Sploitcast – Emulating magnetic cards…
New Splotcast, good stuff – “We were lucky enough to be joined by Ab3nd. He spoke at Shmoocon 2006, explaining the principals of magnetic card emulation. We loved his presentation so much that we asked him to join SploitCast, and much to our delight he accepted our invitation. SploitCast episode #004 focuses around the dangers of magnetic cards, the methods for emulating them, and their future. We discuss very lightly the topic of RFID as an alternative to the problems created by magnetic cards in such things as credit cards. The speakers in this episode are the wonderful ab3nd, Harrison Holland, and Kim Holland.” Link. In MAKE 01 we show you how to make your own mag stripe reader…
Chris writes – “This is my (our) first modification. We got the inspiration from 
David writes “This is a PC Case mod that installs four binding posts that are linked to the PC’s power supply into an empty drive bay so that you can use it as a bench 5V or 12V power supply……..especially useful if you’re messing around with PIC programming, etc.” This is an excellent mod, this could make a great accessory for Maker types too if it were to go in production (or just make one with this how to). 
Krazydad writes – “I decided a few weeks ago to build a wooden gear clock because I wanted to understand the clock mechanism better. There are a number of websites that offer plans for wooden gear clocks, but as someone with absolutely no woodworkng experience (band practice generally interferes with taking shop class), and no tools, I needed something that was ready to build. I found three sites that offer such kits…” Here’s a review of the Ascent Wooden Gear Clock kit. 
wireless.gumph.org has a how to on making a small WiFi antenna – “A small antenna to boost the signal of a laptop wireless card, that can be stuck to the back of the laptop screen. The design is the same as for the larger homemade antenna, but uses thin RG58 cable and is only 2 sectors long. The size was chosen so it could be housed inside the tube of an old pen, to provide rigidity and protection to the antenna.” Thanks Star! 
Ryan Clarke from the Parallax support forums is hacking the Sharper image chimp head – “Getting the skin off isn’t that bad…it’s a stubborn rubber cement type glue…Opening the skull only requires the removal a few screws in the back of the skull…the two touch sensors on the back part of the skull (top and back of head) are the only wires you need to be careful of when opening the skull…The touch sensors scope out in a very similar fashion to the flexiforce sensors (Parallax part #30056). Running the flex sensors in the same circuit with the same code as the FlexiforceSimple.BS2 (available on the product page above) you get a distinct 0 or 1 for output (with a bit of button bounce at the beginning of a press)- It does not appear as though the sensors will be useful for ‘analog’ input proportional to the strength of the touch, but I have not verified this as of yet.” 
