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Maker Ed writes- If you every wanted to build a CNC machine, this is the site for you. This is your one stop shopping for your dream machine. From a simple plotter to a laser engraver, you will get the info you need to build it. The site is forum based with over 13,000 members and every one of them make you feel at home. A complete easy to build set of plans from a chap named “jgro” are available in the downloads section to get you started. The materials can be bought at your local home center and can be built in a week or two depending on your skill level Link.

Sharon writes- Hi. I’m an American, living in Europe. I like to buy my DVD’s from America because they are in my language. I made sure that my DVD player is codefree so that I wouldn’t have a problem. Suddenly the American producers have added a new technology called RCE, whose sole purpose is to make it impossible to play American DVD’s outside of America. Anybody know how to modify a DVD player to get around that little bit of corporational nastiness? Any advice for Sharon while I research this?

Another story on music companies using SunnComm’s technology to “rein in copying by the everyday music fan” (EMI and Sony BMG executive). If you have a Mac you don’t need to worry about this, they only do this to Windows users- if you’re on Windows just hold down the Shift key before you insert one of these new CDs. So far I’ve seen a Velvet Revolver CD and a Dave Mattews CD do this, shift key easily defeats them. Link.

This is sorta like a how-to if someone wanted to take a stab at making bootleg Harry Potter books- turns out, as expected it’s a lot harder to make pirated books. For about $30,000 you could get a unscrupulous printer to make 10,000 copies of the 672 page Potter book. The author of the article called a bunch of places to get pricing and speculation on how this could be done. [via] Link.

Make reader Ben made us a MAKE search engine for Firefox! I learned how to do it from here and using that I made one for a few sites before creating one for you. if you decide publish it: great. if not: it’s fine by me, as it was more of a fun project that I just wanted to try and pull off. I attached the (short) code and the icon that should appear with it, which is the same one from the make blog. (that white square with the two little red squares inside it) Link and click here to download the zip.