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I hope to get to NYC to check this out, it looks amazing! Many of the geared, motor driven exhibits are so big, they needed to be housed in the Sculpture garden. Ãœberorgan, created from multiple bus-size biomorphic balloons, each with its horns tuned to a different note in an octave, is a gargantuan self-playing organ. Its musical score consists of a 200-foot-long scroll of dots and dashes encoding old hymns, pop classics, and improvisational ditties. Tim Hawkinson explains: “The score is deciphered by the organ’s brain- a bank of light-sensitive switches- and then reinterpreted by a series of switches and relays that translate the original patterns into nonrepeating variations of the score.”.

Here’s a neat site- it’s an ongoing journal on building an independent movie theater in Springfield, MO. In Seattle we have few, and I’ve seen tons of great movies, but I know many places only have the big Cineplexes and nothing else. If you’ve ever wondered would it would take to start a theater, this is an interesting read.

I just got around to listening to this week’s Science Friday I recorded. The 2nd hour had a great segment with clips of people who knew or worked with Einstein. It’s his 126th birthday and 2005 is the 100 year anniversary of Albert Einstein’s “miraculous year” and- it’s worldwide “Year of Physics” (more here). The other part of the show had Mitchell Baker, President, Mozilla Foundation talking about FireFox. You can listen to the segments here.

Around June 3rd of last year I happen to be staring at the sky around 3am and saw a huge ball of fire streak across the sky followed by a few “thumps” (story here). This weekend we were treated to another- a huge green glowing ball with a blue tail. Oddly enough we also had a small earthquake at the same time, but our local seismology laboratory said it was unrelated.

The Zipit is a little $99 WiFi device with LCD screen that is primarily targeted to homes with kids who instant message a lot and would use this as opposed to using a computer just to chat. Some folks are starting to hack it up in some really cool ways, here are a few sites I’ve gathered- Yahoo groups with instructions and posts about getting Linux on it, Zipit’s GNUpage, AiboHack’s Zipit page (he’s doing some amazing stuff) and a great Zipit overview page from Elk Grove wireless. If you’re in to these let me know, we might do an article on it in Make.

I’ll write this up once I get back from Etech– here a shot of the shuffle charging via a flexible solar panel. Should charge most USB devices, need to run some power tests to make sure… Another alternative power solution, like the hand powered version.

Tom’s Hardware has a cool step-by-step on building a long range Bluetooth sniper rifle. After construction they were able to find 20 devices from over a half mile away in downtown Los Angeles. This is part one of the article which is only hardware construction with the antenna, gumstick computer, etc.. the 2nd part of the article should be posted soon and it will explore “various open-source and never-before-released Bluetooth sniffing and attack tools on the Gumstix computer.”