Here’s a fun little HOW TO on disabling the annoying beeps from a toy Microwave without disabling the rest of the electronics…It’s really simple, just a snip of a speaker wire, but I bet there are lots of parents who’d like to put some of the toys in useful-but-silent mode. Link. You could also start learning circuit bending and make it a musical instrument too.
MAKE pal Hans writes “I have always wanted to build my own weather computer but never had the time my own first plans were based on an Intel 8085. My friends use to joke that I was going to build the Hans 2000 Weather Computer. The Tim’s page is about the best I have found for building a Weather Computer”. Link.
…free plug-in for Microsoft Word that works with Blogger. We call it Blogger for Word. Catchy? Maybe. Useful? You bet. With this little number, you can work in Word like you normally do and then save your document as a post to your Blogger blog. Once you install the plug-in and restart Word, some buttons will appear. These buttons allow you to publish, edit, and save as draft from within Word. Link. Last year I had proposed “blog printers” you just install a MT, LiveJournal, Word, etc plugin…and they show up as printers.
This week my 2nd adapter shorted out completely. And since my battery only lasts about 7 minutes I was dead in the water. I really didn’t want to fork out more bucks on another new supply so I decided to crack it open. I was able to fix the problem and put it back together, just like new….sort of. First I had to crack open the casing. The supply was obviously designed to be disposable and the casing had no latches or screws holding it together. I had to hammer a thin screwdriver around the edges and eventually cracked the egg open. [via] Link.
Want to control your Ceiva picture frame yourself? Want to send pictures to it from you local server? Hack your Ceiva picture frame to run linux and drive it from your own local linux server. Link.
Grower is a small ‘rover’ vehicle which navigates around the periphery of a room. It hugs the room’s walls and responds to the carbon dioxide levels in the air by actually drawing varying heights of ‘grass’ on the walls in green ink. The Grower robot senses the carbon dioxide (CO2) level in the air via a small digital CO2 sensor. This sensor is mounted high on a wall of the exhibition space and sends data wirelessly to the robot. The number of people in an exhibit space breathing in oxygen and exhaling CO2 has an immediate effect on the sensor. My robot takes a reading of the CO2 level every few seconds and in response it draws a vertical line in green ink on the wall. Thanks Doug! Link.
The main unit has four buttons. In order these are on/off, remote call disable, push to talk, and remote station select. The remote unit has two buttons. In order these are the call button and the privacy button (which disables the audio and the indicator lamp). Only one of these fancy remotes is supported; the other is just a plain loudspeaker with no call button or indicator lamp feature. Link.
