I have a Tablet PC for robot and “wearable” type projects. I’m working on an article for Make Issue 03 that will pull a lot of cool things together like mapping, cosmic rays on airplanes and USB Geiger counters. Here are a couple pictures of some testing from the Maker Flickr group pool. If you haven’t joined the group yet– join in and post up!
Weekends are about coffee in my home. The Philips Senseo is a coffee maker that makes one cup of coffee at a time, insert single serving Fight Club reference here. I saw one at the store a few days ago and remembered reading about analogies to its “protected” coffee pods that keep you locked in to Philips pod system like DRM on many music players do. I never really thought about buying a Senseo, but today on the del.icio.us bookmarks a guide showed up on making your own coffee pods as well as a universal version. So, now I am thinking of getting one and writing this up for a future issue. Has anyone made their own pods out there? Is the Senseo that good?
I’m really getting in to “fan made films” lately. Most are Sci-Fi and starting to become fairly high quality. While I was at the Seattle ComicCon I was surprised to see DVDs of all the ones I’ve viewed in the past for sale on tables with lots of other DVDs you can’t “buy” anywhere. Waxy.org posted a link to this one, a Thundercats fan film which is a fun watch. Other ones I’ve downloaded and used to test video playback on phones, devices, etc… have been Grayson, Duality, Fanimatrix, Hidden Frontier, and Starship Exeter. If you have any other cool ones post’em up!
Terrie our webmaster tells me we have some new RSS/Atom feeds! Gentlefolk, start your aggregators.
You can subscribe to the Talk comments section (RSS and Atom).
Comments from articles (RSS and Atom).
There are also icons and autodiscovery links for these on both pages. We have a summary of all feeds here
WFMU is a public radio station in New Jersey that has great eclectic programs . For instance, one show plays old Edison wax cylinders. The station also has an excellent blog, called Beware the Blog. I was reading a entry on it about high-end MP3 recording equipment, and in the comments section, someone mentioned the Archos Jukebox Recorder, a 20Gb MP3 player that you can buy for about $250. The interesting thing about this device is the alternative operating system for that’s been created by a community of Archos users. It’s called Rockbox. The commentor says “The replacement interface can even play games like tetris and solitaire. (It can announce menus by a robotic user-configurable voice…it can even play videos that are converted to a special format – though on a small LCD the results are far from satisfying.)” This sounds really interesting. If you’ve had experience with this system, please tell me about it by posting in the comments.
Continue Reading
Alex Moskalyuk over on Slashdot has a review of our first issue of Make Magazine. He gave it a 10 out of 10. I really like this part “Make is the magazine for people who like to look under the hood, who like to work on do-it-yourself projects and who feel great accomplishment when a project is over, even though its practical usability might be questioned”. Mark was IMterviewed over on Gizmodo about the magazine as well.
I just interviewed Brian Greene, professor of Physics and Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University. He is author of the best selling books “The Elegant Universe”, “Fabric of the Cosmos” and recently a NOVA special. His area of research is superstring theory, quantum theory of gravity as well as a unified theory of all forces and all matter. We talked about superstrings, branes, experimental ways to investigate all of this along with what tools he uses and how technology has changed the way physicists work together (they use AIM!). This will be part of our Make:Audio series to be released here soon. Brian, wants to build a telescope as a project (I’ve always wanted to as well). I think we’re going to definitely put that in a future issue. I’d like to build my own scope, then use one of my digital cameras to take photos.
