Gramophone Recorder
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 similar, but it records only things of a smaller size and the description seems to imply the recordings can only be played back on these machines, not regular turntables. (It’s a kit, which is nice, but the Gieskes.nl recorder looks much cooler.) I’m interested in trying Gieskes.nl’s project, but I’m wondering if there are other people out there who have done this so I can supplement these instructions a bit. Do you know of anyone else who has information about doing this sort of thing?” Link.
A MAKE reader writes in about some DIY film gear projects: “Today’s posting on Self-Reliant Film considers the pros and cons of DIY film tools, along with a compilation of a number of links (and a reference to the “Crafter’s Manifesto” found in Make)!” The article has a pretty good overview of many of the film gear projects we cover here, including the 
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. 
Paul writes “If you’re anything like me, you just spent your last bit of cash on a wicked gaming mouse and didn’t leave any money for a mouse pad. Typically you would just game without one, but over time those teflon feet on your mouse will fill with gunk, get scratched up and your mouse won’t glide as smoothly as it did in its infancy. Enter the waxpaper mouse pad. For the cost of pretty much nothing, you can have the smoothest gliding mouse/mouse pad combo known to man. Let’s begin the fabrication…” 
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. [