Toyota’s SCION line of vehicles have a new ad campaign where they interview “Modders” and car hackers. The SCION community is pretty booming and Toyota has embraced it making it part of the culture of ownership. The ads feature a fellow saying “Everything is Modd-able” and they go on to show all the tweaks and installations like car PCs inside their cars. Here’s SCION’s community listings and corp site.

On NPR’s Science Friday caller Mari Ann had asked about some welding resources- for books check out The Welder’s Handbook (ISBN: 1557882649) and Welding Essentials (ISBN: 0831131519). The other thing I’d suggest is to check in with local institutions to see what welding classes they offer- it might be better to get an idea of what’s involved before investing in the equipment. Most classes start out with Oxyacetylene welding then move on to Electric Arc and later Gas-Tungsten. Anyone have other suggestions for Mari Ann?

Here are a couple links from NPR’s Science Friday / Talk of the Nation with Ira Flatow. Talk of the Nation, April 1, 2005- We’ll look at some science and technology projects for the extra-resourceful, and some surprising uses for things you probably have around your house. Guests: Philip Torrone, associate editor, Make magazine and Cy Tymony, author of Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things.

Attack of the Show on G4 (formerly The ScreenSavers) just posted up the details on the extremely large NES controller they made which appeared on the March 28th episode. The article documents the process, the parts and there’s a pdf containing the schematics for the big box.

Quinn Norton on the O’Reilly network covers the 2005 RoboGames held at San Francisco State University. There’s robot combat action of course, but I really liked this one– Tirion, age ten, built his towel-carrying robot for the classic hacker’s reason–to scratch his own itch. He didn’t like getting cold between getting out of the pool and getting his towel, so he built a robot that could eventually bring him a towel. It’s not quite ready for poolside, but it took silver in the Mindstorms Open.

Via Digg– Here’s a great optical illusion, it kinda makes me dizzy after a bit though. And here’s another site which also has a lot of other ones, equally dizzying. None of these are animated GIFs, they work by simulated nonlinear luminance adaptation and simulated contrast adaptation- more about that here. I think I’ll try to make a wall sized one. If I could make one large enough I bet a crowd could potentially cause free-throwers to miss at a basketball game (slate had an article on one attempt like this).