Tom writes “Inventgeek.com has a great article on rescuing your LCD monitors from the dumpster. Those of us that have used LCD monitors for a while know that over time the backlight starts to dim and can eventually completely fail. Well for less than $20.00 and about a half hour of your time you can replace the backlight and rejuvenate that monitor to as good as new condition. Now if they can only come up with a way to do this with my old Plasma TV tube.” Link.
In MAKE 04 we show you how to make a rocking pocket amp from a mint tin (Penguin, Altoids, etc). You can preview the PDF here, or you can subscribe to our iTunes feed and have all our new audio shows, videos and PDFs delivered to your iPod. Click here and click subscribe in iTunes.
This just launched today – “OpenSource.nokia.com is the first place to look for information concerning Nokia involvement in the Open Source community. The Projects link will take you to project descriptions and give you access to any Nokia developed downloadable code with an Open Source license.” They’ve got an NNTP news reader up there (source is on Sourceforge), and a few more things (Python, a SIP user agent library, and more). A web browser is coming soon (based on Apple’s Webkit). Also, “Series 60” has been rebranded as “S60”. Thanks Brian! Link.
Piers writes “Daylight savings has started now, and it was still quite light, but not light enough, and I really needed to use a flash. The shadows cast from my built-in flash are really harsh and especially prominent in close-up shots, so I made a makeshift light diffuser out of the top of a slide box, lined on the inside with some thin paper. It worked pretty well, as you can see, the photos have a nice soft light.” Link.
Greg writes “Have you ever been playing an xbox game, and feel the rumble in your hands, and think to yourself, “It sure would be cool to have a rumble pack in a mouse”. My friend thought this, and he proceeded to make the very first Rumble Mouse…” Greg made a USB version, here’s how he did it – Link.
Sven writes “About a year ago, inspired by other projects like Afrotech’s Hard-disk Sound System, I built a first version of my harddisk speaker. The first one was just a very quick hack to see if it would work and was destroyed due to too much power melting the coils and cables. We hooked it up to a 50W guitar amp and pushed the volume a bit to far… Since it sounded really great, I decided to build a second one.” Link.
Astrogoth writes “Thanks to Apple, I couldn’t pair my Bluetrek G2 bluetooth headset to my PowerBook to use with Skype, so I built my own headset from an old pair of Grado SR-80 headphones and an Apple iSight web cam. I described what I did so others could do the same.” Link.
