Knitting with Paperclips
Pink haired and heavy-metal lovin’ Zach, was an 11 year-old 6th grader last year in Bre Pettis’ art class. At the end of every year, Bre gives his students a chance to work on an independent project. “Zach already knew how to knit and brought in some string to knit with and he needed some knitting needles to being his project,” Bre recalls. “I remember him saying something like ‘I could have used pencils, but this is cooler.’ ” Zach ended up with a cool looking wristband, originally intended to be a scarf. Bre’s video blog, I Make Things, makes us wish we were back in school in Room 132 for art class. Thanks Bre! Link.
“Silent Bob records all incoming music, streaming or otherwise, from the soundcard. When the user decides to record and pushes the button, no problem Silent-Bob has already started the recording 2 minutes earlier! Never miss the begining!” This could be handy for podcasters or anyone looking to record sounds to make their own ringtones. [
Seems like a fun project to replicate “…a windmill with a diameter of just 10cm which works by flexing piezoelectric crystals as it rotates, causing them to generate a current. A ‘gentle breeze’ of 16km/h is enough to generate the 7.5mW necessary to power a small electronic sensor. Such windmills are designed to solve the problem of powering Wi-Fi kit in remote locations. Geologists, for instance, can monitor seismic activity using wireless-enabled sensors located across large geographical areas.” [
Hans has a good how to on making a $45 hot air pencil for desoldering “Many types of surface mount capacitors will delaminate when soldered with a regular soldering iron, the main problem being the thermal shock and uneven distribution of heat across the component. Using a Hot Air Pencil solves this problem, by carefully raising the temperature of a component these thermal shocks can be avoided. So, I needed at least a simple Hot Air Pencil. Checking my favorite catalogs I found several, but the cheapest being $600! Need being the mother of inventions, and refusing to pay the price, I started looking for a way to make my own Hot Air Pencil.” 
Greg from 
“Up until recently, Mac users didn’t have a similar Sleep mode which required no power. When Apple announced new PowerBooks in October 2005, it also introduced Safe Sleep to Mac OS X, an extention to Sleep mode that allows for hibernation without power.” The article details how to put other Macs to deep sleep with a clever hack – the comments also have a lot of useful information. [
“This article describes how to build a Linux-based telephone answering machine using a low cost winmodem (softmodem) for the telephone interface. We describe how to install the drivers and libraries, and how to select and install the proper modem card. Our answering machine program is a couple of hundred lines of C code in a single file. If you’ve ever used a telephone you should have no trouble understanding the code.”