Good NYT article on the changing face of the toy business – “Having failed to beat the electronics industry, the ailing toy business will join it in a big way in the year-end holiday shopping season, offering just about everything from cellphones for 6-year-olds (LeapFrog) to video projectors for 8-year-olds (Hasbro) in an effort to hold on to children who are casting aside Lego and GI Joe to play with their parents’ gadgets.” Link.
It looks like a lot of users of the T-Mobile Sidekick received a pretty nice “over the air update” Friday and throughout the weekend. AIM was updated, UI evolution arcade was added for Sidekick I users, Yahoo Messenger was added and many navigation, device, web, email and camera enhancements. Overall, looks like a nice update. Link.
Latest episode of Hak.5! “In this episode of Hak.5 Wess builds a mini arcade cabinet for under $100, Harrison attacks SSL with Whoppix, Darren defends himself by setting up a VPN server on XP, and Jon Harrison’s take on buffer overflows with beer.” Thanks Kim! Link.
Brian writes “A great Maker competition, founded buy a bunch of guys with some spare parts and mechanical know-how and a desire to see how far they could throw a pumpkin. I’ve taken my family for the last five years and it’s great to see the machines, from human powered onagers of Roman design to hundred foot long air powered cannons.” Link. The event was over the weekend, so expect to see some photos and results soon.
Handy DIY project before you make digital versions of those vinyl’s…“Build your own high quality, easy to use record cleaner. This design can be built for less than $50 and will remove at least as much grunge as the expensive VPI record cleaners. The original concept was developed by Jay Amble.” [via] Link.
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A little late for Halloween, but an excellent project to check out – Ben writes “I built a walking APU robot (from the Matrix) costume from PVC. It’s constructed so that it looks like I’m being carried by a robot, and is apparently convincing looking enough that a bunch of people kept asking me who was underneath, or how it was powered.” Link.
Here’s a Flickr photo set of a working raft made out of 120 2 liter soda bottles. The bottles are held together with duct tape and strapped to some wood. Thanks Bentheo! Link.
