Things you can do with 20 hard drives
Chris is looking for things to do with 20 old hard drives “I have twenty 3.5 inch hard drives collecting dust in my garage (10Gb and all working) and I will use them to do things. What things I haven’t decided yet, but I already have a couple of ideas. We have 20 nice shiny discs, as many read/write heads complete with arm, 40 very powerful magnets, and so on. It’s actually only the imagination that sets the limits. In this first part we go through the, maybe trivial but vital, task of taking the drive apart in its components without damaging anything.” Link.
I think most of the online worlds will eventually swing this way – Multiverse is in beta “Make a complete Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) or virtual world for less money and in less time than you could have dreamed possible. Participate in the game industry’s most exciting frontier. Build the features that make your game unique, leveraging the expertise of the networking and infrastructure experts who helped build the web. Deliver your vision to a built-in market of players–without having to ask a publisher’s permission or give up your intellectual property.” [
If you’ve ever taken a spin on one of those theme park rides that show movies, shift/thrash the audience simulator-style you might like the idea of building your own. Jared, the Maker writes – “For some time I have wanted to make my own, seeing the NASA shuttle simulator and other similar training simulators all over. Well one day while playing mech 4 I realized that I had the power to do so literally in the palm of my hand. So I decided to mod out my simulator. Well a lot of R & D went into this and this is actually a prototype for the main build to come.” 
Handy tip if you want to see how TV shows on iTunes will look on your TV -before- you purchase them. Andrew writes “Unfortunatly, iTunes does not let you save the 30 second previews of music or video. While thats not really an issue with music, many people want to know how good the video looks when played on their TV or iPod. So how did I get the urls of the above videos. I used Debug iTunes Music Store.” 
One of my favorite web tech shows has a new episode – the $100 arcade cabinet is pretty good – “In this episode of Hak.5 Wess finishes up his sub-$100 mini arcade cabinet, Darren talks streaming audio and video, Jon dives into AJAX, and Harrison plays with metasploit. Plus the Microshaft Jackhammer 5160, special guest star Frank Linhares, guest intro by Mike Lazazzera, music by Ashley Witt, and a not-so-friendly server.” 
My favorite collective intelligence destination for finding lots of Maker projects is going to expand in to audio/video “Digg.com…a news site that some on the Web are touting as the next Slashdot, intends to branch out from tech stories and move into other news categories as well as media such as video and audio, said Digg.com CEO Jay Adelson.” I don’t think it’s the “next Slashdot”, it’s really the next Amazon – for electrons. 
Raphael writes “This simple project shows you how to make a USB powered Nokia cell phone charger. The advantage is that it weighs much less than the bulky AC adaptor, and can be used wherever you have a computer or a laptop. I use this thing all the time now!”