Here’s MAKE contributor Joe Grand (Grand Idea Studio, Inc.) and the Edison-Ford Winter Estates, 2350 McGregor Blvd., Ft. Myers, Florida. Tons of great photos. The estate is a very cool place with some amazing early prototypes of Edison’s work (one of the original hardware hackers). Certainly worth a visit if you’re ever in the area. Link. Hey Joe, nice shirt!
Peter writes “Since atomic clocks worldwide will add a leap second New Year’s Eve 2006, we decided we wanted to immortalize the moment in sound. Create a one-second piece of music and email it to us, and we’ll have the results by New Year’s. It’s the ultimate in economical music — meaning uncompressed audio (AIFF/WAV) is perfectly kosher!” Link.
Reminder, the MAKEbot delivers the best of MAKEZine.com, Flickr, Instructables and del.icio.us all via your buddy list on AIM. And now you can search ALL of MAKE, the blog and the magazine, all with instant message! After you add the MAKEbot, just type search, then what you’re looking for or just type what you want with a ? at the end, like this – MAKEbot search for iPod! Click here to add the MAKEbot to your buddy list, then type help for a list of commands or just click here to subscribe. Over the last week hundreds of people have messaged the MAKEbot and we’ve given away hundreds of free copies of MAKE to many lucky people too! Want a free digital edition? Just add the bot, type comment and your email address!
Nice Instructable from Maxwell – “An easy DIY project to add ground effects lights to your bicycle or other means of conveyance, utilizing inexpesive and commonly available cold-cathode lights. They look cool, and really do increase your visibility at night. Since putting them on my tallbike everone is asking to take my picture.” Link.
Electric clothing writes “At the next Dorkbot meeting in NYC (Wednesday, January 4th @ 7pm) Mikey Sklar will be explaining the process he used to install a $2 RFID tag in his left hand. His talk will cover why he choose to do this, the necessary materials, different tag options, and what he and other people have been doing with these tags.” Link. See our interview with a RFID implanter as well.
If your car’s air condition is broken, or if it just doesn’t have one – this summer you might consider building your own, like this person did. This DIY car air conditioner is a wall unit inserted in the back window of an automobile and it is powered by a gas generator. With this many wrongs, it’s just so right. Link.
Interesting tactic, people were driving too fast in a neighborhood, so the neighborhood built “roadwitches” – “These type of “DIY traffic-calming happenings” are described by their creator as “roadwitches” and have included an 11-feet high rabbit, a big bed (for a sleeping policeman), a Casualty-style fake crash scene for Halloween and the setting up of a living room in the middle of the road.” Link.
