Buffed up with US $100 in replacement parts, a $150 disc player can challenge players that cost ten times as much. The IEEE has a story showing how you can turn a cheap DVD player into something that sounds a whole lot more exotic. All you need is a small budget, a soldering iron and a desire to void your warranty. [via] Link.
Here are instructions to turn such a tester into a not-so-precise analog display to monitor the CPU load on a Linux system, controlled by a serial port. You can build two variants of the display: a simple display, with the battery tester on the control circuit, or a more precise and less finicky display, with the battery tester mounted on a heatsink. Link.
Doug’s new project is awesome. Every day there are scores, or even hundreds, of fascinating and important conference sessions, lectures or other presentations that are lost. They simply evaporate because no one captures or records them. Some of these presentations are given by the greatest and most inspiring minds of our time, and many could be important to people in the far reaches of the planet, if only they could hear them. Link.
Ever wish you could dispatch a robot to grab you a beer? That day might soon be here, thanks to an as-yet-unannounced decision by iRobot. In early July the company will post instructions for controlling its Roomba vacuum cleaner via the built-in serial port, so programmers can modify it however they want – from equipping it with a camera to, yes, adding an arm and training it to retrieve brewskis. iRobot hopes the move will foster the development of Roomba accessories – like the ecosystem of add-ons that has sprung up around the iPod – thus driving sales. Link.
Oldie but goodie…In our other crystal radios we wound the coil by hand. In this project we use a much smaller coil with a ferrite rod inside, from our catalog. The ferrite rod allows the coil to be smaller, and it can be moved in and out of the coil for coarse tuning. Link.
Game sound emulators for ColecoVision, Atari, Sega Master System, GameBoy, NES, and even IntelliVoice. And you can plug them into your sound software as VSTs (Windows-only), or, better yet, into your own custom sound patches in Pd (free – Mac/Windows/Linux) or Max/MSP (commercial – Mac/Windows). [via] Link.
This is both a tutorial and an informational page about the Apple Podcast ChapterTool utility and Podcast Chapters in general. This article is a part of the iTunes tips entry. The tutorial section will show you how to add chapters, chapter images and chapter links to your podcasts. It is relatively technical, so hopefully a GUI based chapter tutorial program will come out soon, but in the meantime this is the best and only way to accomplish this task. Link.
