Here’s how to make your own Root beer. Fermentation has been used by mankind for thousands of years for raising bread, fermenting wine and brewing beer. The products of the fermentation of sugar by baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae (a fungus) are ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide causes bread to rise and gives effervescent drinks their bubbles. Link.

Revival of the oldest laptop concept! In this recipe the Etch A Sketch tablet is digital. It even includes the feature of shaking the tablet to erase the screen, as in the original version. How to map a couple of analog inputs to X and Y coordinates of a simple drawing software. How to get a Boolean input from a sensor (tilt). Link.

Digital information is lossless. You can copy a file from hard disk to floppy to CD to flash stick to … and it will still be the same file. But if you use analog media, such as good old tape, you can rely on the opposite: The data you read from the medium will definitely be different from what you wrote onto it. Anyway, there are many ways to hide secret information in the sound on an audio tape. This article shows you one way of doing this… Link.

Here you’ll find a variety of rather unusual paper toys, all free for you to print out and enjoy. The toys include a hearse playset, coffin gift boxes (with occupants), a little cemetery, several unusual board games, a gloomy little haunted house, a rusty old-style robot, and quite a few other dark delights. So pick out some toys, print out the pattern pages, and with a few common supplies like scissors and glue you’re ready to create all these strange little curiosities. I hope you’ll enjoy them all. I like the mechanical bat. Link.

Incremental optical encoders can be quite expensive...commercially available units from US Digital can go from $7 USD (mylar encoder disk) and $50 USD (encased encoder). Taking apart the ubiquitous $5 PC mouse, however, can give you two cheap but quite reliable encoders plus two infrared (IR) emitter-detector pairs. This tutorial will show you how to take apart a mouse, remove these parts and protoboard your own quadrature encoder in an afternoon or two. Link.

In the Media Arts and Technology program, we explore new metaphors for artistic interactivity that connect the physical world with the virtual realm. We develop new techniques for computing that generate music and visual arts in a myriad of ways; but in order to put forth these techniques, we must create new sensors, and build interfaces that can better grasp their control and generation. The CUI allows us to bind physical processes or actions to corresponding digital expressions. Link.

Here are some photos and dissections of the Juicebox, a cheap LCD device that can play music and photos. It’s based on uClinux, so there are a few projects currently underway to do some neat things with it. And here’s a tip- to put the Juicebox into test mode – just hold the top and bottom most buttons on powerup. Link.