The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the kitchen, garage and backyard from food to furniture to fun & games for your family.
Hans writes “Laser Chess was created by Mike Duppong back in the late 80s, and you can find lots of software versions of the it on the web. However, a Brazilian student named Alexandre Van de Sande actually made a actual working laser version of the game!” Link.
Excellent reason to roll back any PSP, a Commodore 64 emulator! – “64psp began life as an experiment to learn how to program the PSP. No PSP C64 emulators existed at the time and the Frodo source code appeared to have a gentler learning curve. A PSP port of VICE is also in progress. Both emulators have their plus and minus points, so why not try both?” [via] Link.
Make your own gift wrap – Jack writes “This year as I was putting together Christmas gifts, I realized that I’d forgotten to pick up a roll of wrapping paper. At this point, I recalled the Make-a-Flake site I came across a while ago, and it hit me that I could prevent another trip to the store and at the same time, make custom wrapping paper for each of my giftees. Win-win!” Link.
There’s a new google-maps-style API for the virtual world Second Life. It’s in beta, but we made an example of what’s possible – you can click the arrows and see snap shots of the virtual edition of MAKE, our theater and the tree house. Click the navigation arrows as well as the zoom in/zoom out controls to see the rest of the virtual world. The cool thing about this is that it’s a “real” view into another world. Link.
Rob sent in this great LED Menorah with a USB interface, the Maker J. Schrier writes – “It can correctly calculate the dates of Hannukah for at least the next few thousand years (or any historical date back to 2 B.C.E.). As well as “lighting” the candles based on when the sunsets (I set the default geography for San Francisco/Berkeley, but you can enter any latitude/longitude and (assuming you don’t live too close to the arctic circle) it will be correct to within a few minutes. Furthermore, the shamas (candle you use to light the other candles) can blink out any morse-code message you want It will convert the words to morse code for you!” Link.
For any of you Second Life makers who have been itching to create the ultimate virtual home there are a couple of bidding wars over on Ebay. Both Linden Lab and Anshe Chung (largest virtual land owner) are holding auctions for your very own island, which includes 120 hours of in world consulting and building. Also, special thanks to everyone who came out to the virtual MAKE meet up on Friday write up here.
Chris has a great arcade building how to, he writes – “…the cabinet construction was completed in 24 hours, but it took about three months to get around to the last few bits (like decorating the unit), so don’t complain if after one day you don’t get something that looks like the unit on the left! Please browse through the links at the top and bottom of each page. They will cover the construction diary (in blow-by-blow detail), the finishing of the unit together with a shopping list, prices and then information on the PC inside the unit. Finally you will be able to download some plans we created after building the device, together with some of the graphics that are on the unit.” Thanks Rick! Link.
