How to build a 10 minute podcast
Some good tips from Eric Rice- guidelines for creating short, organized shows that can help you either get started in podcasting or organize your existing podcast into manageable, predictable chunks. As a society, people have become conditioned over generations to expect certain patterns in radio-like content. Podcasting is no exception. Even if your podcast sounds like radio, the most important piece of the podcasting puzzle is that it’s made by everyday folk. Link.
Here’s how to turn a Nintendo controller (USB Retropad) in to a wireless version using a targus wireless keypad. The NES controller uses 8 inputs and one ground for it’s switch state input. The keypad uses a 4×5 matrix decoder. So I split the ground trace on the control pad into 2 parts (you can see this cut in the second image below) and gave each ground to a column on the keypad. Then I jumpered pairs of buttons on the control pad and connected each pair to one of four rows on the keypad, effectively giving me / 8 2 0 for A B Sel Start and * 9 3 . for Up Rt Lf Dn. ![Dokumat500 1[1]](http://cdn.makezine.com/make/blogs/blog.makezine.com/dokumat500_1%5B1%5D.jpg)
Dokumat 500 is a fully automatic documentary robot. The Robot consists of a modified tripod and a video camera. The tripod moves autonomously around and pans and tilts the camera. It switches the camera and a spotlight, mounted next to the camera independently on and off. So, the documentary videos are edited directly inside the camera and the robot supplies a complete finished end-product. 
I need to try this to confirm it works…It’s possible to send a VGA “video” signal down an ordinary Cat-5 ethernet cable. This is possible for two reasons: firstly, although VGA connectors have 15 (or 13) pins, only about 8 wires are actually necessary to send the VGA signal; and secondly, ethernet cable is twisted pair, and we can use the magic of twisted pair to push the analog VGA signal further than spec. 
…a novel, inexpensive, stereoscopic technique for generating 3D images from cellophane on a liquid crystal displays which are most typically used for a laptop screen or a camera phone screen. Stereoscopy requires independent manipulation of the left and right eye views. Our technique takes advantage of two facts; the first is that the light from the liquid crystal display of either a laptop computer or a camera phone is polarized light, and therefore we can easily manipulate its transmission with a polarizer sheet. The second fact is that a cellophane half-waveplate can change the direction of polarization of light. [
4 months, $300… case mod is a scale model of a Star Wars TIE Fighter, with a computer built right into the cockpit. And, it’s also a desk! The whole case is built from scratch. As a die-hard Star Wars fan, I knew my first mod would have to incorporate something from Star Wars, and I could think of nothing cooler than a TIE Fighter. I got the blueprints online and got to work. [
Slax looks like a fun distro, I’m going to take it for a spin this weekend- Slax fits on a mini CDR so it’s easy to tote it around with you. You can take your operating system with all the familiar apps with you to any PC that has a CDRom drive and you can reboot. At your parent’s house with their computer full of AOL and bloat? Pop in your Slax and get some work done. 