Year: 2010

NES cartridge harmonicas

NES cartridge harmonicas

Ebay seller nes_harmonica is offering three of these old Nintendo cartridges that have been modded to contain working harmonicas. Why the heck would you do that? Turns out it’s kind of a retro in-joke for NES enthusiasts. OhGizmo’s Andrew Liszewski explains:

If you grew up in the 80’s and played video games, at one point in your childhood you had to blow on an NES cart, or inside the console itself, to get it to recognize a game. In fact I never even had an NES, but I can still remember having to do it on a friend’s system. At this point it’s almost become cliche to bring it up whenever the conversation turns to classic video games, but that didn’t stop one clever modder from attempting to turn a profit on Nintendo’s folly.
Right now Super Mario 3, Dick Tracy, and Legend of Zelda models are available. [via Geekologie]

Steampunk coilgun pistol

Steampunk coilgun pistol

Nick Thatcher’s compact coilgun uses a coil of copper wire along the barrel to launch its projectile. It’s powered by 15 photoflash capacitors juiced up by 2 AAAs. Of course the power of this gun is very much in question, the super dark video on the site doesn’t show a whole lot. It appears, however, […]

Happy birthday, Albert Einstein!

Einstein, who would be 131 today, needs no introduction. The foremost physicist of the 20th Century, he held a position at the Institute of Advanced Study, one of the most storied intellectual centers in the world. Nobel Prize. He published papers on such physics-related topics as molecular physics, thermodynamics, the behavior of photons, statistical mechanics, […]

Arduino digicam

Arduino digicam

From the MAKE Flickr pool: Flickr user arms22 built this neat Arduino-based camera, including a LS20031 GPS receiver and a C328 640×480 camera module, with a SD card to store images. The maker provides more information and code on his blog, though it’s in Japanese.