A MAKE Flickr Photo pool member made an amazing Redwood version of the iPod by hand. It looks like he just took his iPod apart and carefully fabricated a redwood version of iPod frame, later adding a clear coat to it and reassembling it. I’ve seen wood iPod docks, but I think this is the best actual wood iPod to hit the scene so far.
Link.

Never answer the phone again….you plug in the other end of the phone line that is connected to the phone box into the wall socket. Doing this will activate the Busy box and cause all phones that are connected to the system to not work (you will hear no dial tone when you pick up the phone ) and there will be no incoming calls (when ever some one calls your house it will say “this line is busy” message). Link.

Handy reference. The purpose of this set of guidelines is not to frighten you but rather to make you aware of the appropriate precautions. Appliance repair can be both rewarding and economical. Just be sure that it is also safe! Link.

On Sunday evening, observers finally may have answers to some of these celestial questions. At 10:52 p.m. PDT, a NASA spacecraft the size of a wine barrel is scheduled to slam into the Tempel 1 comet at roughly 23,000 mph. The impact, projected to leave a crater that could swallow a football stadium, is intended to scrape away part of Tempel 1’s surface and expose what’s underneath. Link. Update: Amazing, we hit it! Kersmash!

As the copies of Mac OS X for Intel start to make the rounds (real and fake) guides on running Mac OS X on Intel are also starting to pop up. Steven Troughton-Smith has step by step guide on what’s required to get what’s possible working right now. He notes- Luckily this leak doesn’t work – just giving us a slightly enhanced Darwin, but it means it’s scarily possible to run OS X on normal PCs without getting a Macintosh. Link.

If you liked our Atari 2600 PC project in issue 02 of MAKE you’ll really like this. Tursi documents how he built a mini-ITX PC into a TI-99/4A case. The TI-99/4A Home Computer was the number one home computer in America, with approximately 35% of the market share in 1982. Thanks Rich! Link.

The Ray Kurzweil Reader is a collection of essays by Ray Kurzweil on virtual reality, artificial intelligence, radical life extension, conscious machines, the promise and peril of technology, and other aspects of our future world. These essays, all published on KurzweilAI.net from 2001 to 2003, are now available as a PDF document for convenient downloading and offline reading. The 30 essays, organized in seven memes (such as “How to Build a Brain”), cover subjects ranging from a review of Matrix Reloaded to “The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine” and “Human Body Version 2.0.” Link.