Air Cooled Mouse Pad
Tom sent in this fun how to from Jared and Dan “The idea for this project evolved out of necessity. Dan and I are both avid gamers. After a few hours of gaming with our normal high-end mouse pads you get a build up of sweat. The mouse and mouse pad becomes slippery and you start to loose your competitive advantage due to the loss of precision. While there are a couple mice on the market that have small fans in them to dry out your palm, they all have major failings in precision and accuracy. So after some thought and discussion we chose to build out our own custom mouse pad with a blower in it to suck the air down through the pad and away from the gamer’s hand. The result is astonishing!” Link.
Craig guide on PC keyboard interfacing… “Why would you want to interface the Keyboard? The IBM keyboard can be a cheap alternative to a keyboard on a Microprocessor development system. Or maybe you want a remote terminal, just couple it with a LCD Module. Maybe you have a RS-232 Barcode Scanner or other input devices, which you want to use with existing software which only allows you to key in numbers or letters. You could design yourself a little box to convert RS-232 into a Keyboard Transmission, making it transparent to the software.” 
Japala writes “This is the project that I started to do something about these old and outdated mouse pads, maybe to add some more “glow” to them. I bought the plexi from a firm specialiced in plastics. They sell these surplus peaces priced by weight. I found this clear 500x500x5mm piece and payed 45 FIM for it (~$6).” [
Derek Yu writes “Creating pixel art is a skill I picked up because I needed graphics for my games. After a lot of practice, I became rather handy with it, and started to see it more as “real” art rather than just a tool. These days, pixel art is quite popular for gaming and illustration…In this 10-step tutorial, I’ll teach you how to create a “sprite”, which is a stand-alone two-dimensional character or object. The term comes from video games, of course.” [
A ton of MAKE readers sent word that their favorite alpha-Maker Macgyver made the super bowl “Entitled “MacGyver” the ad finds Richard Dean Anderson’s character in typical fashion: held hostage in a remote warehouse with time running out on a self-destructing bomb. Cleverly, MacGyver uses the purchases he had made with his debit card – everyday items at a convenience store – to free himself and escape to safety.” 
Mattr’s handy Instructable “The “Notebook Akku Hot-swapper” is a device which allows to exchange the rechargeable battery of a Notebook during runtime avoiding the need to shutdown/poweroff the system before the exchange.” 
Janos’s awesome case mod! “I already had a powerful computer setup so I wanted something more quiet, small and low power consumptioning to function as a basic home server. I love to tinker with hardware etc. so I wanted to make something quite unique for a case. I have seen many nice and creative cases before but none of them were made out of a bottle. In November I bought an industrial 3.5″ SBC board (with Socket370). For the project I selected a 1.5 litre Ballantine’s bottle for case. That was the proper size and shape for the task at hand.” [