Use a Prius to power your house during a blackout
Interesting way to provide localized power sources – “The Toyota Prius – Gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles can serve as a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) for your house. The Prius, unlike the generator, also has a battery that provides instant, UPS-like power, to your house. Careful research has shown that most people would prefer not to go outside to manually pull a cord in the case of a power failure.” Tons of information, photos and how-to info… Thanks RobK123! Link.
Nice bike – “What does a propulsion engineer do when he wants to experience the power of a rocket without going to space? He simply bolts one to a bike. How It Works – 1. A toggle switch on the battery pack arms the ignition system. 2. The left-thumb button sends power from the battery pack to an igniter on a model-rocket motor inside the rocket engine, vaporizing the roofing-tar fuel so it can burn. 3. The right-thumb button keeps the nitrous oxide flowing (and the rocket lit) as long as it’s pushed. 4. The left brake lever regulates the flow of nitrous and throttles the rocket.”
Neat how-to and video from Troy…“This is my hydrogen generator that I built Using stainless steel switch plate covers. You may be asking, Why switch plate covers? Well in the area I live in I was having trouble finding Someone to sell me a sheet of stainless steel and cut it for me. So I was in the Home Depot (a local hardware store) And I ran across switch plate covers made of stainless steel. All cut to size and all uniform. Well this made it too easy for me so I bought them About 36 @ $1.24 ea. I thought it was kind of expensive but what the heck. I was not getting the generator built waiting for a deal to drop in my lap. So on to the building of the h2 generator.” Thanks Jason!
Tim used our how to on using the Kodak Wi-Fi camera with Flickr and writes in “Thanks for your help. I followed the instruction on your post on the MAKE blog, but was having trouble getting the Automator application I created to work. When I tried it as a stand alone Automator application, it would not work. When I ran it from within Automator it worked. I noticed that software update was telling me about some new updates. I ran them and then restarted and now it works fine. Don’t know if it was the updates or just restarting, but now it works well. Thank you for your help with this.”
If your car’s air condition is broken, or if it just doesn’t have one – this summer you might consider building your own, like this person did. This DIY car air conditioner is a wall unit inserted in the back window of an automobile and it is powered by a gas generator. With this many wrongs, it’s just so right.
Interesting tactic, people were driving too fast in a neighborhood, so the neighborhood built “roadwitches” – “These type of “DIY traffic-calming happenings” are described by their creator as “roadwitches” and have included an 11-feet high rabbit, a big bed (for a sleeping policeman), a Casualty-style fake crash scene for Halloween and the setting up of a living room in the middle of the road.”