DIY KITT Car Scanner


Here’s an interesting way to add a LCD screen to your CPU case. This project uses a PSOne LCD. This Maker had a video card that supported video out, but it seems like it’s possible to wire in directly if your video card supports it. You could also power it from the computer itself. Link.
Kempa.com has a great overview of video on vinyl and the history of getting videos on all sorts of discs. In fact, there was a ‘format war’ of sorts that broke out amongst companies encoding video onto grooved discs, well before the VHS / Beta wars were waged. CED’s appear to have been the dominant iteration of this technology, though I’ve found reference to a number of similarly imagined formats, including VHD videodisc system, Magnavision/DiscoVision, phonovid and y. Link.
Wolfgang Puck is releasing self-heating coffee- can’t wait to pick one up and use it for some projects! It took a California company named OnTech seven years and $24 million to create the self-heating cans, which are activated by pushing a plastic button on the bottom. Water flows into a sealed inner cone filled with quicklime, which is mostly calcium oxide. A chemical reaction heats the coffee to a pleasant 145 degrees in six to eight minutes, the amount of time it might take to order, pay for and receive a latte from a barista. Link.
This fellow has a few cool projects, I like the TV Fish Tank- A friend of mine had a broken television, and for whatever reason, I decided I should make it into a fish tank. As a word of warning to anyone who may attempt something similar, this project has been a little difficult, mostly because I’ve never built a fish tank before, and it’s hard to get something that looks good and is also capable of holding 120 lbs of water. It’s easier if you use a smaller tv. Link.

Mini review: The $20 Griffin XpressCable digital audio cable for Airport Express is nice- if your looking to get the best quality audio from your AE (or iMac G5) to your stereo (with Toslink/Optical inputs) this worked out for me and it’s about half the price than the Monster cable version. Of course the other fun thing to do is to point a laser at it for science experiments. Link.