Use a Prius to power your house during a blackout
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.” [
Mikey, one of my favorite Makers (and appearing in our book 
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. 
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.” [
Here’s how to disassemble a DC WMATA’s SmarTrip card and turn it into a keychain-ready size –“The SmartTrip card is composed of three sheets of laminated cardboard (or plastic; it’s tough to tell). The middle one is where the important guts are located. The outer two serve a decorative and protective function. The first order of business is to remove those outer layers. But before you do, resign yourself to destroying the card. You might be able to transplant its brain into a new body, but DCist doesn’t want any angry emails demanding money for replacement cards.” 
Nice bike – “What does a propulsion engineer do when he wants to experience the power of a rocket without going to space? He simply bolts one to a bike. How It Works – 1. A toggle switch on the battery pack arms the ignition system. 2. The left-thumb button sends power from the battery pack to an igniter on a model-rocket motor inside the rocket engine, vaporizing the roofing-tar fuel so it can burn. 3. The right-thumb button keeps the nitrous oxide flowing (and the rocket lit) as long as it’s pushed. 4. The left brake lever regulates the flow of nitrous and throttles the rocket.”