Month: August 2005

Homemade Intercom System

Homemade Intercom System

0909-095344 Markus The main unit has four buttons. In order these are on/off, remote call disable, push to talk, and remote station select. The remote unit has two buttons. In order these are the call button and the privacy button (which disables the audio and the indicator lamp). Only one of these fancy remotes is supported; the other is just a plain loudspeaker with no call button or indicator lamp feature. Link.

Build Your Own Mac for 9

Build Your Own Mac for $199

X86 While it was always possible (although costly and time consuming) to cobble together a PowerPC Mac from old and new parts, hardly anyone did it. Now that Apple has introduced OS X for Intel processors, however, it’s conceivable that you could soon be building your own Mac from scratch. One user, CEpeep, shopped around and found everything you’d need to build your own Intel Mac for under $200 – no rebates, no refurbs. Obviously, there are still many reasons why you’ll want to buy a true Mac – Apple quality and support (and innovation), the current lack of a legal x86 OS X, etc. But it’s interesting to think that the days of the do-it-yourself Mac may be just around the corner. Link.

Circuit to use old phones as intercoms

Images-11 Here’s a good post from 1993 on making a circuit to use old phones as inter-comms- Talking over the phones is easy. You put DC current through the phone and it transmits and receives audio. So two phones and a current source (about 25mA) all in series will give you a talking circuit. A suitable current source can be as simple as a 9V battery and a series resistor whose value is adjusted (with both phones offhook) till about 25mA flows. Link.

Happy 80,000,000 downloads Firefox

Happy 80,000,000 downloads Firefox

Images-163-19 months ago Firefox 1.0 came out, 80 million downloads later, it’s hard for me to use anything else. I have a pretty tweaked set up, the G5 optimized build, the brushed metal theme and here are my extensions and greasemonkey scripts. All of this together helps fuel the MAKE blog machine. The really interesting thing is- I think this might be the “end of Word” as we know it as all the browser tools are slowly replacing my need to use Word and Word-like applications. Any way, happy 80mm to the most DIY-MAKER friendly browser! Link.