EPE’s “Basic Soldering Guide”
In MAKE 01 we have a great soldering primer, here’s another to check out from the Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library. “This written guide will help beginners and novices to obtain effective results when soldering electronic components. If you have little or no experience of using a soldering iron, then EPE recommends that you practice your soldering technique on some fresh surplus components and clean stripboard (protoboard), before experimenting with a proper constructional project. This will help you to avoid the risk of disappointment when you start to assemble your first prototypes. If you’ve never soldered before, then read on!” Link.
Handy how to on making printed circuit boards, Incepinar writes – “I spent a lot of time to find an easy to use PCB drawing program and failed. (Believe there should be lots of but it’s just me can’t find it!) All of them I came across were either so professional or hard to handle. So, in admiration of the AMIGA’s Deluxe Paint, I decided to use Windows’s Paint program to create my own PCBs. All I needed was it’s copy and paste functionality. Thus any other drawing editor on any Operating System may be utilized for the following work style that I currently (and will continue to) use.” 
I didn’t know Goodwill had eBay-like auctions, but they do. Make reader zw suggested that the 
Peter is looking for some Makers out there, he writes “Basically, the folks at National Instruments have added DSP (digital signal processing, useful for lots of audio applications — both industrial and musical), to LabVIEW, their high-end development platform for creating test / measurement / control applications. Here’s the cool part: they designed a free synth (as in musical synth) to run on the platform. Somewhere out there, there’s a scientist or engineer who’s going to love fiddling with this thing. It’s electronic music for Dr. Bunsen Honeydew. Know anyone in those communities (blogosphere or printosphere) who might be interested in this?” 
Run a Mac, on a stick. “Running Linux, Windows or applications like Firefox, Thunderbird and AbiWord from a USB flash memory device is old hat. How about a Mac 128K or Plus on a USB key? Using a ‘portable’ Mac system you can: play with old system software and applications without dusting off your old Mac, impress your friends, or show others what the older Mac system looked like, use Mac on Windows and Linux.” Thanks Jim!