Here’s a great tutorial from Ashley Martineau on how to reuse the yarn from old sweaters you don’t want anymore. The tutorial is complete with photos and lots of tips on how you can reuse the yarn, like doubling up the fibers for stronger support. Link.
“The basic idea for the single use digital camera is to take your “27 pictures” or so, send the camera in and they send you a CD with your photo’s. Kind of lame, but unique. However, you bought the camera – keep it! There are three different methods to making this camera “last forever”. You do not need to do all three of them, choose the method that will be cheapest/best. You may have a few of the items at your disposal already, so take a look at the required parts for each section, then choose which rout to take.” Thanks Star! Link.
Interesting way to provide localized power sources – “The Toyota Prius – Gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles can serve as a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) for your house. The Prius, unlike the generator, also has a battery that provides instant, UPS-like power, to your house. Careful research has shown that most people would prefer not to go outside to manually pull a cord in the case of a power failure.” Tons of information, photos and how-to info… Thanks RobK123! Link.
Dave is hacking up the new Furby “Yesterday I went and bought the New Furby which just came out in October this year. The new Furby is a pretty darn advanced toy for only $30, if you haven’t seen one before they are basically armless Mogwais with beaks. New Furbys are powered by the Sensory Inc’s RSC-4128 which is a multi-purpose microprocessor that does everything from voice recognition to text-to-speach to IO to DTMF output. After reading through the white paper for the RSC-4128 I was pretty sure that the Furby would be quite the hackable robot, so I decided to take a look inside and see what hacking would entail.” [via] Link.
Mikey, one of my favorite Makers (and appearing in our book Makers) writes in with a great POV project – “A entirely open source persistence of vision project using surface mount parts. The web page includes a helpful three minute video of soldering surface mount parts for this project. This is the first POV project I have seen that has a optional Bluetooth connector for updating content.” Link.
Great how-to on making your own binary clock! John writes “I saw your blog entry that linked to a project to build a binary LED clock. I built my own binary clock a few years ago, and I recently posted a detailed article on how I built it…” The site has many iterations of the 3 clocks John built along with the circuit diagrams. Link.
There’s something appealing to running Linux on a $8000 Korg… MFenkner writes “Knoppix is a CD-based Linux distribution. I figured I’d give it a try to see if the Oasys would boot it, and sure enough it did! It even recognized a USB keyboard, USB mouse, and USB Ethernet adapter! The only problem is it doesn’t recognize the display correctly by default, so it would require some customizing of the Knoppix CD. As it is, the screen is off-center and “blurry” due to the wrong resolution.” [via] Link.
