More wall art made from book text…
McWhizzleteeth has a follow up how-to on making two-tone text for wall posters made from the text of books – “The “Origin of the Species – wall hanging” project makes a nice use of opacity masks in Illustrator, embedding an image in a field of text by changing the opacity throughout. But pulling this off can be difficult to figure out. This guide will run you through the steps to embed an image in a field of text merely by changing the opacity of the text itself.” Link.
That was quick, meet one of the first modd’ed Xbox 360s complete with – a window mod, 4″ cold cathode, 12V fan mod (increase air flow), Silver and blue paint scheme, Blue ring of light, 60GB laptop drive upgrade (this is in addition to the 20GB normal 360 drive both can be, accessed from the dashboard and the upgrade drive can be updated with media from a PC) [
A couple free ways to make flip books – PC: “Flipbook Printer is a program that lets you make your own printed “Flipbooks” from avi movie files using business cards. Makes a great present – have the kids send a flipbook of them waving hello to the grandparents, or send your loved one a movie of you smiling or blowing them a kiss. It’s the ultimate in low-tech movie making!” 
“Early users of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 are coming up with innovative ways to fix some of the first reported glitches plaguing the new videogame console. One of the fixes involves dangling the unit’s power supply in midair with string…Other 360 owners joined in, saying that once they cooled down overheated power units — by using fans or in one case, a half-filled bottle of frozen water — their consoles stopped crashing.” [
Gene is looking for a scriptable USB-IR controller – “So far I have not been able to find such an animal. I bought the first generation of Robosapian. The robot from wowwe toys. It comes with a real crazy remote control. You have to press many keys in certain combinations to make the robot do anything. If I could program a dynamic IR device with the codes and then create scripts.. It would be possible for me to make my robot do all kinds of neat things. Also I am into doing time lapse videos. That is where you setup a camera and let it run for about an hour.. I throw the video into my computer and use the editing software to speed things up. That is fine.. But I have an Olympus 8mp digital SLR camera. It also has an IR control out. A programmable IR device as I described above would really help me out with my camera. I could setup a high resolution picture every 15 seconds using a laptop on location replacing the IR controller. This would produce a very high quality time lapse once I put it in my editing software.” I think the USB-UIRT might be a good start, any other suggestions for Gene? 
