The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for bikes, rockets, R/C vehicles, toys and other diversions.
Great interview! “Benjamin Heckendorn (aka Ben Heck) is one of the greatest console hackers the gaming community has ever known. Not only does Ben have the amazing technical knowledge and great design sense, but he is also a riot to converse with. In case you are not familiar with his work, Ben basically takes full game systems (from basically all console generations) and turns them into a custom handheld device.” Thanks Brian! Link.
Here comes an interesting trend – buying real world goods with virtual money – “The first real product, an XFX GeForce graphics card, is selling for L$20,000 or about US$80 (approx. $L250 = US$1). Makes sense, upgrade your system from work within the virtual world you’re running. What next?…How about something simple that generates from the SL itself, like user-created t-shirts a la something like Threadless? What do you think would work? Gosh, virtual currency for virtual things is going to be sooooo passe soon.” Link.
NextBrick.net has a post about some really cool LEGO’s from the 60’s and 70’s from Mario, he writes “Dedicated to those of you LEGOmaniacs who are too young to remember the first years of Lego, or who have never had the opportunity to see some of these relics. During my childhood I spent tons of hours playing with Lego, and a large part of my small week’s pay buying spare parts. It would have been strange not to receive at least one Lego set at or birthday. My sister Elena and my brother Stefano are just one and two years younger than I am. They were very fond of Lego too and we usually played together to build very large cities. Not all of our Lego survived, but we still own a very large bunch of pieces, which I am pleased to share with you in this page.” Link.
Raphael writes “In order to practise at the arcade version of Super Mario Bros, I modified a NES to be able to run arcade ROMs. The result: A dedicated Super Mario Bros VS. console with switches on the front panel to tweak some aspects of the game (A user friendly version of dip switches found on the arcade motherboard).” Link.
Heyrocker writes “This is a coffee table built from the playfield of a pinball machine. It is pretty easy to build and best of all, it lights up! It was inspired by a bar in Seattle called Shorty’s, which has tables similar to these in its booths.” Complete how-to on Instructables! Link.
The Lessig video-watching event in world (Second Life) has been set for tonight, Monday, January 16 from 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM PST. It will take place at Make Land in Tenera (tenera/84/196), Join Hamlet Linden for a screening of a Lawrence Lessig lecture on free culture, then stay for the discussion afterward. A perfect way to prepare for Professor Lessig’s appearance on Wednesday! More info on the event here and here.
Here’s the first test of a 3D RSS reader “idea” I’m working on – I shot this last week before I left for Macworld so it doesn’t really show what’s possible, or how it works now, but I think it’s easy to get the idea – in the current version you point it toward a real geographic location and using a “lens” (a tablet pc with x,y,z axis tracking) as you point it at something you get the feeds, so let’s say you point it towards Redmond, WA you’d get news about Microsoft or something. For now I need to manually let it know where it is, but I think there’s a way to feed in more real world data. Ok, here’s the video – Link (MOV) and photos. I’ll have a new video and some more about this later.
