The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for digital gadgetry, open code, smart hacks, and more. Processing power to the people!
First Chess, then Jeopardy, now the Rubic’s Cube. Mike Dobson and David Gilday’s CubeStormer II Rubic’s Cube solving robot successfully beat Australian Feliks Zemdegs’ 5.66 second record by solving a cube in a mere 5.352 seconds. The feat was accomplished using four LEGO Mindstorm NXT kits controlled by a Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone. The Singularity is near, I tell ya.
I’m beginning to suspect an October conspiracy: While last week’s Flickr pool submissions, on average, had a distinctly orange hue, this week they are distinctly black. And I’ll give dollars to donuts that next week, sure as clockwork, we’ll start to see actual jack-o-lanterns. Our featured image this week is cosplayer JiaJem,as “Jack,” from Mass Effect 2, sporting Shawn Thorsson’s sweet “Predator Heavy Pistol” replica prop.
Once again, it would appear that the folks over at iFixit have let all of the magic smoke out of the latest iPhone. This time around they were confronted with the eerily familiar iPhone 4S. On the outside it looks and feels like an iPhone 4. On the inside they were confronted with a different phone altogether. Dual-Core A5 processor, 8 MP rear camera with new optics, Bluetooth 4.0, Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE + Dual-band CDMA/EVDO radios.
The last time I was excited about a belt buckle, I had found one with old-timey CB radio lingo embossed on the front. Fast-forward a few years and now you’re able to let everybody know your 10-4 with this sci-fi accented iPhone 4 case that doubles as a belt buckle.
I’m a minimalist by nature, which is what attracted me to this “no-case” from My Open PC in the first place. I have often toyed with the idea of designing something similar, myself – just a couple of panels with the bare-minimum cutouts to meet the ATX specification. While, over the long run, I think there are good reasons to keep a PC’s guts inside a hard case, in the short term, an open fixture like this has a lot to recommend it, for instance as a test fixture for experimenting with different hardware configurations.
If you like to ride your bike while listening to music on your iPhone, you’ll find the Horn Bike from Fruitshop right up your alley. This passive amplifier built into an iPhone 4 case easily mounts to your handlebars for hands-free and earbud-free listening. And since it’s passive, you won’t annoy the people you share the road with.
Though described as an “electronic instrument” and an “orchestraโฆcomposed of levitating balls whose physical height determines their volume,” London design group Poietic Studioโs “Floating Orchestra,” cool as it is, cannot possibly be producing the big, bold, brassy sounds of The Benny Goodman Orchestra that accompany their embedded video, above. Which naturally leads me to wonder what it really sounds like.
