Blog

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!

Andy Saunders has spent the last 12 years restoring the self-proclaimed world’s safest car, the Aurora. Designed in 1957 by an eccentric New York priest as the world’s safest car, it flopped and only one was ever made. It has foam-filled bumpers, roll cage and seats that swivel 180 degrees before a crash.

Ever like a game so much you made another one to keep playing? Zelda Classic is a tribute to (what we think is) the greatest video game of all time: Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda. It has been developed into an exact replica of the NES version that we all know and love. Beyond that, Zelda Classic allows the development of new quests that can use either the traditional graphics or enhanced graphics, as well as new enemies, items, and challenges. You can download user created quests (and here’s how to load them). Runs great on the little oQo!

The Playstation portable has only been out a few days here in the states and there is already a really cool hack for it- using it as a web browser. There are a few ways to do this and here are a couple- all require (for now) the game “Wipeout Pure” and redirecting the traffic via a proxy. Wombat Mobile has a great how-to here for Windows users… and here’s one if you have a FreeBSD machine- roto/moxy have some info. While I don’t think this is any scientific indicator of success- the portable gaming console that has the most hackers will “win”.

Makezine.com is easy to remember, but sound.sky.walk.car.mysteryrobot.com sounds cooler when you use Nambers. A namber is part name and part number. Each number between 0 and 255 has a namber. For example, 1 is fun and 213 is star. I really like this idea, the nambers are simple words that represent the DNS of your site. It would be neat to make little hieroglyphics Stargate style so you could get to a site with a big pictogram dialer. Or for kids, a “see and say” web browser.

Flash superstar Brendan Dawes made a flash (memory flash) USB drive out of an old Atari cartridge. “…occassionaly I yearn for stuff that was oversized and just made you want to reach out and touch it. So I took an old Atari 2600 cartridge and put inside a 128MB Flash drive! It’s incredibly stupid, and is the polar opposite of what Flash drives were invented for, but I love it!”.

Here’s a great article about turning that old PC in to an internet-enabled CD player, DVD burner, and MP3 jukebox using Knoppix. I get asked about this a lot “What can I do with an old PC” and this is a pretty good use and Knoppix is a great way to get started. We interviewed Kyle Rankin who wrote “Knoppix Hacks” and hopefully in the next week or so we’ll be releasing the interview(s) with him and others for our Make:Audio series.