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Here’s a great project with lots of uses from the deepquest blog…“Exploring my new Siemens MC 60 mobile I discovered an interesting feature. It has the ability to record small pieces of sound with its integrated microphone and store them as WAV files, so that you can use them later as personalized ring tones, etc…The recording feature made me think that I might use the mobile as a magnetic stripe reader, just like I did with computers with soundcards. After some tests I had successful results, so here is the process in case you are interested in doing the same”. In our 01 issue we show how to make one for your PC as well.

Maker Jus2in posted this in our /talk section, but I wanted to get it on the blog…“I’m putting together the plans of a low-cost infant incubator that an Indian physician has developed. She’d like to distribute the plans of the device to other doctors in developing countries. Is there anyone out there who would like to help out on the project or could point me to a place where I could find interested engineers?” Post in the comments if you’re interested.

John writes in with a handy link from his bookmarks- this site shows you how to create a LED display to show all sorts of information about your PC like CPU utilization, memory utilization, network bandwidth, hard drive usage, OS information, program information to monitor CPU, memory, and other resources used by individual threads or processes. I have an old PC with a parallel port and extra drive bay that this would look very sci-fi prop-ish blinking away.

Use commercial blueprint paper for photographic fun. Blueprint paper is inexpensive, easy to process at home, and does not require a darkroom or any special equipment. While almost anyone can make a blueprint image, the real challenge lies in composing an image that takes advantage of blueprint paper’s unique qualities and characteristics. Main site here and the gallery is stunning.

MAKE will be on Dr. Andy’s Poetry and Technology Hour on Wednesday, April 13th at 5:40pm PDT on KDVS (90.3 FM) in Davis and Sacramento, California, and everywhere else via the web. We’ll be talking about our favorite topics, mashing up technology and hacking up things along with some sneak previews of what what’s in the next issue of MAKE (Sorry about the late post with this).

Chicago guitarist and blogger Kevin Skomsvold built himself a guitar effects pedal board for $27 in parts, saving himself a couple hundred dollars! Here’s how. I really like how this project started out…“Last week I built a board that would allow me to access my guitar effects easily along with some other enhancements. I Googled my face off looking for some schematics to go by but found nothing”. If it’s not on Google, it’s time to build it!

“Wasting Precious Time” gives you give you a set of pictures to work with, you arrange them anyway you please, and write a story with them. When you’re done, just save and publish it, and the whole world can see it. All the pictures come from collections on archive.org. I like this one about insects that capture and carry restaurant guests away.