MAKE Happenings at Macworld SF
O’Reilly Media has a full slate of in-booth tech talks at Mac World January 9th to the 13th and plenty of Mac and digital media titles to browse. Plus we have goodies, too! If you buy two or more titles at the booth, you get your choice of a canvas book bag or an O’Reilly T-shirt (while supplies last). And even if you’re not in a buying mood, you can enter a drawing with the opportunity to win a 30GB iPod Fifth Generation (video model). MAKE (part of O’Reilly) will be speaking each day about all the things everyone wants to do with their iPods like convert video, install linux, etc. Ok, not everyone… Link.
Wow, great news – now I can keep track of the stuff I want to do in the virtual world – “Web-based event-management service Eventful has opened a public portal to the strange goings-on inside virtual world Second Life. The Second Life Event calendar, formerly hidden from non-residents, is now indexed regularly by Eventful, which listed over 1600 searchable virtual happenings last month alone and expects to index about 400 events daily. Virtual-world residents can travel directly to event locations via Eventful by clicking an embedded link in each entry containing exact coordinates. Event-listings, which are updated regularly, can be subscribed to in iCal and RSS format.” [
This scanner can actually play music, nice hack – “That’s right. The HP ScanJet 4c’s SCL (Scanner Control Language) command set includes an unofficial PLAY TUNE command. I stumbled across this after reading an article on the ScanJet 4c in the feb. 
Interesting game hack… apparently Counter-Strike removed the cross-hairs for the sniper rifle to make it a bit more realistic (that is, they remove the cross-hair when the scope is not in use). With this trick a sniper will be able to accurately shoot in short-distance battles, all using a Sharpie. Thanks Ghia! 
Reven writes “Yesterday I received my minipov kit from adafruit industries (
Here’s the latest on the 
A Make reader writes “Kleinbauer sells plans for building cnc mills from scratch, using surplus available materials. I was thinking about ordering plans for his “Brute” pcb mill. It might be an interesting feature in Make if someone were to buy one of his plans and build a mill from it, to give a feel for the cost and complexity of the project, as well as the quality of the plans.”