We have a ton of new goodies from MAKE – a limited edition YEAR ONE 4 volume set, our high speed flash photography kit, the Makers book, shirts and more. Mark (editor-in-chief) has a bit about the Makers book here, it’s a gorgeous. You can get them here and here are some photos of our elves cranking away, next year we’ll have robot elves too Link.
Onyxfrog wants you! “I work at a Home Depot and over the holiday shopping season we have a ‘santas workshop’ setup and I get to run all sorts of demos and classes. It’s lots of fun and I keep all my issues of Make with me for ideas but I would really like to hear and cool How-To’s you guys have that can be done with products primarily from Home Depot. I actually made a cigar box guitar last weekend. So far I haven’t been able to convince them to let me make a spud-gun but I’ve made plenty of mini-marshmallow guns =) If it wasn’t so darn cold out I would love to do a Kite Aerial Photography demo. So if anyone has any ideas I would love to hear them!” Link. I think the $14 video camera stabilizer from MAKE 01 is a good one. Post your ideas in the comments!
Michael writes “InventionDB – the “wikipedia of projects” – is giving away a new iPod Video to the best project submission before 12/31/05. Everyone welcome. InventionDB.com is a free project-blogging engine built on top of an interconnected database of people, organizations, projects, resources and vendors. It allows anyone doing creative projects to quickly build online project portfolios connected to multiple team members, project resources, organizational affiliations and vendors used.” Link.
Slashdot is inviting folks to post their questions for the Mythbusters – not sure if it’s too late, but have at it! – “Who are the Mythbusters? Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman are the hosts of a unique and popular television show on the Discovery cable channel. Working from a background in the special effects industry and shooting on location at effects warehouse M5 Industries, Jamie and Adam attempt to shed light on hearsay, rumour, and myth. Along the way they usually run across a little bit of science, too.”… Link.
The C-3PO from MAKE 02 is for sale on eBay “This item is a full size replica of C-3PO from Star Wars “A New Hope”. No home is complete without your very own protocol droid. He stands on his own, his eyes light up and there is a speaker in the head for a sound system that the winning bidder could add (sound system not included). The head is moveable from left to right (by hand, not motorized). This c-3po was on the cover of Make Magazine’s second issue. This item has taken me 3 years to bring to the point it is now. He is very near completion and only needs a few details. I make no claims to its accuracy, but rather its a best guess.” [via] Link.
From Nat “Are you hacking something cool around voice-over-IP, Skype, Google Talk, gaim, Asterisk, VoiceXML, or similar technology? We want to know about it! We’re looking for participants in the ETel Fair at our Emerging Telephony conference (conference is Jan 24-26, San Francisco; Fair is the evening of the 25th). We want cool hacks, funky devices, awesome apps. The fair is like a poster session with booze: you and a dozen others each have a demo of your system and a poster describing it, and conference attendees and the general public get to walk around, drinks in hand, grilling you about how it works, how much work it would take to add feature X, or whether you want to work for them/be acquired by them/come back to their hotel room for drinks and “session initiation”. If that sounds like you, drop mail to me (gnat AT oreilly.com) and Surj (surj.patel AT gmail.com) and tell us what you’ve got …” Link.
In MAKE 04 we featured some great kit gift ideas in the magazine, “Kits for the Holidays”. But we didn’t have room for all the kits we found, so here’s another round for elves with makers on their list. MAKE subscribers can log in and view the full article here…Link. We also have our own kit for taking high speed flash photography to capture high-speed events — A splash. Popping balloons. Breaking glass. It’s an amazing adjustable flash controller triggered by light or sound. Link.
