Good article by Andy Oram on oreillynet “Modding is childish and eccentric and deeply serious. People are investing major chunks of disposable income and (astonishingly, in a flat-out work-obsessed society where no one has time) untold hours in modding. It’s one of the fastest up-and-coming social trends in the United States.” Link.
Here’s how to add a javascript driven cursor following flying bat to your pages. You can download the 2.6kb zip archive, containing all you need and get startet…Good for Halloween, or if you have a goth site or something. Link.
Rick writes “Here are some examples of Stirling engines – An online shop for many model engines. But often existing products are the inspiration for our own production efforts. Worth a look for anyone interested in Stirling or steam engines.” Link. In MAKE 04 we have an interview with Dean Kamen who’s also cooking up a Stirling engine.
Candy Addict writes “A blog from The National Association of Manufacturers where they post videos of things being manufactured commercially. There are some really interesting videos!” Here’s a post (with video) on how the Just Born candy company makes their treats. Link.
Complete HOW TO and source code for making a barcode scanner out of LEGOs. The Barcode Scanner uses standard LEGO parts with two exceptions. The first is the laserbrick, a selfbuilt LEGO brick with a modified laser pointer connected to an output of the RCX. The second part is the barcode label from a LEGO box.Thanks Douglas! Link.
How to make the sunrise in your bedroom every morning. Many artists have used the Camera Obscura over the years, now make your own. – an optical experiment easy to do, but which, in spite of its simplicity, is able to give you a continuous marvel. What you have to do is simply mount a lens on the bedroom window. In this way, when you wake up in the morning, you will admire the outside scene projected on a wall of your bedroom. Link.
“…construction of a very simple low-cost compound microscope. As shown in Figure 1, the microscope we describe is one that just about anyone can build and will produce a magnification of about 75 times. Microscopes may be thought of as very intricate and mysterious instruments but in reality, they are not as complicated as one may think. Building this simple instrument is not only a fun project, it will help you understand how microscopes work.” Thanks Rick! Link.
