I was looking for an interesting cookbook for project ideas with non-food items, and oddly enough spotted a link to one on Robert Scoble’s site – it’s extremely well done. Autumn Omakase is an electronic/PDF cookbook available for free download. The two books we’ve published electronically are pretty unique as the quality is comparable to what you’d see at a bookstore, but its available for free on the net. Call it a pleasant side-effect of a labor of love. [via] Link
Redbluefire posted some photos on Flickr of his experiences riding out hurricane Wilma – his power went out and with the phones only working he used the phone line to charge up the Walkie Talkie watch gadgets “…the two lines in the phone that supply power, Red was positive, but to my suprise the ground was not black, but GREEN! After that, it was all a matter of opening the watch, checking the pinout, and twisting the wires to hold onto the jack inside. I need to communicate, and sometimes a laptop just isnt worth wasting for idle communication.” Link.
Here’s a simply HOW TO on making little charms to hang off wine glasses to help identify which glass is yours. While I don’t think I’d make ones like these, I do think it’s a neat idea to put really odd charms, like weird bolts, electronic chips, cell phone trinkets (like Natalie made) and lots of other things you wouldn’t expect to see hanging off a glass but bound to start some conversations. Link.
Maker Rich Gibson is welding up a neat looking chopper bike – on the MAKE flickr photo pool he writes “Chopper bike ‘complete.’ I am going to lower the seat some more. It is still basically unrideable by mere mortal. I’m going to make a new front fork that is shorter. Keep the original one for ‘special’ occaisions.” Link. In MAKE 03 we have a good welding primer from Mr. Jalopy if you’re looking to pimp your bike too.
Last week the free VMware player was released. It lets you run virtual machines, but not create them. Here’s a HOW TO for creating your own virtual machines. In this example, a usable VMware image using the VMware player and FreeDOS. I think one day I’d like to make an OS jukebox, you’d put in a quarter and it would “play” any OS you want and then you access the net, etc… Link.
The Dark Blade PC case was started in 2004, and it’s looking like it’s almost done. Made from milling a lot of metal, comes with 2 hydraulic pumps to keep it cool, it’s gorgeous. This is the type of PC case design you’ll see in some futuristic version of MoMa. [via] Link.
Andy Volk has a nice HOW TO for getting video on that spiffy new iPod video “Since I wanted to fill my new gadget as quickly as possible with video files found with Yahoo! Video Search, I realized that this would be a good time to mention that you can use the Media RSS feed from our Web Services API to easily pull in Yahoo! Video Search results as a video podcast with iTunes 6, and from there you can move them to your iPod. (So you can still use this feature with iTunes 6 even if your Video iPod hasn’t arrived yet).” [via] Link.
