San Francisco Makers Sought For Focus Group
We are working with a partner to put together a focus group session related to technology related projects and the projects you Make on
your time. In this session, we will be brainstorming new ideas and getting your feedback on possible future concepts. This session is
hosted by Make magazine but conducted by an outside focus group facilitator and is designed to get creative ideas about how the
marketplace can better serve your needs. The focus group will be held in San Francisco on Saturday, Sept 17 from 10AM to 1PM. All qualified participants will be compensated for their time. Link.
Starting from the beginning though, as even the designers of the real Dreamcast would have done, David sketched possible ideas of what he wanted the console to look like, which was followed by a clay mold, then a plaster cast of it. The next step involved taking a 14″ x 18″ sheet of plastic, and heating it up. Once that’s softened up, it sits on top of the plaster cast while a home made vacuum chamber (instructions on how to build one can be found here) sucks all the air out from around it, making it fall into the shape of the cast… 
WoW. Earlier today, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against a group of gamers who wrote a work-around to Blizzard’s Battle.net multiplayer gaming service. The three programmers had written a program dubbed ‘BNetD’ that functioned similarly to Blizzard’s free service. The letter of the law may side with Blizzard, but it is hard to see how this is anything but a single-finger salute to their army of fans: play on our servers or not at all, is the message. Naturally it is Blizzard’s product, so they can do as they see fit, but this restriction is contrary to almost every multiplayer game on the market and only serves to limit their market. 
...put a couple FAQs and walk-through guides on the PSP so you could use it as a hand held reference when you are playing other game systems or if you are between PSP games. It makes things much easier now that you can read normal HTML text and image files instead of having to convert everything to an JPEG file. [
MAKE Flickr pool member BenSinclair cleaned up his workshop area and has a challenge for all of us – show your work benches! My freshly cleaned work bench. Normally it looks like something exploded. Let’s see some more benches from the MAKE group! Join in and post up! 
For your Media Center PC folks out there- this is really cool. This package (firewire.zip) supports channel change and recording (SD/HD) via firewire, integrated into MCE. Channel change only works with the Motorola 6200/6208/6412 STBs and the SA3250HD/SA8000/SA8300HD STBs, recording works with other STBs. [