DIY Projector Screen
Here’s a pretty simple how to for making your own project screen… “Home cinema is a great way to spend piles of money quickly. The projector costs a packet to buy and then more to run (about 10p an hour) and so you really don’t want to be shelling even more money out on a projection screen. A custom made projector screen will cost you around £200 at least. I hear you cry foul. Why get a custom made projector screen – can’t you just buy one off the shelf. Well yes and no. If you are going for a small image you can buy one off the shelf.” Link. Also, check out the Tyvek version on Instructables.
Tom made a pretty spiffy Ubuntu (Linux) home media center. He writes – “Like a lot of people nowadays, I have a growing collection of digital media. My digital media is stored on a home Linux server. Most of the digital media players available today do not support protocols to connect to a Linux server, which make them unsuitable for my use. I realized the best way to connect my digital media library with my home theatre was to build my own Linux home media center (LHMC)…” [
Make Flickr photo pool member DrewSteele writes “I went dumpster diving while at the ski resort in maine, the first dumster I hit yielded a working DVD player, so today I emptied out the insides of the DVD player and rearanged them inside this cute little red box…kinda cool.” 
Big news for TiVo owners with iPods and PSPs – “You can setup the desktop to automatically transcode transfers to one of three formats – Windows Media Library, Sony PSP, or Apple iPod. At least in the first release you cannot transcode shows that have already been transferred. And you can only select one format for the desktop, so you can’t transcode transfers for both a PSP and an iPod, or put some shows into one format and other shows into another. But, again, I suspect most users will be OK with these restrictions, and TiVo says they may add these capabilities in subsequent releases. Advanced users still have other options.” [
Batman writes “Last Aptil, MIT created their very own 
Make your own LEGO blocks “…not everybody has access to their own CNC machine, but for those who do, here is a lesson in building up custom lego parts. This is not necessarily a design just for those of us lucky enough to own a CNC machine. A manual milling machine, or even hand tools and a great deal of patience will do the job. This post IS however directed at somebody who owns some sort of CNC milling machine, has access to some plastics and the tools appropriate to cut them, and somebody who is not a rank beginner at building lego robots.” [
NCT writes “Here’s some great opensource DIY Home automation software, written in Perl with a Web interface. For windows or Linux/unix. It also works with the One Wire Weather station posted a few days ago.” MisterHouse is an open source home automation program. It’s fun, it’s free, and it’s entirely geeky. Written in Perl, it fires events based on time, web, socket, voice, and serial data. It currently runs on Windows 95/98/NT/2k/XP and on most Unix based platforms, including Linux and Mac OSX. 
