MIDISpeak: Speak & Spell MIDI Kit
Not a bad deal for $49. “MIDISpeak Module – Version 2, The Talking Toy MIDI RetrofitAdds a standard MIDI IN port to your Speak & Spell, Speak & Read, or Speak & Math. Non-English versions also supported. Trigger thousands of sounds–words, word fragments, garbled speech, percussion and bizarre sound effects.” Link. In MAKE 04 we also show you how to build music toys like this. Modify a Casio keyboard (or other electronic audio stuff) and start playing some of the strangest sounds you’ve ever heard.
“A small wireless battery powered device – Turn it on near a friendly wireless network that contains iTunes shares and plug your headphones in. It picks a random iTunes share, picks a random tune and starts playing. Repeat until bored or the batteries are dead. The size of the system is amazing. The main board is about the size of my little finger. By default it’s running an ssh server, a web server and advertising itself to the network with bonjour.” 
Michael writes: “I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. I remember reading about an expensive commercial product for it, and there’s a much cheaper product available that is 
Peter writes “Here’s a Haile, a robotic drummer that responds intelligently to your playing with an expressive performance on a Native American Pow-wow drum. They’re set to create a Jewish-Arab drum circle composition featuring the robot commissioned for performance in Jerusalem.” Here’s how they did it. 
This is a trend I think we’ll see over and over again this year with phones and the music stores carriers are going to roll out – the slow death of MP3 playback on phones, or having to have a Windows PC and Media player 10 to convert to WMA before your phone can play your music. Techdirt has a story about Verizon phones that will no longer play MP3s one upgraded to use their new music store, if customers complain they’ll get an old refurbished phone with older firmware, but it doesn’t appear that the user is warned before updating that they’ll lose their MP3 playing feature. [
Peter writes “In response to the 
Wow, nice project and the MP3s on the site are fantastic! – “SIDman is a portable SID music playing device. If you don’t know what SID music is, then get thee 