IMbot that looks up books…
Great idea – check out Edward Vielmetti’s Superpatronbot – “Another evening’s work produced this working (but buggy!) Google Talk robot that looks things up in the Ann Arbor District Library catalog. Technology used: Jose Nazario’s from Ann Arbor’s DuckyLib library to do the RSS parsing of the AADL’s catalog, and Perry Lorier’s confbot (from Wakaito, New Zealand) to handle all of the Google Jabber stuff.” Thanks Brian! Link. Don’t forget our MAKEbot contest is still going on!
Fredrik writes – “There are lots of CPUs on the market that can be run at a lower voltage than what they are specified to. Especially the kind of low power consuming CPUs found in laptops. You’ll be surprised when you see the results of undervolting your CPU. In this article we will look further on how you can undervolt the CPU of a modern laptop without loosing performance or stability. Our test-system is an Acer Aspire 5021WLMi which appear to be a good computer to undervolt.” [
This looks handy for collaborative CAD work, but a little pricey at $995 – “Adobe’s Acrobat 3D software lets people view three-dimensional objects with the Acrobat reader, append notes to the images and send them to colleagues. Typically, design engineers today create a two-dimensional image and send them via e-mail, Bhalla said. Having an embedded 3D image, which people can rotate to view and append with notes, will speed up the design collaboration process and reduce errors…” 
“For quite some time it has been possible to access the Internet using mobile phones, although the role of the phone has strictly been that of a client. Considering that the modern phones have processing power and memory on par with and even exceeding that of webservers when the web was young, there really is no reason anymore why webservers could not reside on mobile phones and why people could not create and maintain their own personal mobile websites.” [
Daniel made an amazing case mod / MAME cabinet for playing old games, I really like his design. He writes “This is may take on a MAME cabinet. I didn’t have the space for a full-blown cabinet but still wanted the joysticks and buttons so I made this panel. It connects to the tv and is perfect to play from the couch.” 
Green is good! – “Network Operations Centers and Help Desks all over monitor their systems and networks with a somewhat open source product called Big Brother. Here’s how to add a traffic light to indicate network status. Big Brother provides a web interface that shows the status of the network, and systems. The web interface allows you to drill down and see the status of any device monitored. It does all this in a very simple and elegant way, by providing color indications, red, yellow, and green to tell you how things are going. Well all of this really can put the idea of traffic lights into your head if you like to “repurpose” consumer electronics like I do. So lets get to task and use our desktop computer, running Java to monitor a BigBrother web page and change a faux traffic light to match the color-status of our network.” Thanks 
A clever maker out there made his own robot pal – “My dream of a home-built robot was smolding since the early 80ies. The floor of the young boy’s room was covered with “fischertechnik” parts, and a robot which clears the mess seemed feasible… Well, it took some years until the project actually started. And this not only due to my personal capabilities as a mechanical engineer, but also in the environment of today’s technologies: Webcams, WLAN, and last but not least powerful yet power-saving PC-Mainboards.” Here’s how he made his robot! [
