Maker challenge: Wiring a House
Here’s a good tip from the comments on our Maker challenge: Wiring a House – I’m an architect, AND I recently renovated my own house from bare studs on up. I’m with the guy who said to run conduit. It’s called ENT (Electrical Nonmetallic Tubing), some contractors call it Smurf Tube, cause it’s usually blue. You run it from junction juntion box to box inside the walls and cover the standard boxes with a standard wall plate. You can then run any type of wire in them in the future and you can run the wire anywhere in the system by skipping from box to box. Even if you run structured cable, run it in smurf. Link.
This article will show you how to make your own microphone pop-filter. A pop-filter is a small screen that goes between a microphone and your mouth to prevent sharp popping sounds (known as plosives) like “P” and “B” words from overloading the mic level and distorting. Commercially available pop-filters are expensive and can often cost 20 dollars or more. The pop-filter you can build here will cost less than $6 dollars. 
Here’s a directory of images and videos from a fellow who hacked a CVS cam and put it -in- a rocket. The launch video is amazing, from pad to sky to a lovely decent, until it lands in a tree- but it was later retrived. 
MAKE Creative Director David Albertson shared some of his fav tools with me – and now I’m sharing them with you! Not the latest gadgets, but two of my favorite tools are an 
Open up a copy of google talk on all computers with which you wish to conference. After one copy is opened make a new shortcut for google talk but at the end of it add /nomutex. If you installed it to the default folder then your shortcut should read “C:Program FilesGoogleGoogle Talkgoogletalk.exe” /nomutex. Open 2 instances of the software on every user’s computer. After this start a chain: User 1 should connect on one instance to user 2. User 2 will connect on his second instance to user 3. User 3 will connect using his second instance back to user 1. With this chain everyone is connected to everyone. [
Hydroman writes “You might say I am a shade-tree scientist. I am doing a research and development project of my own. I am making hydrogen from beer cans, water and sodium hydroxide. Visit my website to see the plans, watch the videos and leave comments in the forum. I had a lot of fun making the videos. This is an opensource project. Join in the fun!”