Gaming

HOW TO – Make junk mail blinds

HOW TO – Make junk mail blinds

IntroMatt writes “Strangely aesthetically pleasing window blinds made out of junk mail. By affixing strips of junk mail to an existing set of venetian blinds, one can drastically reduce the amount of light allowed through without losing the ability to raise and lower the blinds. In my case, about three months’ worth of junk mail, but your mileage will vary. Your trusty roll of duct tape (color to suit). Two rolls of scotch tape. A ruler. A spool of uninsulated wire. A pair of needle-nosed pliers. A thumbtack. Space to work.” Link.

Make a Solar Engine

Make a Solar Engine

Ssolar1How to make the engine usually found in the BEAM solar roller“…the most common use is in a solaroller which is a small wheeled car that charges up and then moves in a quick burst of speed. Since you can only use motors and coils with this circuit robots built with this circuit are mainly mechanical such as my artistic butterflies. One other common use is a little thing called a symet which can roam around and not get stuck using only one motor.” Link.

HOW TO – Make a force feedback racing simulator

HOW TO – Make a force feedback racing simulator

01If you’ve ever taken a spin on one of those theme park rides that show movies, shift/thrash the audience simulator-style you might like the idea of building your own. Jared, the Maker writes – “For some time I have wanted to make my own, seeing the NASA shuttle simulator and other similar training simulators all over. Well one day while playing mech 4 I realized that I had the power to do so literally in the palm of my hand. So I decided to mod out my simulator. Well a lot of R & D went into this and this is actually a prototype for the main build to come.” Link.

HOW TO – Watch TV and play PS2 games on your PSP

HOW TO – Watch TV and play PS2 games on your PSP

BasestationKotaku has an overview on watching TV on your PSP using Sony’s LocationFree TV “watch cable TV, DVDs and DVR from your home entertainment center anywhere you can access a broadband connection. The one (major) downside is that you have to fork out about $350 to buy the LocationFree TV base station.” – a commenter on the site also mentions “you can use it to play PSX/PS2 games on the PSP. Granted there is a slight lag, but it does work.” Link.

Hacking the PSP RSS Channels

Psp2-1-2-1-1-1-1The latest version of the PSP firmware gets you RSS feeds, specifically podcasts. Sounds good, but there are a few problems. The first is that the PSP doesn’t actually download the podcasts, it “streams” them. So you need to have a Wi-Fi connection at all times. The second downer is you need to use their interface to add each podcast feed. There is some hacking of the file format of the stored feeds, here’s the first pass at cracking it at bit – Link. Ideally, you’d have a desktop OPML to PSP-RSS list creator and also, Sony should consider making the PSP actually download the files so you can take them on the go…I don’t think I’ll update to 2.6 until this is fixed.

Overheated consoles not really new…

Overheated consoles not really new…

64Airship reminds us that overheated new gaming systems, like the Xbox 360s aren’t really that new, take a trip down console gaming past…“Early Commomdore 64s had a similar problem with overheating brick power supplies. Commodore ended up beefing up the power supply dramatically. In the meantime, a healthy 3rd party market sprang up for replacement power supplies. Maybe Microsoft is just trying to stimulate the growth of 3rd party support for the Xbox?” Link.