If you like having lots of bells and whistles attached to your computer, we’ve got you at least partially covered here. Using a microcontroller and a homemade solenoid inside a desk bell, Instructables user Meseta walks you through how to create a USB-based dinging notification system. The bell can be used to notify you of […]
Nick Carter and his son Henry were browsing Goodwill when Henry spotted a Staples Easy Button for sale and wanted to try using it to make an Awesome Button, our DIY USB synonym generator project. Neither of them had much experience with electronics projects, and despite some difficulty with the soldering iron, they managed to […]
After a quick search of the posts I’ve written for MAKE, it’s clear that I overuse the word “awesome.” It’s not news to me, but I had no idea how bad my problem was. In fact, I think you could say that I abuse the word. In order to cut down on my usage of […]
Instructible user fungus amungus turned his broken Nintendo Entertainment System into a flash drive dock and modded his game cartridges with 8GB flash drives. Now when he inserts the game carts into the NES, the drives appear on his desktop. As a nice touch, he added custom icons for each drive so that he knows […]
Here’s a fairly radical way to motivate yourself to learn Morse, from Australian Ben Buxton. Got to agree with tipster Alan Dove, who described the build as, “a project involving Arduino programming, a mint tin, a USB interface, and International Morse Code, resulting in unassailable geek cred.” The USB key interface is built into a mint tin and provides a dual input port for a standard USB keyboard to access non-Morse characters. A numeric display on the tin displays your coding speed, and tapping out “SOS” without letter spaces brings up the settings menu. Software, schematics, and build notes at Ben’s site. [Thanks, Alan!]
While visiting Pumping Station: One in Chicago, I noticed that member Tomer had a curious device: a soldering iron that plugged into his laptop.
You may have heard of this guy. Born on this date in 1809 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, Charles Robert Darwin would go on, in 1859, to publish On The Origin of Species, a book which is surely among the most influential ever written. In it, Darwin first proposes the idea that all of life descends from common ancestors, and that its diversity can be explained by a process of evolution driven by natural selection. He died in 1882, aged 73, and was afforded the exceedingly rare honor, especially for a scientist, of internment in Westminster Abbey.
