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Here are tons and tons and tons of online generators: many of the them are fun, or gags, but there are a lot of useful ones. Barcode generators, Dungeons & Dragons random dungeon generator, morse code, comp sci papers, passwords, names and more. Link. UPDATE: Check out this blog too!

On Friday MAKE was a guest on G4’s Attack of the Show. Before the show, Scott Moschella gave me a tour of the studio and all the places you really don’t see on camera. Here’s a bit about the appearance (we’ll be posting video soon, we had fun with lasers and I debuted my iPod box robot) and here are some of the photos I took.
Link.

…Thanks to Mrs Rowling’s insistence not to release an electronic version of the new Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, underground e-book pirates have already began to do the work for themselves. There are now homemade text and audio versions of the book all over the place; this somewhat reminds me of when Battlestar Galactica was released in the UK and not in the USA. Would folks buy a digital version of the Potter book if it was available? I think so. On that note, an e-version of MAKE will be out soon! [via] Link and Link.

The cycle computer sensor is mounted on the circumference of a freely spinning plate (in my case a peanut butter jar lid screwed to a sliding door castor) which is surrounded by three rounded cups (baby food cups, NZ$4 the set) and mounted on a pole (an aluminium towel rail). All parts are either naturally weather-resistant (e.g. plastic or aluminium) or made so (e.g. varnished the wood, used silicone sealant to prevent water getting in). The unit was assembled and then calibrated out the window of a moving car. Thanks Chris! Link.

Jim sent this in, how can we not post it! I’m posting this and submitting it to the Make Blog in hopes that the gentleman who let me photograph him on his custom bike in Knightsbridge yesterday will visit the site (as I asked him to..) and perhaps instruct the rest of us how to create a dual-bike hybrid like this one. Link.

Summer time is here in the northern hemisphere and with it comes the heat waves. Cooling indoors is of course not something new, but how about cooling down your sitting area outside? In this article we will show you how you can make use of some ordinary things you can find in your home and garage, and put this together to an efficient cooling machine. I can only say this – you’ll need some cleaning detergent, spray bottle and a garden hose. Thanks Chris! Link.

This is an actual potato-powered Web server, currently online here. After the great SpudServer joke, I thought it would be interesting to see what an actual server capable of running on potatoes would look like. This server is very, very slow (around 0.2 hits/second), so you may have trouble connecting. [via] Link.