MAKE VIDEO PODCAST – Soda Bottle Rocket (video)
In MAKE 05, we show you how to make your own soda bottle rocket so you can start your own rocket program even if you’re not Burt Rutan. With a few empty soda bottles and some PVC pipe, you can build a high-performance water rocket. Here’s a video of author Steve Lodefink and his 4-year-old son Ivan launching theirs. Click here to get the video delivered automatically with iTunes. This video (MP4) will play on PC/Mac/Linux/PSPs and iPod video devices.
Cheyenne writes in about the homemade laser saber – “I used a reflective slider and small rare earth magnet. Very Happy I think it looks really nice with the new red 100mW. I only powered it up with the red 100mW a couple times on the video. I tried not to look at it. I really need to get some safety glasses for the red 100mW. I don’t really know how dangerous the diffused light from the saber is, but I’m not going to take any more chances then I already have.” 
How Waterloo made his own proximity cards – “Lots of companies use proximity cards to control physical access. An employee holds their card within a few inches of the reader; the reader receives a unique id from the card and transmits it to some central computer that tells it whether or not to open the door. This is rather magical, considering that the tag is credit card-thin and contains no battery. The trick is the same as for RFID tags. The reader constantly transmits a rather strong carrier; the tag derives its power and clock from this carrier, kind of like a crystal radio.” 
Didn’t make the cut with your invention? “The place to be if you are an inventor who has auditioned for any of the new Inventor related television shows such as Modern Marvels (History Channel), American Inventor (ABC) or Made in the U.S.A. (USA Network). Perhaps you never made it to an audition, let this Invention Hub shine the light on your invention web site. The network programs are interested in the top 10 Inventions, Inventor Underground is interested in the other 10,000.” 
Peter Green made a portable Mac Mini! “Why the Mac Mini Portable? Well, in short I wanted a machine that was really dinky to just pop in my rucksack, and while the PowerBooks/iBooks are pretty small, they still take up a fair amount of space. I wanted something with a very small screen that was more or less hand-held, and mac just don’t do that [yet].” [
Jeremiah writes “As a new Linux user, there is a sense of frustration. You can’t seem to get anything working correctly or you just don’t know how. I know exactly how that feels, and after spending countless hours searching forums and guides, I have compiled a list of the ten guides I find most useful as a new Ubuntu user (and Linux user for that matter). So, here they are, not listed in any particular order.” Thanks Jason! 
Brian sent this one in – might be good for projects “Never heard of it, but at $35, it sounds like a good buy for any wacky projects that need a cheap GPS. There’s probably a USB/Serial converter in the cable, which you could rip out and then hook the GPS device itself up to a regular serial port, if you are messing with an embedded system that doesn’t have USB.”