DIY Projects

Ear Bud Holder as Student Project

Ear Bud Holder as Student Project

Yesterday I carved out a bit of end of summer classroom experimentation time. One of the projects I wanted to develop was a student designed ear bud holder. They’ve crossed my radar a bit over the years, but I’ve never really needed one. I used to keep my headphones plugged into my mp3 player, and would put it on a shelf in the house, or in the elbow box in my car. Recently, though, my mp3 player and GPS unit were stolified out of my car. So now my phone seems to have become the ultimate gizmo again. It works pretty well with the music app, and Google Maps has a navigation feature that wasn’t there when I looked before. It would actually be perfect if it had an FM radio for local terrestrial audio. The problem now is, where to keep the tangle of headphone wires.

War and Peace Bookend

War and Peace Bookend

Over on CRAFT, MAKE contributing writer Scott Bedford offers a great little illustrated tutorial for hacking your own action figure into a spirited bookend. Check out the post on CRAFT, or head over to Make: Projects for a PDF of the build. Can’t wait to chop up some zombie Barbie bookends! Scott’s illustration style is […]

How-To: Car Battery Welding

How-To: Car Battery Welding

Welding! Welding is a glorious, mystery-infused, thoroughly bad-ass way to stick things together. Welders move in their own cloud of mythos and danger- they are dirtier, tougher, and sexier than any other kind of maker, and the things they build are big and strong and hold our world together. This positive stereotype permeates at all levels of pop culture: if a character is introduced while welding, you immediately know that they will be some kind of blue-collar superhero, or some kind of cliched contradiction- the welder quoting Hegel after winning the bar fight, or the classic trope of seeing a welder at work, and then they flip off the helmet and OMG IT IS A GIRL! A GIRL WELDING!

LED Party Scroller

LED Party Scroller

Brian, aka Plasma2002 of San Francisco build this LED scroller that displays messages SMSed to a Google Voice number. I’ve always loved the idea of sending messages to the big screens you usually find at concerts and other large events. I figured it could be scaled down, while still being just as entertaining. It may […]

FabFi: CNCed Wifi Antennae

FabFi: CNCed Wifi Antennae

FabFi is an open-source, FabLab-grown system using common building materials and off-the-shelf electronics to transmit wireless ethernet signals across distances of up to several miles. With Fabfi, communities can build their own wireless networks to gain high-speed internet connectivity—thus enabling them to access online educational, medical, and other resources. [Via Ponoko]

Best MAKE Erratum Ever

Best MAKE Erratum Ever

Everybody makes mistakes, and we’re no exception. After each issue has gone to print, we usually find out we’ve made a mistake or two and post our errata on the magazine volume page and in the Letters section of the subsequent issue as “MAKE: Amends.” For our current volume, we just got perhaps the best […]