The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for digital gadgetry, open code, smart hacks, and more. Processing power to the people!
Having a hard time figuring out how to affix your GPS unit to a secure spot on your dash? Crappy suction cup mounts always falling off? Sandbag mounts sliding around all over the place? If you don’t mind sticking things in your HVAC vents, you might consider trying something similar to this custom ShapeLock GPS mount from Portuguese maker Rui Cabral.
Built for a presentation on mobile development for MobileCampBrussels, the Phone Guitar is an amalgam of five smartphones, three mobile platforms, three programing languages, two third-party apps, a custom cross-platform sequencer app, a stick, some battery powered speakers, and plenty of duct tape.
Nice tip spotted in the BB comments for avoiding “Facebook malware” – In Firefox, install AdBlock plus, add these filters (above). Now you can browse the web without Facebook installing applications you don’t want or sharing information with sites you do not want information shared with, or at least only ones you choose. This will […]
By now we all know that the iPad does indeed blend. But does it shred? Built to Shred host Jeff King and pro Chad Knight put the iPad through it’s paces. Does the iPad shred? You’ll just have to watch the video to find out.
This is just a commercial, really, but it’s pretty entertaining. Google advertisers wanted to push their whole “Chrome is fast” angle and so they set up and filmed a series of “tests” where they trigger some fast real-world event and load a page in Chrome at the same moment. Guess which process finishes first every time? Yeah, OK, that was an easy one. It’s hardly “science”–not even the watered-down television kind–but it is, in fact, fairly amusing to watch a potato get blasted through a fry-cutter and into a vat of cooking oil. They also spray paint onto a giant ear model using acoustic waves and zap a tiny pirate ship with a Tesla coil. The making-of video is recommendable, as well. [Thanks, Alan Dove!]
I have been reading the Picture of the Day feed from Wikimedia Commons for about a month, now, and it is fast becoming one of the best parts of my daily newsreader experience. Every day there’s a gorgeous new publicly-licensed photograph pre-selected for quality by a vote amongst Wikimedia community members.
That’s how I happened upon the work of German inorganic chemist and photographer alchemist-hp (English-language page). She or he takes amazing photographs of element, mineral, and chemical samples and has a stated goal (badly translated by yours truly) “to create special pictures of all naturally occurring elements.”
Interesting concept from Thingiverse user 12meyer. All kinds of potential problems here, so this is more of the “way to think outside the box” kind of shout-out than the “where can I invest in your start-up” kind. One can, of course, dim fluorescent bulbs electrically, but it turns out to be kind of a PITA. The idea here is to exploit the spiral shape of the bulb itself to make an opaque cover that screws on or off to block more or less light, respectively.
