The Juicebox is a cheap (under $25 in some stores) music, video, photo viewer from Mattel aimed at kids. There are some hacking projects going on, and we’ll have some articles on that soon, but here’s a good how-to on putting ebooks on one using JPEGBook which makes images from text and you view those on the Juicebox. Link.
Flickr member Jonnay posted some photos documenting the building of an x0xb0x kit. (A DIY monophonic synthesizer that emulates the Roland TB-303). The x0xb0x is not just another MIDI-controlled TB-303 clone. x0xb0x is a full reproduction of the original Roland synthesizer, with fully functional sequencer. The x0xb0x is one of my favorite projects, it’s open source hardware at its best. Link.
Interesting interview with Jonah Peretti, Director of R&D at Eyebeam, last statement looks promising! “We recently finished construction and are in the process of outfitting the lab with electronics benches, a 3D printer, a laser cutter, and workstations for hackers, designers, and artists. The lab will be dedicated to public domain R&D — our code will be under GPL, our media will be under Creative Commons, and we will publish DIY instructions for hardware projects”. Link.
A long time after having lots of fun fun blowing stuff up with the high-energy capacitors from the Surge Generator, I came across a few more caps, which with the originals, makes up a total of 220uF at 5KV (some of the newer caps had a lower voltage rating than the original 6KV ones). I decided to build them into a box with a charging supply to make the setup slightly safer and easier to use. Link.
Good news on the iPod Linux front, it looks like full MP3 playback will hit the next builds, along with being even closer to play OGG on most iPods soon. Video playback with audio is expected soon as well. Here’s our video of a few generations of iPods on Linux. Thanks Michael! Link.
Robotic! Here you kind find a podcast of google news. I (well cron) pulls the news 4 times a day and feeds it to festival. This gets posted here in the form of mp3 and xml. Just for fun, one version of the news gets fed through a Markov chain Algorithm. This creates random sentences out of the input. The program that I use for this is explained in the excellent book “The Practice of Programming”. Link.
If you’re in the Cincinatti, Ohio area tune in to 700 AM and listen to MAKE on the SciZone show with Bill Boshears. In the Greater Cincinnati area, call 749-7000 or 1-800-THE-BIG1 (843-2441) anywhere else in the world if you have questions or comments. You can also listen to the show via streaming. Link.
