Air Cooled Mouse Pad
Tom sent in this fun how to from Jared and Dan “The idea for this project evolved out of necessity. Dan and I are both avid gamers. After a few hours of gaming with our normal high-end mouse pads you get a build up of sweat. The mouse and mouse pad becomes slippery and you start to loose your competitive advantage due to the loss of precision. While there are a couple mice on the market that have small fans in them to dry out your palm, they all have major failings in precision and accuracy. So after some thought and discussion we chose to build out our own custom mouse pad with a blower in it to suck the air down through the pad and away from the gamer’s hand. The result is astonishing!” Link.
It’s LED day today it seems – “Want to make a neat courier bag light? This light goes through the straps on a timbuk 2 bag and blinks in really cool patterns using a BS2. You’ll need: 16 x 470 ohm Resistors, 16 x LEDs 24 Pin IC Socket on/off switch, 9v Battery 9v Battery connector, 9 x Molex KK Connectors, 18″ 3/4″ Flat webbing, Breadboard, Wire… oh you’ll need some wire.”

The Spy Gear Night Vision Goggles generated quite a lot of interest in the wearable community since it’s basically a very low cost (~$50 USD) eyetap / wearable display. Here are some technical details on the Googles, which are basically a low cost camera and display. Great low cost way to make yourself more cyborganic.

Make your own LED tank top “84 LEDs, a microcontroller and battery were sewn onto a tank top with conductive thread to create a wearable LED matrix display…the shirt is initialized with a glider on the back of the shirt and a blinker on the front. Periodically, a new glider is added to the back of the shirt. The tank top “board” for the Game of Life is a torus; the cells on the top row of the tank top are neighbors to the cells on the bottom row and vice versa.”
Craig guide on PC keyboard interfacing… “Why would you want to interface the Keyboard? The IBM keyboard can be a cheap alternative to a keyboard on a Microprocessor development system. Or maybe you want a remote terminal, just couple it with a LCD Module. Maybe you have a RS-232 Barcode Scanner or other input devices, which you want to use with existing software which only allows you to key in numbers or letters. You could design yourself a little box to convert RS-232 into a Keyboard Transmission, making it transparent to the software.”