Great project on i-hacked.com. Using a simple laser pen pointer, a few misc parts, and about 15 minutes, you can make a simple laser communicator that converts a sound source into light that travels across a room, and back into sound with very little quality loss. Link.
Caya sent this in- “This is a lovely old book I found online today. It outlines how to make all the old amusements kids used to enjoy- how to make many kinds of kites, how to catch frogs, and many, many other fun things. It is very low-tech (late 19th century in fact) but it is very “how to” perhaps your team would enjoy reading it, or maybe Make readers would enjoy it also“. Link.
Standard PC components mounted to a $20 rack-mount shelf. This is a project from about 3 years ago, when anything “Rackmount” was even more expensive than it is today (not that Rack PC’s are all that cheap now…). With a system board that has on-board Ethernet, and 1U power supply from ebay, this could easily be a $20 or $50 1U setup as well. Thanks Brian! Link.
Peter Kirn has a great overview of how Chris O’Shea is going open source with his experiments in building tangible interfaces — interactive tables on which moving physical objects (like blocks) create visuals and sound. One obstacle in this technology has been people haven’t been able to refine the techniques; they just create bare-bones proof-of-concept but haven’t been able to build on others’ work. This is really encouraging. Link.
Tom’s Hardware takes a look at the build-it-yourseld laptop systems. If you like building your own PC, this might appeal to you. It seems like it will always be a little more expensive, but you’ll get exactly what you want. The cool part is in the end you get to put it all together yourself, the article also includes a video. Thanks Spyder. Link.
This will likely come in handy for someone- incompetech,com has PDFs you can print out in just about all the graph paper styles one may need- Metric, Multi-Width, Asymmetric, Dots, Iso-Dots, Hexagonal, Hex Dot, and Celtic Knot. Neato. Link.
