…designed for being in the city walking. in the urban landscape less public space are provided for sitting down. public benches are being moved away or replaced with a ‘leaning pole’ but the need of sitting down remains. YOC serves both as a carrying bag and as a stool to be used while rambling, shopping, waiting or when ever you want to sit down. the stool is folded out of coated fibreboard and can be flattened when not in use. Link.
Portable retro gaming! I use my Pocket PC quite a bit for games, mainly old NES titles on the PocketNester emulator. But the hardware buttons on the iPAQ are too small, and it can be hard to use certain combinations. My solution for this was to interface an original Nintendo controller to my PPC. For this mod, I used a cheap IR keyboard (Belkin F8U1500) and wired the directional keys and PPC hardware buttons (circled below) directly to the NES. Link.
DIY AC. …a student, with limited funds and a cheap house without air conditioning. To avoid dying this summer, I’ve built a primitive air conditioner. It’s a basic heat pump, using water as the medium. You’ll probably need to fiddle a bit with the dimensions of the supplies based on your resources and preferences. The system will cool an average room to a comfortable level in approximately 15-20 minutes. Depending on flow rate, a full bucket of water will last approximately 1-3 hours. It doesn’t rip quite as hard as central air, but for less than $30 CAD I’m not complaining. [via] Link.
Here’s a neat little iPod shuffle case made from a Tic Tac 100 case- it’s a little larger than the usual Tic Tac cases so the iPod shuffle fits in there nicely with room to spare for the mints. If i ran Tic Tac or some other company for the day, I’d go out of my way to make all my candy holders fit the most popular music players and watch the creativity flourish (Altoids sorta does that now). Link.
Finkbuilt writes- I am serializing the construction of the Grizzly Ukulele kit. I thought that you might be interested. I’ve known about the Grizzly guitar kits for a while and always thought that it would be neat to build one. A recent investigation into the ukulele sub-culture has pushed me past the tipping point where interest threatens to crescendo into obsession. The only way to get over it was going to be to dive right in, so I ordered up a Grizzly uke kit. Link.
From Tim! Someone who heard a podcast of Neil Gershenfeld’s eTech talk then went out and bought his book, Fab. Gershenfeld is the director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, where he teaches a course called “How to Make (almost) Anything.” As you know from O’Reilly’s new Make magazine, we’re closely following hardware hacking and what we’re now calling the maker movement. The work that Neil is doing is at the bleeding edge of that movement. We’re setting up our own Fab Lab in conjunction with Squid Labs, which is populated by former Gershenfeld associates, so you’ll be hearing more about personal fabrication in future issues of Make. Link.
Making satellites from old surplus space suits. Plans are on the fast track to deploy a surplus Russian Orlan spacesuit this fall as a non-traditional satellite. Dubbed “SuitSat,” the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) project could become the most unusual Amateur Radio satellite ever orbited. Now, an ARISS-US proposal will provide an opportunity for schools to participate in the SuitSat enterprise. Link.
