A Classic Dobsonian – handmade telescope
From MAKE’s Terrie Miller! One of the hand-made telescopes at John Dobson’s 90th birthday party (Aug. 27, 2005 at the Randall Museum in San Francisco). Dobson pioneered this easy-to-make telescope design and co-founded the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers. (See more in this set.) Link.
3 things to do with old records…
Here are three quick and simple projects you can do with old records and LP covers. Melt them to make a bowl, make a cool LP cover box and my fav, record coasters. I’ve been meaning to try the record melting to bowl thing for awhile, just need to pick up an old damaged record that I won’t feel bad about bowl-ifying. Link.
Mech model made from junk…
The end result is pretty nice…in line with my desperate attempt to be a jack-of-all-trades (and master of some?) I decided to build a model of a mech out of garbage. Now I’ve seen some damn fancy scrap mech building in my day. When you’re done visiting here, check out this stuff, which I think is mostly kit-based but with lots of customization. [via] Link.
Tube amps!
MetaFilter has a round up and a great discussion on tube amps. Some cool little tube amps. The world’s smallest production tube amp and world’s Smallest Vacuum Tube hi-fi stereo amplifier. These are too cool. Link.
Modding iTunes…
...organize classical music such that the composer appears in the artist field and the artist/ensemble appears somewhere else. The obvious choice would be to use the now vacated composer slot, and I do exactly that. I’ve modified iTunes to support this new paradigm and am VERY happy with the change. The final result looks like this… Link.
Windows Application With Wine + X11 Works
By adapting the Wine compatibility layer for Windows, some enterprising developers have developed a method to run Windows programs under OS X for Intel. While porting Wine to OSx86 requires some serious tweaking (which still results in some unstable programs), work such as this opens a wide range of possibilities for the future. Since future versions of OS X will be built on the same Intel processors that Windows programs use, will we one day be able to use Windows apps as if they were native to OS X? [via] Link.