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. Link.
…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. [via] Link.
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. [via] Link.
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. Link.
Here’s a quick and easy way to make wallpaper/desktops for your computer from Google maps…gMerge is a python script that merges Google Maps satellite “tiles” in order to produce a wallpaper (or even a poster!). For some reason the town I grew up in continues to not be visible on Google maps, ah well. [via] Link.
Flickr gang- congrats on your 17 millionth photo! I never expected to use a photo sharing service so much and for it to be a daily part of work, play and everything in between. The MAKE Flickr photo group has been a great meta for us, thanks again! Lastly, for Flickr fans like me- there’s a new collaborative poster you can order with thousands of others- called the Flickrverse. Link.
Neat- a story from a MAKE reader building the Marshmallow gun in issue 02– We went to the Ace Hardware store to get the parts…when we got to the counter the clerk said ‘looks like a lot of fun here.’ Spencer sort of acted out putting a marshmellow in a tube and shooting it…she got it. “Ah, you read Make magazine?” She not only reads Make, but had got the second issue before me…and wanted the store to carry it. Link.
