The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the kitchen, garage and backyard from food to furniture to fun & games for your family.
Kempa.com has a great overview of video on vinyl and the history of getting videos on all sorts of discs. In fact, there was a ‘format war’ of sorts that broke out amongst companies encoding video onto grooved discs, well before the VHS / Beta wars were waged. CED’s appear to have been the dominant iteration of this technology, though I’ve found reference to a number of similarly imagined formats, including VHD videodisc system, Magnavision/DiscoVision, phonovid and y. Link.
Mini review: The $20 Griffin XpressCable digital audio cable for Airport Express is nice- if your looking to get the best quality audio from your AE (or iMac G5) to your stereo (with Toslink/Optical inputs) this worked out for me and it’s about half the price than the Monster cable version. Of course the other fun thing to do is to point a laser at it for science experiments. Link.
Waxy points to story about how Nintendo will be beaming demos wirelessly at E3. I don’t think there’s time to do a project around this before next week, but by next year we’ll likely have the ability to broadcast homebrew games, content and all sorts of things- for the DS and maybe the PSP depending on how all the hacks keep going. It could be a bit of war of the signals DIY vs demoware… Link.
In the Build your Own Arcade Controls Message forums there are tons of great ideas suggestions and how-tos- here’s on on flush mounting a Trackball. Frosty says “Basically, I set my router depth to match the depth of the top of the mounting plate (about 1/8″ of an inch), and routed the outline of the plate. When dropped into the recess, it sat flush with the top of the CP. The artwork was placed on the panel and mounting plate (covering it) and then Lexan on top of it“. Link.
The C64 DTV is a 30-in-1 Commodore 64 system for playing games using your TV. MAKE Flickr photo pool member bjepson hacked one up to use a PS2 keyboard. Photos here and project details here- Link. Pick up our 2nd issue of MAKE to get the thorough step by step and how-to!
Neat DIY-comment about the new Xbox 360. Henshaw expects the new faceplates to include game-themes and plenty of home grown versions. “There will be different colors, game-themed face plates, a lot of people making their own face plate with fabrics,” said Henshaw, who is growing a Chia plant on his 360’s faceplate. “What we found is that people tend to like electronics that allows them to be entertained the way they want to be entertained and people love the kind of device that allows them to make it a reflection of their own personality.” Link.
The ELP Laser Turntable plays records by beaming the laser at the grooves (no needles touche the record). There are a total of five lasers: two for the left and right groove walls, two for tracking groove pitch, and one for tracking groove warp. Sounds amazing, until I saw it was $18,999. I think we’ll need to a Make version! Link.
