MAKE @ American Inventor – November 17th
MAKE will be covering ABC’s American Inventor’s auditions November 17th at 8am in San Francisco. If you’re going, let us know (before or after if you want to share your experience). “AMERICAN INVENTOR is an exciting new primetime reality show for ABC from Simon Cowell and the producers of American Idol. Set to premiere in early 2006, the show will undertake the biggest search ever for America’s best new invention. An embodiment of the ultimate American dream, the show will uncover the hottest new product and make some struggling inventor’s dream come true. The show will celebrate the best in homespun American ingenuity and will turn one person’s idea into the next big thing.” – Link. Look for our special write up this week!
I saw the start of Fabienne Serriere’s awesome project at the 
The “Spiral Rainbow Island” created by Richie Sowa is an island is anchored off the coast of Mexico, close to Cancun. The island is made from over 250,000 recycled plastic bottles, packed into netting. 
Chris sent this how-to in from Grynx contributor Dan “This box will house my proprietary Wi-Lan HP45-24 radio unit and set as a client, a 2.4ghz 500mw HyperLink Amplifier connected to a Linksys WRT54G with a third party firmware and set as an access point, the Wi-Lan HP45-24 radio will be the main link back to my base radio. The whole idea of this enclosure is to be as “modular” as possible, i.e. if the PSU blows-up I can simply remove the PSU and replace it, OR if I need to relocate the whole box, I can simply unscrew all the antenna and take it away with me.” 
Here’s a step-by-step guide to converting any external hard drive enclosure (USB, Firewire, SCSI, etc) into an external SATA enclosure that meets the SATA standard. 
Good overview of the Machinima film fest and making films in the virtual world, the entries are great! – “Machinima is film-making using video game engines, hybridizing traditional film, animation, and game development. Lots of fun…A full list of festival winners, nominees and presenters are up on the festival site. Big ups to Machinima Man Paul Marino and everyone who put it together. Already looking forward to next year’s fest which will have two full days of machinima.” 
Matt writes “I have put together some free plans for building a spider rifle. This is a device which I designed and built from pvc & cpvc pipe that uses compressed air to suck up and kill household spiders.” I don’t think you have the kill the little fellows, so this could just be used to capture and release.