HOW TO – Make a putt putt (pop pop) steam boat
Here’s how to make a fun boat powered by steam “…it wasn’t until I was an adult that I saw my first putt putt steam boat, chugging away in an outdoor market in Bangladesh– in Southern Asia– one of the poorest countries in the world. Made mostly from a recycled milk tin, it sounded like a tugboat and it really moved–all efficiently powered by a little vegetable oil lamp. How could such a cool thing have existed without my knowing about it?” Thanks Jos! Link.
We’re starting a new feature on MAKE called “Something I want to learn to do”… Sarah writes in “I have a ton of stuff that I’ve made or want to make that needs to be framed. I hate paying a zillion dollars to for professional matting and framing, plus I think it would be cool to do that stuff myself. And in some cases, the framing would be part of the project. Selfishly, I’d love to see a story on DIY matting and framing techniques.” Post suggestions and stories about matting and framing in the comments and also 
Handy tip if you want to see how TV shows on iTunes will look on your TV -before- you purchase them. Andrew writes “Unfortunatly, iTunes does not let you save the 30 second previews of music or video. While thats not really an issue with music, many people want to know how good the video looks when played on their TV or iPod. So how did I get the urls of the above videos. I used Debug iTunes Music Store.” 
Good news for future Linux installs on Macs…“Through reverse engineering, a linux driver for the Broadcom 43xx series chipset has created. This chipset is used in the Airport Extreme, TrueMobile 1300 WLAN Mini-PCI Card, Wireless 1350 WLAN Mini-PCI Card, WL-100G, Linksys WMP54G PCI, Belkin F5D7010 54g Wireless Network card, etc.” [
Emlodnaor writes “i have a toshiba pdr-m700, and was wondereing if it is posible to somehow convert movies into the same format as the camera uses, too see them on the camera.. i’ve tryed some, but can’t seem to figure it out… any help would be nice.” Have any suggestions? Post them up! I’ve tried this with a few cameras and usually they store another file that you can’t replicate to play the movie you put on the camera. 
“GET LAMP: The documentary is a currently-in-production documentary about the story of the text adventure, a genre of game that flourished commercially in the early 1980s, with roots reaching many years before and with rebirths and innovations sprouting from it to the present day.” You can pre-order it now – [
There are not a lot of details on this, but I’d like to see how hard it would be to make a DIY version of this outstanding water droplet picture maker “This installation works like a flat shower that shoots out water droplets with different frequency. The difference in distance between droplets results in an image.”