually no cost and homebrew X10 signal analyzer - rather than measure signal strength, this homebrew signal analyzer (built with a lego mindstorms RCX) actually counts the transmissions that arrive at the destination X10 sensor, for comparison to the source sensor. Missing transmissions indicate reliability problems.

Make Osgg Mh Web 1
The Open Source Gift Guide: Open source hardware ... Here's some great opensource DIY Home automation software, written in Perl with a Web interface. For windows or Linux/unix. It also works with the One Wire Weather station posted a few days ago." MisterHouse is an open source home automation program. It's fun, it's free, and it's entirely geeky. Written in Perl, it fires events based on time, web, socket, voice, and serial data. It currently runs on Windows 95/98/NT/2k/XP and on most Unix based platforms, including Linux and Mac OSX. $ Just need to buy/eBay the home automation hardware, like x10 (easily found for cheap).

Make Pt0863
Smarthome's INSTEONNetLinc devices (works with iPhone).

June 29, 2008

HOW TO - Stackable sound baffles

Jim Robert made an instructable for stackable "gobos," portable sound baffles for absorbing or reflecting sound for a reconfigurable sound work environment. He has the tutorial up on his website, too.