AOTS had one of my favorite Makers- Simon Field, author of Gonzo Gizmos: Projects & Devices to Channel Your Inner Geek. Simon makes all sorts of projects from stuff found around the house. Film can cannons, three penny radios, solar marshmallow roasters and more. His website SciToys also has a lot to explore as well as the parts/projects to purchase. Link.
On Friday’s MAKE:Audio show we had a quick review of Mac OS X Tiger and now that’s we’ve been banging on it for a few more hours, here are some cheers and jeers. Spotlight search is creepy fast, it’s finding everything almost instantly. Dashboard and its Widgets are fun but take up a lot of memory, not sure if it matters though. The RSS screensaver is also fun, here’s a video of what it looks like. Only Macs that are 1Ghz G4 and above can do join in multi-video chats, but multi-audio seems to be fine on some sub 1Ghz machines here. Even if you bought QuickTime Pro 6+ you need to repurchase QuickTime 7. Overall a great release, it’s living up to all the stellar reviews. Some photos from the Seattle store (4th in line!).
Here’s a quick video I shot late last night of the Skype payphone actually working. It rings and can be used as a Skype phone for any call, SkypeIn/SkypeOut and it’s just really really cool to have a working VOIP Skype payphone in one’s living room. Next up getting it to take quarters so you can make calls and using the keypad as username and password entry.Link (QuickTime 8MB).
Lots of things to put on your PSP. Here are official PSP versions of comics formatted for the PSP from Variance press (High and Lonesome, Last Orders and Semantics). Next up- Star Charts resized just for the PSP from the Mag-7 Star Atlas project, love this! And lastly, pimp out your PSP case- I hope someone makes a template and kit to do this. Link. Thanks Eric!
Is there anything bamboo can’t do? Here’s a how to on making a bike frame out of bamboo. “I saw many amazing constructions made of bamboo and I always wondered, why such light, strong, stiff and elastic material is not widespread used for building of bicycle frames. Since I finished my carbon frame, I was thinking about using bamboo for my second frame”. Link via BoingBoing.
Here’s a DIY teleprompter for the folks out there who are using web cams to do videoblogging or recording themselves speaking. It’s pretty simple, a couple CD cases and some HTML and you’re good to go. I think as we start using video conferencing more it might be a neat project to put all sorts of things on there, like instant messages, widgets, slides or maybe a RSS ticker, maybe not. Link.
Mac OS X Tiger is out today, so that means we’re going to see a ton of really neat widgets, if you want to get started building here’s an overview…Based on Web Kit technologies, Dashboard Widgets are created using a mix of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. This extends the ability to develop Widgets to a very wide audience. If you know how to create a web page, then you know how to create a capable Widget. Link. We’ll have some examples once we make a few too.
