HOW TO – Building a better Tall Bike
Great bike hack on Instructables from Maxwell – “How to Build a Tall Bike, one that you can stop safely, and could be construed as street legal in most places. With this method, you’ll be able to stand over the bike, allowing you to hop down easily, have two brakes, a full complement of gears, And have a better riding position than two bikes stacked on top of eachother. You’ll only destroy one bike, The top portion is bolted to the bottom bike, so if it breaks, or you get tired of it, the bottom bike can be reverted to normal. All in all I think this makes for a suprisingly sane tall bike. Not that you’ll look any less the madman riding it through traffic.” Link.
In MAKE 03 we showed you how to

Chris writes “Considering how many people bought the HP Bluetooth stereo headphones and got disappointed when the headband snapped, I thought that it was time to do something useful with the ‘broken’ headphone. We’ll take you through all steps of dismantling the Bluetooth receiver and building it into a nice mouse housing with 12v in and line out. And as the device keeps its battery, you can also use this as a portable Bluetooth stereo receiver and plug in you high quality headphones or even connect it to your stereo at home.”
This might make a good low cost DIY centrifuge for here on Earth too – “For most space travelers, the first effect of weightlessness they feel is nausea. But over the next few days and weeks, the lack of gravity takes its toll on the rest of the body, leading to muscle and bone mass depletion and troubles regulating blood pressure…researchers at UC Irvine and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI) have developed a two-person, centrifuge-like, one-stop workout machine that makes its own gravity. They call it the Space Cycle.”
“The nitrogen laser will give 100kW pulses of light at 337.1nm (UVA light). The pulses are only 6ns long, so the energy per pulse is just 0.6mJ. It is a very simple laser, and it does not require mirrors or glass working at all! But using a mirror at one end of the laser will boost the output to over 250%. And if the nitrogen entering the laser (it is a flowing gas laser, but it can be made sealed) is cooled, it can go up to 120 pps. So if it is running at 120 pps, and has a mirror at one end, the average power output will be 180 mW. Although the beam is invisible it can be used to pump dye lasers to give beams with wavelengths ranging from infrared to ultraviolet.”