HOW TO – Make a glowing keyboard
Chris writes – “This is my (our) first modification. We got the inspiration from Arkku on flickr. We did ours a bit differently, he used 1 LED, we used 2. The process is the same for each. Since there are only 5 volts to work with, both versions require the circuit to be built in parallel. I just have one more parallel circuit in my mod. There are two options for this mod. One involves removing the circuit board, the other leaves it in and splices the connecting wire. The choice is yours.” Link.
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.” 
Here it is…3D-printing a SecondLife / WoW character, and mashup into Google Earth! “OGLE (i.e. OpenGLExtractor) is a software package by Eyebeam R&D that allows for the capture and re-use of 3D geometry data from 3D graphics applications running on Microsoft Windows. It works by observing the data flowing between 3D applications and the system’s OpenGL library, and recording that data in a standard 3D file format. In other words, a ‘screen grab’ or ‘view source’ operation for 3D data.” [
Bcmeikle has a great way of making cheap(er) QuickTime video panoramic movies… “For some time now I’ve been making video panoramas but how to capture them has remained a mystery. Here’s a 
