Justin writes,”I took a letterpress class last Saturday at San Francisco’s Center for the Book, a maker-rific and tremendous Bay Area resource. I learned how to use a Vandercook 4 printing press and by the end of the day long workshop, the class had designed and printed 40 copies of a book!” Link.
Chris writes “I’ve been a regular user of Skype for about a year now and have been using my own solutions to try to make this as user friendly as possible. But it was never perfect and I’ve always been the only one in my house using it as it hasn’t been user friendly. Then I heard about the Sipura and started looking around on how to use it, and then I heard about VoIPBuster which provided free VoIP calls to land lines all over the world. In this how-to I will explain why I made the choices I made and show you how easy it can be to have this up running in your own house. Calling nationally and internationally for free to regular telephones.” Link.
Thimble has rounded up some great product photography tutorials to help you take better pictures of the goods you make. I have the same disadvantage as her with not much bright natural light in my house. I love the DIY mini-studio set up you can make yourself via the Switchboard article. [via] Link.
This is crazy, I just recieved my Powerglove off eBay and another Gyration mouse for a VR glove project and Leadingzero built one! – “The time has come to bring new life into our old friend and to welcome him back as a productive member of society with the ‘Powerglove Mouse’. With this hack I can strap on the Powerglove and have total control over the mouse cursor on my computer. I can control the cursor’s position with a wave of my hand and activate the mouse clicks by simply bending my fingers – a beautiful integration of old and new.” [via] Link.
Chris Jang is building his own autonomous robot – “This robot is my first electronics and embedded systems project. I studied Electronic Circuits and Applications by Senturia and Wedlock for six months and then rebuilt and cross compiled my home computer systems with a Linux From Scratch book to prepare for it. This project is also the first time machining moving parts (as simple as the front suspension is, the parts do move). I’ve maintained what a friend referred to as an “mail blog” during the project. After some progress or discovery, I emailed a status report of sorts, usually with pictures and (rarely) movies attached. A coworker convinced me there is value in these emails as artifacts of the project history.” [via] Link.
Joelsprayberry iPod mount Instructable for his Honda Element – “I had been lookin online for ideas on the cleanest way to mount an ipod that wasn’t in the way, with wires everywhere and was not cumbersome to use or to see. I got a ipod mount for a bicycle handlebarfrom gpscity.com and modified it to fit.” Link.
AizeMashehu’s writes “I built two fan controllers into a happy-face baybus for two sets of fan arrays so I can hear the sound of silence while the eight large fans chug-a-lug-lug. One knob on the new fanbus controlls the two rear 80mm fans blowing into the water-cooling radiator (in addition to the existing 120mm fan with rear-mounted speed control knob sucking air out of the radiator from the other side) and the other knob controls the 2 front 80mm fans that blow air around 5 of the fastest hard drives in the machine. You can see a close up as well as an explaination of the switch here and the main machine that this is wired to in the other photos in this series.” Link.
