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Weather Maps lets you view real time weather information on a map. Most of the data comes from personal weather stations that are run from homes and schools. Weather Underground and Weather Bug are two of the major sites that compile this data. Incorporates webcams as well. [via] Link.

The Ultimate Portable Studio by Gina Fant-Saez — If you’re a musician, producer, engineer, or songwriter who wants to set up a professional, laptop-based recording studio, here’s all the information you need. Wow, this makes my podzilla recorder look really dinky. Link.

Great resource of pinouts. This is a collection of pinouts that I’ve gathered over the years and umpteen hours of buzzing out cables. Since others are bound to find some of this information useful, I’ve cleaned it up and html-ized it, but hopefully in a non-obtrusive way so that it is still useable from an 80-column dumb terminal. Link.

Here’s another way to peek under the cap to see if you could win as opposed to the tilt method. What’s the trick? REFLECTION. Get a flashlight, tilt the bottle slightly, and use the surface of the soda as a mirror! If and when the soda folks give away a trip to space via a bottle cap promotion, I’m going to have to do this. [via] Link.

Crude oil and gasoline prices are near an all-time high. But don’t despair. One scientist has found an alternative source of energy: pig manure. Yuanhui Zhang, an agricultural engineering professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, has succeeded in turning small batches of hog waste into oil. Seems like people waste could work too. Link.

Buffed up with US $100 in replacement parts, a $150 disc player can challenge players that cost ten times as much. The IEEE has a story showing how you can turn a cheap DVD player into something that sounds a whole lot more exotic. All you need is a small budget, a soldering iron and a desire to void your warranty. [via] Link.

Here are instructions to turn such a tester into a not-so-precise analog display to monitor the CPU load on a Linux system, controlled by a serial port. You can build two variants of the display: a simple display, with the battery tester on the control circuit, or a more precise and less finicky display, with the battery tester mounted on a heatsink. Link.