Month: December 2005
Makers: Reviewed on Slashdot
James Alguire has a review of our new book Makers on Slashdot – “Makers: All Kinds of People Making Amazing Things In Garages, Basements, and Backyards by Bob Parks, and published by O’Reilly, celebrates the basic human desire to create, to nail together two things that have never been nailed together before and see what it does. While I have worked in construction, built computers from scratch and done my share of soldering, I still felt a sense of wonder after reading about the 76 projects outlined in this book.” Read the rest of James’s review…” Link.
Make a Musical Ode to the Leap Second
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.
Open source web based home automation
NCT writes “Here’s some great opensource DIY Home automation software, written in Perl with a Web interface. For windows or Linux/unix. It also works with the One Wire Weather station posted a few days ago.” MisterHouse is an open source home automation program. It’s fun, it’s free, and it’s entirely geeky. Written in Perl, it fires events based on time, web, socket, voice, and serial data. It currently runs on Windows 95/98/NT/2k/XP and on most Unix based platforms, including Linux and Mac OSX. Link.
Simon Says Christmas Wreath…
Good one for next year! Ryan writes “Most of us remember the popular memory game Simon from the late 70’s. In this hack, I converted simon to play on a christmas wreath. Bust this out next year along with some egg nog and impress your friends with a non-traditional wreath decoration.” Link.
HOW TO – Build the ULTIMATE Garage Door Monitor
Dan writes “Build the ultimate garage door monitor, if you like home automation, you will definitely like this. This How-To shows how to monitor the exact position of the garage door, and display its status in your touchscreen interface (in this case, Main Lobby). A lot of details, but easy to understand.”Link.
DIY Metal Chess Figures
Claude writes “My newyear present for all makers: Industrial Design DIY chess pieces out of nuts and bolts, brass and steel. I had seen a picture of similar chess figures in a book about chess, so i decided to build my own using commonly found 8mm nuts, bolt and other metallic pieces, some glue (to fix parts to base, which is a 14mm nut)”. Link.