Here’s a fairly old how to, but a good one that could be handy for new projects. If you have a Cisco Aironet card, or want to score a cheap one on eBay to hack up to add an external antenna here’s how. Link.
Badger writes “This holiday season my lovely lady wife asked me what I wanted for Christmas. Since my hobby is hard to buy for, we often have these conversations. One of the things I had mentioned was a 8″ Slow Speed Grinder I had seen at Woodcraft (on sale no less) for sharpening lathe chisels. Something I haven’t really mastered the art of yet, but it’s hard to get good results on 80 grit 6″ grinder wheel.” Here’s how he made a lathe tool sharpening jig…Link.
Simon made a simple iPod dock for his iPod nano using all the parts it came with. On the Flickr photo set he posted it shows making a hole in the desk, modding the connector cable and securing it flush on the desk. I go through too many devices to settle on one music player, but boy, this would make the desk less cluttered. Link.
This is a trend I think we’ll see over and over again this year with phones and the music stores carriers are going to roll out – the slow death of MP3 playback on phones, or having to have a Windows PC and Media player 10 to convert to WMA before your phone can play your music. Techdirt has a story about Verizon phones that will no longer play MP3s one upgraded to use their new music store, if customers complain they’ll get an old refurbished phone with older firmware, but it doesn’t appear that the user is warned before updating that they’ll lose their MP3 playing feature. [via] Link. (and more details here).
Peter writes “In response to the earlier post, I’ve heard back from people who are using circuit simulation software to create highly accurate models of physical circuitry in software. The folks at Audio Damage use the free SPICE model and software to produce audio/music plug-ins like an upcoming bi-phase effects pedal model. That’s not the only geeky tool out there that’s useful for music: an add-on for MatLab lets you visualize MIDI music files.” Link.
This looks like a great DVD full of how-tos, here’s a review from Kathy Sierra – “Without a doubt the coolest present I’ve ever gotten is The Book of Cool, which is really a set of DVDs (plus a companion picture book) on how to do… cool tricks. You might not want to learn rope tricks, but how about rugby tricks, bar flairing, card magic tricks, or my favorite–skateboard tricks? Besides being cool–it’s also a simple and elegant example of video instruction…There’s something for nearly everyone in this thing and it’s quite a lot of fun to watch, even if you don’t want to learn how to do a fake reverse thumb spin with your pen.” Thanks Terrie! Link.
Holly writes: “Step by step instructions on making a batch of hard apple cider, from picking fruit through bottling and adding letterpressed labels.” 