Make your own AOL Instant Message bot
Rbils writes “Release 7.0 of ColdFusion added several different IM Event Gateways that make creating IM based bots extremely simple. The developer version of ColdFusion is free and can be downloaded from macromedia.com. The ColdFusion community has already released several bots, including one for use in looking up ColdFusion documentation (try cflivedocs in Yahoo Messenger for example).” See our previous post about a MAKEbot…Has anyone made one of these? Let us know… Link.
Master modder Ben Heck has created a masterpiece “Of all the portable videogame devices I’ve ever built over the years one system has always been my “Holy Grail” to make – my “dream portable” if you will. (Yes, even more so than my Neo Geo arcade machine) And now after a couple years of tinkering it is complete! Without further ado – the Atari 800 XE Laptop!” 
If you have some old CPUs laying around, you can turn them in to great geeky keychains, perfect for holiday gifts. The process is pretty simple, drill a hole, get a keyring and that’s about it. 
This looks like an excellent book “What Would MacGyver Do? is a book-in-progress. When it is finished, it will be a collection of 75 to 100 original stories by and about people who have exercised MacGyver-like ingenuity in solving their everyday problems. The stories will be selected and edited by Brendan Vaughan, an editor at Esquire magazine.” 
“In these disaster-ravaged times, whether natural or otherwise, the refugee radio is more than an object of convenience. Mareike Gas has created this handy, energy-independent AM-receiver radio. The Refugee Radio is powered by the energy of radio waves (crystal radio) and was primarily conceived for two situations in mind – any emergency crisis and a long-term refugee circumstance. The Refugee Radio is a great device for calamity-prone/conflict-plagued areas or simply for those insufferable power blackouts.” [
“Most barcodes are 12-digit UPC barcodes, with ten digits at the bottom of the code and one small number to each side. Impress your friends by asking them to select a random item from the kitchen with a removable label and cut the numbers off of the UPC barcode; you can then proceed to read the numbers encoded in the lines.” 