$45 Hot Air Pencil
Hans has a good how to on making a $45 hot air pencil for desoldering “Many types of surface mount capacitors will delaminate when soldered with a regular soldering iron, the main problem being the thermal shock and uneven distribution of heat across the component. Using a Hot Air Pencil solves this problem, by carefully raising the temperature of a component these thermal shocks can be avoided. So, I needed at least a simple Hot Air Pencil. Checking my favorite catalogs I found several, but the cheapest being $600! Need being the mother of inventions, and refusing to pay the price, I started looking for a way to make my own Hot Air Pencil.” Link.
Greg from 
“Up until recently, Mac users didn’t have a similar Sleep mode which required no power. When Apple announced new PowerBooks in October 2005, it also introduced Safe Sleep to Mac OS X, an extention to Sleep mode that allows for hibernation without power.” The article details how to put other Macs to deep sleep with a clever hack – the comments also have a lot of useful information. [
“This article describes how to build a Linux-based telephone answering machine using a low cost winmodem (softmodem) for the telephone interface. We describe how to install the drivers and libraries, and how to select and install the proper modem card. Our answering machine program is a couple of hundred lines of C code in a single file. If you’ve ever used a telephone you should have no trouble understanding the code.” 
We love iPod firmware mods, and this is one of the best ones yet – using iPodWizard (PC) you can add little icons to all the menu items on most iPods. How to and files included to make your own. Thanks Lubbi! 
Brian from 
Adnan writes “So what if your chances of ever becoming an astronaut are less than nil, you can still defy gravity using Oooms’s Anti Gravity Machine and you know it’s probably more fun. All you have to do is harness yourself on to the moving sea-saw contraption and voila, you can moonwalk like Neil Armstrong all over the Basketball court.” Looking at this counterweight machine, it wouldn’t be that hard to build, I’ll see if I can find (or make) a how-to.