The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the kitchen, garage and backyard from food to furniture to fun & games for your family.
Excellent guide on procuring LEDs from a cheap and plentiful source – “They come disguised as “Christmas Lights” – the “Forever Bright” line is especially good. And they are the subject of this article. Why bother? Cost. A string of 75 BLUE LED lights costs $10 on sale – and up where I am there’s a $5 rebate per string for “Energy Saver” lights. So that’s five bucks for 75 LEDs – or about 7 cents per LED for the expensive BLUE ones. Cheap.” Link.
Kotaku has an overview on watching TV on your PSP using Sony’s LocationFree TV “watch cable TV, DVDs and DVR from your home entertainment center anywhere you can access a broadband connection. The one (major) downside is that you have to fork out about $350 to buy the LocationFree TV base station.” – a commenter on the site also mentions “you can use it to play PSX/PS2 games on the PSP. Granted there is a slight lag, but it does work.” Link.
Why buy a Media Center PC when you can make your own – fun project for an old PC “MediaPortal turns your PC in a very advanced Multi-Media Center / HTPC. It allows you to listen to your favorite music, radio, watch your video’s and DVD’s, view, schedule and record live TV and much more. You get Media Portal for free/nothing/nada/nopes and best of all it is opensource. This means anyone can help developing Media Portal or tweak it for their own needs! “ [via] Link.
The latest version of the PSP firmware gets you RSS feeds, specifically podcasts. Sounds good, but there are a few problems. The first is that the PSP doesn’t actually download the podcasts, it “streams” them. So you need to have a Wi-Fi connection at all times. The second downer is you need to use their interface to add each podcast feed. There is some hacking of the file format of the stored feeds, here’s the first pass at cracking it at bit – Link. Ideally, you’d have a desktop OPML to PSP-RSS list creator and also, Sony should consider making the PSP actually download the files so you can take them on the go…I don’t think I’ll update to 2.6 until this is fixed.
Airship reminds us that overheated new gaming systems, like the Xbox 360s aren’t really that new, take a trip down console gaming past…“Early Commomdore 64s had a similar problem with overheating brick power supplies. Commodore ended up beefing up the power supply dramatically. In the meantime, a healthy 3rd party market sprang up for replacement power supplies. Maybe Microsoft is just trying to stimulate the growth of 3rd party support for the Xbox?” Link.
Sony has a new release of the PSP firmware, this one is 2.60 and it actually has some interesting features. This latest update’s main features include WMA support, DRM capabilities, and a RSS Reader. The RSS reader makes the PSP one of the few MP3 players that can get and play podcasts via Wi-Fi without a computer. Review here and the update will hit your PSP via network update or here. On a side note, what is up with this PSP graffiti?
Neat, podcasting on TiVo – I hope it will download more content based on traffic conditions, then you sync that to your music player. David Zatz says “TiVo is beefing up their HME offerings by centrally hosting applications and partnering with Yahoo! Yahoo! weather, traffic, and photos are available by entering your account info on the TiVo box. Also being tested are Internet radio (Live365), the podcaster application I previewed at Digital Life, Fandango movie tickets, and some various games. TiVo’s beta is scheduled to continue testing into early 2006.” [via] Link.
