Weird stuff from Government Liquidation
Harvey writes “Where US Taxpayer’s have already bought the best equipment (Like $2,000 hammers) and you can pick up it up for a faraction of its original cost. Get electronics and test equipment, pumps and motors, battaries and computer equipment by the pallet! Buy entire pallets of parts at a time and make the impractical dream a reality! NOTE: Read the fine print and watch out for shipping costs!” Link. I’m bookmarking this for the occasional requests we get for surplus or bizarre decommissioned gear.
Jason from Preshrunk writes “The gang over at Vestal Design have made and documented a really killer bar made out of somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 discarded library books. Well, I know I’d totally make one if I had that many books laying around.” 
Excellent set of photos of the construction of cigar box guitars from Pasque – “I am building guitars out of cigar boxes with my students. Here are some photos of the prototype I built at home (now updated with photos of my students’ guitars). I went begging and got a bunch of wooden fingerjointed cigar boxes. The fee… a photo of my students with their guitars, a fair trade. The project idea came from Make magazine 
Slashdot has a post about Michael Golembewski’s homemade digital camera projects. He writes – “For the past three years, I’ve been taking apart cheap secondhand flatbed scanners and turning them into homemade large format digital cameras. They are well over 100 mexapixel in resolution, and produce results that are both similar to and significantly different from traditional digital and conventional cameras.” [
Here’s a Dance-Dance-Revolution style USB mat you can get from Kraft (the macaroni and cheese folks) for only $10. This is a pretty good deal and you could likely turn this into all sorts of controllers and as parts for projects. I bet it will even work with the 
Mostlyaudio’s article about building the AudioNote Kit1 PQ Signature Edition SET amplifier. “This kit will build a very high quality Single-Ended, Class A, directly heated triode amplifier. The amplifier will support a single line source (unless a pre-amp is used that will support more sources) as it incorporates a volume control. It has a class A output of 8watts per channel. Don’t be put off by this seemingly low wattage as it is every bit as loud, position for position, as my my old 40W Linn solid state amplifier was through the same speakers. It also has an input impedance of around 100K which is more than ample for a huge range of source components.”