TiVo Beta supports podcasting…
Neat, podcasting on TiVo – I hope it will download more content based on traffic conditions, then you sync that to your music player. David Zatz says “TiVo is beefing up their HME offerings by centrally hosting applications and partnering with Yahoo! Yahoo! weather, traffic, and photos are available by entering your account info on the TiVo box. Also being tested are Internet radio (Live365), the podcaster application I previewed at Digital Life, Fandango movie tickets, and some various games. TiVo’s beta is scheduled to continue testing into early 2006.” [via] Link.
A couple free ways to make flip books – PC: “Flipbook Printer is a program that lets you make your own printed “Flipbooks” from avi movie files using business cards. Makes a great present – have the kids send a flipbook of them waving hello to the grandparents, or send your loved one a movie of you smiling or blowing them a kiss. It’s the ultimate in low-tech movie making!” 
“Early users of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 are coming up with innovative ways to fix some of the first reported glitches plaguing the new videogame console. One of the fixes involves dangling the unit’s power supply in midair with string…Other 360 owners joined in, saying that once they cooled down overheated power units — by using fans or in one case, a half-filled bottle of frozen water — their consoles stopped crashing.” [
Here’s a fun Google video of what happens when you put Mentos in soda (you might want to mute the sound). The video doesn’t explain how it works, but there’s an overview 
Gene is looking for a scriptable USB-IR controller – “So far I have not been able to find such an animal. I bought the first generation of Robosapian. The robot from wowwe toys. It comes with a real crazy remote control. You have to press many keys in certain combinations to make the robot do anything. If I could program a dynamic IR device with the codes and then create scripts.. It would be possible for me to make my robot do all kinds of neat things. Also I am into doing time lapse videos. That is where you setup a camera and let it run for about an hour.. I throw the video into my computer and use the editing software to speed things up. That is fine.. But I have an Olympus 8mp digital SLR camera. It also has an IR control out. A programmable IR device as I described above would really help me out with my camera. I could setup a high resolution picture every 15 seconds using a laptop on location replacing the IR controller. This would produce a very high quality time lapse once I put it in my editing software.” I think the USB-UIRT might be a good start, any other suggestions for Gene? 
Great bike hack on Instructables from Maxwell – “How to Build a Tall Bike, one that you can stop safely, and could be construed as street legal in most places. With this method, you’ll be able to stand over the bike, allowing you to hop down easily, have two brakes, a full complement of gears, And have a better riding position than two bikes stacked on top of eachother. You’ll only destroy one bike, The top portion is bolted to the bottom bike, so if it breaks, or you get tired of it, the bottom bike can be reverted to normal. All in all I think this makes for a suprisingly sane tall bike. Not that you’ll look any less the madman riding it through traffic.”