The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the kitchen, garage and backyard from food to furniture to fun & games for your family.
Rob writes “One of my co-workers and his brother are somewhat serious about their Christmas lights. They welcomed the introduction of LED lights, because it meant that they could stop adding new electrical panels to their house. Of particular interest to MAKE readers are the technical notes on the sidebar of their site.” Link. But wait, there’s more! Snopes on another music sync’d home, and you can see it on Google video. Lastly, build your own – with MAKE!
Great step-by-step guide on hacking the Atari Flashback 2 Console, adding a cartridge port to play old 2600 games – “So, you’ve decided to take your Atari Flashback 2 console to the next level? Well then, here are the basic details to help assist you in hacking/modding your console into a full fledged Atari 2600 system that can use your original cartridges.” Link.
Chris writes in with a great site from Yamaha that has all sorts of fun papercrafts to download, print and make “This has a range of papercraft projects including Yamaha motorcycles, rare animals and some very cool seasonal themed projects like a jack-o-lantern… and for Japanese festivals.” Link.
Great holiday Instructable! “Use solid-state relays to blink the lights on your tree in time with music. String lots of lights onto the tree. Use as many sets as you like, but arrange them such that there are three light regions, each with a separate plug. Run these three plugs down the trunk so they can easily be attached to the light controller. Up to three strings of lights can usually be linked in series, so you can almost certainly cover even big trees. Plug light strings into the controller you built for Halloween (MAKE 03). Attach computer and sound system…” Link.
Ray and Cape write “We thought it’d be sweet to make shot glasses out of ice. There are some bars in Europe and Australia which are made completely out of ice and kept below freezing, we didn’t go that far but these are pretty cool (no pun intended), check it out. We used Dixie cups. They come in several different sizes. You will need two different sizes, we used 9 oz and 3 oz cups…” Link.
Escher’s “Relativity” in LEGO! “…our fourth Escher picture rendered in LEGO. Once again, no camera tricks, but the picture has to be taken from exactly the right place, and boy did we get tired of trying to find where that place was. The whole thing took five or six evenings spread over two or three weeks. Most of the last evening was taken up with setting up the lighting the way we wanted it and trying to get the camera position just right…” Thanks Techhat! Link.
Nice mod if you have an old Dreamcast laying around, Raph writes – “The image on a TV is always a little too blurry for my taste, and the quality of a VGA image is very superior. I had always dreamed to be able to use my SNES on a PC monitor, but the SNES did not have a VGA output. When I learned that the Dreamcast could output a VGA signal, I installed a VGA connector on it almost instantly.” [via] Link.
