There’s quite a bit of POV (Persistence of vision) projects lately. Most POV projects are a series of LEDs (lights) blinking and when moved produce a word- it’s the same “hack” when you play 30 frames a second to see a movie. A couple years ago I made a pair of shoes that spelled “NIKE” when you run (View image) and when I get time, they’ll display speed too. If you’re interested in the POV “movement” here are a few great examples to get started. Drewish’s 2-sided pov toy, Lady Ada’s minipov and Make pal EverythingDigital’s recent posts using off the shelf parts.

PSP Video 9 is a free tool that will manage and convert video files to play on your PlayStation Portable. The cool part is- you can add Videora and using RSS, and BitTorrent subscribe to video feeds. While this is just another example of podcasting, videocasting, etc… the really interesting thing here is that many portable devices capable of playing audio and video are hitting the market with applications that can automatically grab and convert stuff you want from the cloud using RSS and BitTorrent. Music, Audiobooks, eBooks, how-to videos, movies, TV, it’s all starting to really happen.

There are a lot of super interesting and super-odd plans as well as fully assembled Sci-Fi type projects over on Future Horizons. Before I click on through to the purchase side, has anyone ever ordered a set of plans from them, how were they?

I keep a sketch book (here) of my artwork but I’ve been looking to make my own for bigger drawings. This how-to shows you how to turn those old vinyl albums in to sketchbooks and you can of course extend that to other types of notebooks or books. Most garage sales have a variety of weird albums that are perfect for this sort of project.

English cut is a blog from Thomas Mahon, Bespoke Savile Row Tailor, London. I’ve been reading Thomas’s site since Hugh McLeod dropped it on me. Clive Thomson from Slate properly identified why I think it’s so appealing… “After all, suits have many of the things that geeks particularly appreciate: Intense levels of engineering, an obsession with structural elegance, physics, totally wicked gear that’s used to create them, topographic geometry, and materials science that burrows right down to chemistry and – these days – nanotechnology. And when it comes to ties, my god, you’ve got the most awesomely realized application of knot theory on the planet”.

Jeremy Wagstaff has a great collection of programs (or ways to run programs) off USB drives. Chat/instant messaging, Browsers, Operating Systems, PIMs/organisers, Email, Encryption, Office, Music, and Web Authoring- I have a few of these on my perpetually hacked up Shuffle so when I visit foreign computers I can get stuff done without installing anything.

This Brainboost search engine is kinda neat. You can ask it regular questions like “Why is the sky blue?” or “When was the great pyramid built?” and many other types of natural kid-like questions. Their site calls it an answer engine as opposed to a search engine- which takes the search results and answers your question (or tries to).