The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for digital gadgetry, open code, smart hacks, and more. Processing power to the people!
In the Make photo pool Adam Thornton posted a really cool how to on making a 20th century cocktail. Besides it being a useful step by step, Adam used the Comic Maker application “Comic Life” from Plasq we’ve been having a lot of fun with here. Link.
Here’s a really cool way to make a list of movies and books that are most popular among the people who are connected to you at Google’s Orkut. The author describes how he used Perl to construct a list of movies and books that are cited most in the profiles of the people who are at a maximum distance of 2 from him on Orkut. Having such a tool handy offers an interesting way to discover popular movies and books. I wish all social networking sites had this and NetFlix queues. Link.
Here’s how you change the Phone Book Widget on Apple’s new Mac OS X Tiger to use Google Maps instead- Hes Nikke on macoshints says…“Mapquest is an aging mapping system and doesn’t fit in with the new shinyness in Tiger. Thats why I made the phone book widget use Google Maps instead”. Link.
On Friday’s MAKE:Audio show we had a quick review of Mac OS X Tiger and now that’s we’ve been banging on it for a few more hours, here are some cheers and jeers. Spotlight search is creepy fast, it’s finding everything almost instantly. Dashboard and its Widgets are fun but take up a lot of memory, not sure if it matters though. The RSS screensaver is also fun, here’s a video of what it looks like. Only Macs that are 1Ghz G4 and above can do join in multi-video chats, but multi-audio seems to be fine on some sub 1Ghz machines here. Even if you bought QuickTime Pro 6+ you need to repurchase QuickTime 7. Overall a great release, it’s living up to all the stellar reviews. Some photos from the Seattle store (4th in line!).
Mac OS X Tiger is out today, so that means we’re going to see a ton of really neat widgets, if you want to get started building here’s an overview…Based on Web Kit technologies, Dashboard Widgets are created using a mix of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. This extends the ability to develop Widgets to a very wide audience. If you know how to create a web page, then you know how to create a capable Widget. Link. We’ll have some examples once we make a few too.
Two MAKE Extras published today– these are projects and updates that MAKE publishes online, for all to see, no dead trees. One is a recipe for a PC-based Digital Video Recorder (DVR) / media server / multi-console game machine that does everything except charge you every month. Link. The other Make Extra is an update to MAKE 01’s Magnetic Stripe Reader project, which shows you how to read the data off of stripes in any of the the three standard locations on a card. More power to you! Link.
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This isn’t a new unlock code, but I wanted to post up -why- people unlock phones. “So I’m off to Thailand for 2 weeks tomorrow (more on this later). Here’s the code and a post from Rojo’s Kevin Burton. “I wanted to unlock my phone so that I could buy a prepaid GSM SIM chip to use my phone in Thailand for cheap. The only problem is that stupid Cingular locks the phone but you can just buy a new SIM chip”.
