Nice community site for Makers – Get those technical questions answered. Wide range of experts on line including NASA engineers, Scientists, Pilots, Mechanical – electrical – computer engineers,Business men, Linguists, Teachers and just plain smart people from all over the world. Something technical or scientific always bugged you? Ask away, even if we don’t get to the bottom of it we will enjoy the discussion on the way. Link.
Well, I like Skype, I like eBay- it seems the rumors might be true– According to a BusinessWeek article, eBay will be holding an “investors conference call” at 5am PST for an announcement to be made 2 hours before. Since the eBay, Skype talks began early last week, there’s been speculation on whether or not this will happen. An article on MarketWatch, which was last updated at 11:40PM EST (Sept. 11), states eBay and Skype are in the final stages of this deal and would cost as much as $4.1 billion. Time to finsih my Skype-eBay payphone I guess. Thanks Sean! Link.
We are working with a partner to put together a focus group session related to technology related projects and the projects you Make on
your time. In this session, we will be brainstorming new ideas and getting your feedback on possible future concepts. This session is
hosted by Make magazine but conducted by an outside focus group facilitator and is designed to get creative ideas about how the
marketplace can better serve your needs. The focus group will be held in San Francisco on Saturday, Sept 17 from 10AM to 1PM. All qualified participants will be compensated for their time. Link.
MAKE pal Jason Striegel from blogcadre.com writes “Here’s a telerobotic Mac Mini based on the Pioneer 3at platform. I guess they intend to expand this into a fully autonomous unit that uses lidar and the iSight camera for guidance and obstacle avoidance. Right now they control it over a wireless connection and use ichat to provide a remote video feed”. Link.
Are you tired of answering the phone only to find a telemarketer on the other end and wish you could make them as angry as you feel? Now you can build your own answering system that carries on a virtual conversation with the telemarketer and drives them nuts. The Telecrapper 2000 (TC2K) is a computerized system designed to both intercept incoming Telemarketing calls on the first ring, and then carry on a virtual conversation with the telemarketer. The site also features phone calls the device has carried out with telemarketers. Thanks Jay! Link.
Raphael Assenat writes “Since I got my webcam, I never used it for videoconferencing. Instead, I tried to do many cool things with it, like infra-red photography, security, and automated 360 degree photography of objects using a stepper”. I really like the stepper motor project (source and schematics included)…Link.
Neat project from Kaufmann’s lab…I found a USB-IDE cable online that would allow me to build my own external hard drive. Since I had a spare 40GB drive at home, I had everything I needed except for something to stuff it all in. After thinking about it for a bit, I decided to see if it would work inside of an old gutted tape recorder. This project was a lot of fun, and ended up costing me less than $20, since I had an unused drive. Thanks Brad! Link.
