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Perhaps some of the coolest and most interesting radios I’ve seen in awhile. The Thermogenerator TGK-3 uses heat from the oil lamp to provide electricity to run a radio. Why can’t modern radios looks so cool? [via] Link.

Fred Quimby of the Stella Atari 2600 VCS homebrew game development community has written a BASIC compiler for the Atari VCS. Yes, you read that correctly — it lets normal mortals write games for the Atari we all played to bits before we finally poured orange juice into the console by accident when we were XYZ years old [via] Link.

Zantor sent in this car “how to” site he found handy…There are amazingly well-arranged tutorials in here for fixing electrical problems, clearing up the beam pattern on your headlamps, changing the oil filter, tightening up the transmission, and more. I just did the one that fixes the false-positive beep in the seatbelt indicator. Plenty of photos and good instruction. Link.

“Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a mechanical guitar-playing robot, named the Crazy J. The guitar player is composed of two mechanical systems that interact to play a range of 29 musical notes. A plucking mechanism with six independently controlled picks is mounted over the body of the guitar and a fingering mechanism with an array of 23 fingertips is mounted over the first four frets of the fingerboard.” [via] Link.

Great interview with Colin from iRobot! What sort of add-ons could you have for the Roomba? Angle: For the Roomba, there is a group that’s working very seriously and looking at the idea of using the Roomba as a physical avatar. I might log into a Web page and see what the robot sees, hear what the robot hears and be able to drive the robot from my Web page. Over time, there’ll be probably more of this type of interest. The rate at which it becomes economically interesting? I’ve no idea. We’re putting up the APIs and doing what we can to encourage people. Link.

I wanted to do a GPS nav screen in my car, but I didn’t have an in-dash system. But I did have an old laptop..hmmmm. What if I used this as an excuse to use my brother’s welder to create a little stand so I can use GPS software on the laptop while I drive? Materials: About a foot of 1 inch square steel pipe. An old music stand shelf. About 2 feet of water heater copper tubing. A couple of connectors. Link.

Use a Smart Media Card, Compact Flash Card, SD Card, USB Flash Drive or even a USB HDD with a PSP. Team Xecuter is developing a simple plug in device where you can expand the PSP Memory Stick Port to connect to several other memory devices, thus saving massive costs and giving you a multitude of storage options for your PSP no matter what you wish to play with be it games, web browsers, ebooks, music players, media managers and much more ! Using this same development kit we have been able to downgrade v1.52 / v1.51 down to v1.50 or even a v1.00 with no problems whatsoever Link.