Ax-Man Surplus Stores – A “Makers” Heaven…
Joe writes “I moved from Minneapolis a few years ago and miss this store so much. They resell industrial parts, wheels, motors, speakers, fabric, foam, bio-hazard suits and just about anything you can use to make. As you walk through Ax-man you’ll notice large motorized moving displays with baby doll parts and humourus descriptions accompanying there products. I bought some beautiful large hollywood style metal film cannisters there and sanded them down to make a portfolio case. I think the store owner would be a great interview for your mag. As a Make subscriber I would love to have this store listed amongst others that are great resources for “stuff”. Take a look at the tour section of the site to see this bazaar shop.” Link.
Edmund Scientific’s has a deal on kits for kids -subscription style…“Edmund’s Young Engineering Kits Program – this program consists of three fun and educational hands-on activity kits that will help the young ‘engineer’ to experience, create, and learn different aspects in the vast field of engineering! The kits will be shipped individually every other week to give you something to look forward to during this winter season. The Young Engineering Kits Program is a subtle and creative way to expose young persons to.” 
Amazing video of a touch screen interface – “While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops.” [
Thomas Wilburn has a lot of great info on making music with one of my favorite “games” for the Nintendo DS he writes – “Composing with Electroplankton, part one: I started a one-man rock band for four reasons. I find the idea of one person onstage creating a lot of great noise on the fly to be very personally appealing. It has a kind of bizarre audacity…” tons of great tips and more – [
There are a lot of homemade versions of this lately, but here’s a really cool way to pilot your RC chopper – “HeliHobby’s True Vision is a state of the art device which includes a high quality sub-micro camera, sub-micro transmitter ( 2.4GHZ ), base receiver and coupled with EyeTops’s high resolution LCD Eyewear to give you the only True Vision when flying any size R/C Helicopter. True Vision is the only system which will allow you to fly your R/C Machine in first person view as well as third person virew simultaneously.” [
Great video from Coolhunting! “Nullsleep makes music on Gameboys. Exclusively. And it’s really good. He performed recently at Monkeytown in Brooklyn, NY and the m ss ng p eces was there to capture it for CH Video. His interview, and excerpts from his performance, comprise the first in our series ‘8-bit’ which is about making music on low-fi gadgets.” [