The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for digital gadgetry, open code, smart hacks, and more. Processing power to the people!
If you’re in Portland, OR for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, come to the expo floor and check out the Maker Shed. We’ve got a whole bunch of stuff for sale here; Arduinos, Mintduinos, Mintronics Survival Packs, Netduinos, books, and more.
I’m always on the lookout for interesting horizontal docking options. Enter the c/dock from Portland area maker James Aloysius. It’s a well designed hunk of walnut with either a brushed aluminum or black resin faceplate that allows you to charge and display your phone in the viewer friendly horizontal orientation.
When documenting how to make a technology project that involves the computer, it can sometimes feel a little tedious describing how to get things done within a particular program. On the other hand, glazing over those details can leave many people feeling intimidated by what sounds like a complex process. In those cases, recording a […]
If you have ever tried to install (or re-install) an OS from a thumb-drive on a netbook, small laptop, or other computer without a built-in optical drive, you may have learned the frustrating lesson, as I did, that they are not always hardware equivalent. Many laptops and netbooks will cheerfully boot from an optical drive attached to a USB port, but gronk at the exact same files, or ISO image, on a thumb drive attached to the same port. It’s enough to make you want to throw things. Who wants to buy and keep track of a USB optical drive just for that one purpose?
If you’re not into the whole stainless steel and glass look of your iPhone 4, you can encase your cold sharp handset in this warm soft wooden case from Etsy user kencheng88. Available in maple and rosewood, each case comes with a matching stand.
More and more books keep being released about our favorite little microcontroller, the Arduino. Apress offers a new one tomorrow entitled Arduino Robotics. Written by Josh Adams, John-David Warren, and Harald Molle, it’s is a monster 628 pages…
Clever idea from Japanese firm SoftEther, whose press release is available in English onlyvia machine translation as of this writing. The video pretty much conveys the idea, however. QUMA is rather like an artist’s figure-drawing mannequin with sensors in the joints that report all the articulations through a USB cable. Appropriate software can then position a character’s rigging to match, which seems like it would be both faster and more intuitive than dragging bones around a screen with a mouse.
