A long time after having lots of fun fun blowing stuff up with the high-energy capacitors from the Surge Generator, I came across a few more caps, which with the originals, makes up a total of 220uF at 5KV (some of the newer caps had a lower voltage rating than the original 6KV ones). I decided to build them into a box with a charging supply to make the setup slightly safer and easier to use. Link.
Good news on the iPod Linux front, it looks like full MP3 playback will hit the next builds, along with being even closer to play OGG on most iPods soon. Video playback with audio is expected soon as well. Here’s our video of a few generations of iPods on Linux. Thanks Michael! Link.
Robotic! Here you kind find a podcast of google news. I (well cron) pulls the news 4 times a day and feeds it to festival. This gets posted here in the form of mp3 and xml. Just for fun, one version of the news gets fed through a Markov chain Algorithm. This creates random sentences out of the input. The program that I use for this is explained in the excellent book “The Practice of Programming”. Link.
If you’re in the Cincinatti, Ohio area tune in to 700 AM and listen to MAKE on the SciZone show with Bill Boshears. In the Greater Cincinnati area, call 749-7000 or 1-800-THE-BIG1 (843-2441) anywhere else in the world if you have questions or comments. You can also listen to the show via streaming. Link.
Over the weekend the del.icio.us social bookmark service moved to new servers, and wow- it’s really fast. We have over 1,500 links in the MAKE bookmark list of hacks, mods, resources and all things MAKE-like. You can also just add the RSS feed to your aggregator and see what we see as we see it! Link.
Some good tips from Eric Rice- guidelines for creating short, organized shows that can help you either get started in podcasting or organize your existing podcast into manageable, predictable chunks. As a society, people have become conditioned over generations to expect certain patterns in radio-like content. Podcasting is no exception. Even if your podcast sounds like radio, the most important piece of the podcasting puzzle is that it’s made by everyday folk. Link.
Here’s how to turn a Nintendo controller (USB Retropad) in to a wireless version using a targus wireless keypad. The NES controller uses 8 inputs and one ground for it’s switch state input. The keypad uses a 4×5 matrix decoder. So I split the ground trace on the control pad into 2 parts (you can see this cut in the second image below) and gave each ground to a column on the keypad. Then I jumpered pairs of buttons on the control pad and connected each pair to one of four rows on the keypad, effectively giving me / 8 2 0 for A B Sel Start and * 9 3 . for Up Rt Lf Dn. Link.
