Blog

If you have your copy of MAKE, be sure to enter the MakeShift challenge (page 170). After a relaxing night of camping in the deep woods, you return to your car to find that it will not start. The battery is dead. “Someone” left the parking lights on overnight. You are 50 miles from the nearest road and have limited food and water. You try to call for help, but your cellphone is out of power and out of range. Snowy weather is scheduled to set in by late evening. The situation is serious. Makeshift winners will get a SWISSMEMORY
USB Victorinox 512MB device, as well as a Make T-shirt and 1-year subscription, if you win. This is your last chance to get in some last-minute entries before the deadline 3/31!

Make Flickr pool member drewish of Bicycle POV fame posted up a couple images of a minty cool mouse he made. Ingredients: One Altoids tin and one Logitech USB optical mouse. Not shown: Dremel, mini-hack saw, two-part epoxy, random plastic bits, 4 hours of my life.

There are few ways you can get eBooks on your PSP. One way- you can turn the PSP in to a web browser and hit a HTML page that has an eBook, but an easier way is to use a print utility called PaperLess printer to make images of any printable file or PSPPhoto which makes photos that are properly sized for the PSP. Here’s how to make eBooks using PaperlessPrinter from GameFries, here’s where to get PSPPhoto and here are a ton of great digitized Manga for the PSP. Last up HowToons on my PSP!

Altoids and old Atari 2600 cartridges make great project cases. Earlier Brendan Dawes’s made a USB drive out of an old Atari cartridge and now here’s a great step-by-step from Teach42 that shows you how to make a battery pack for an iPod using Combat.

OMG! LOL! I can’t wait add Flipper to my buddy list…Seadragon allows you to emit underwater whistles and to acquire underwater whistles. You can now try to communicate with many species of whales and dolphins. Seadragon could be described as Instant Messaging for dolphins and humans. It does not translate whistles. It tries to recognize them, it gives a name to unrecognized ones, and it is up to you to figure out their meaning, if any. It allows you to emit whistles underwater and to see the text names of whistles emitted by cetaceans in response to yours. Download it here.

Earlier I had mentioned I ordered one of the GameOptic devices from ThinkGeek. It arrived, and wow, I really like this USB LCD info-gadget. Here are some pictures of some of the things it can do. I hooked up my web cam and set it to upload pictures to Flickr when someone messaged me (photo). There are about a dozen other projects I’m going to do with this little guy and the developers of product have been really receptive to more ideas and hacks.

We’re testing our new video feed- I made a quick video (MP4) that shows the ways many PSP hackers discovered to use a PlayStation Portable (PSP) as a web browser using a game called Wipeout Pure, an awesome DNS/PSP Portal from FugiMax and all the great info from all the PSP tinkerers out there. Follow the directions here to actually do this and to watch our test video. Save this video file to your local system and play on your Mac/PC or create a new folder on your PSP Memory Stick called MP_Root and inside that folder another folder called 100MNV01 and place the M4V83876.MP4 file in there. On the PSP go to videos and play it. Keep in mind, it’s just a quick and dirty test. If you’re in to more testing– subscribe to our RSS 2.0 feed podcast/videoblog aggregator style and have any audio, video and files we post here downloaded automatically. Make:Audio coming soon!