First real product buyable with virtual money
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.
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).” 
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! 
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 (
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 – 
The Goldfish Online has some really interesting LEGO logic gates – “…designed working NOT, OR, NOR, AND, and NAND gates. Using two NAND gates I have produced a NAND gate latch or Flip-FLop. The natural follow on from these is clocked logic, full-adders and ultimately a genuine “computer” device. At the moment all these gates essentially just demonstrators. They work, but because of the limitations that arise through gear slippage, the real practicable use is probably not that great.” The details of logic gates can be found here – 
