Category: DIY

This adorable kitty pic from the Machine Project site reminded me of something in Dave Hrynkiw’s Junkbots… book about how to remember the polarity of the cathode and anode sides of a diode. He said his Physics teacher used to say: “I fell very negative about cats.” (Cathode being the negative side.)

(And yes, I know this particular cat is looking at a capacitor not a diode, so don’t send me mail.)

Mark Allen’s awesome LA art space Machine Project will be teaching a solar robotics workshop on Dec 3rd using my BEAM articles from MAKE Vol. 6 and 8 as their guidebook. Cool. I hope they take lots of pics and post the results.

UPDATE: It looks like the workshop is already sold out. Bummer. I guess that’s what happens when Boing Boing announces your limited-seating workshop. But if you’re in LA, you still might be able to go to tomorrow night’s Dorkbot SoCal MAKE #8 release party, also at Machine Project.

Did you know that you can use the iPod Notes program to create “interactive” e-docs that can include subfolders, images, and hyperlinks to other text, images, videos, and audio? Tru dat. It’s rudimentary stuff, but it’s doable. This MacDevCenter tutorial shows you how.

News of this project, of this site, made me giddy with excitement. When we posted the piece about Draw and Print Furniture earlier this month, I saw it as a glimmer of something wholly 21st century. This project, to create a bottom-up open source boom in desktop fabbing, has a similar resonance. It intersects so many current techno-cultural vectors: the new Maker/DIY movement, open-source software, Web 2.0 publishing, blobjects and blogjects. And the truly revolutionary thing about it is it seems SO doable. Might we be including, say a MAKE Kit to build one of these in our ’07 Gift Guide? Maybe ’08?

[Via Make]

If you haven’t heard about Moo Mini Cards yet, they’re 28mm x 70mm (think: half a business card) photocards that have images on one side and brief calling card-like info or other text on the other. Originally designed as a kid’s playful biz card, they’ve really taken off as Flickr photocards. For US$20, you can get 100 cards of your Flickr photostream, with all the images different, if you like. The cards have become very popular on Flickr, with people trading them, photographing them in odd situations, making them into composite images, etc. There’s something very infectious, almost fetishistic, about the small size, the thick card stock, the glossy satin finish, that’s turned them into something of a phenom.

Having all those Mini Cards around has inspired some “Moosters” to make useful, fun things out of them. On Meg Pickard’s blog, she shows you how to make Moognets (ugh), fridge mag Moo Cards, and on Red Mum blog, she shows how to laminate them and turn them into Moofobs, keychain decor.

Flickr Moo Card enthusiast Danielle Blue has morphed her Moofobs (say *that* ten tens) into something approaching jewelry.

You prolly saw this on Boing Boing already, but since we like collecting the iPod papercraft here at the Labs, I figured it was worth adding to our collection. This is a template for creating your own iPod Nano protective paper cover. If you’re the moths-in-pockets type, this might be a fun no-cost present to give somebody. Print out a whole batch of ’em skinned in cool designs.

We’re psyched about all of the cool kits that MAKE is releasing for the holidays, especially the open source MP3 kit, the Daisy. If you haven’t gone to Raphael Abrams’s site yet, here’s the link. He’s Daisy’s creator. Hopefully, as the kit gets sold and projects made, he’ll have more application content on the site. Right now, you can download Daisy’s PDF manual, source code, and schematics. After the jump is the parts schematic showing the layout of everything on the PCB.

You may be unaware of the fact that Raphael has several other, cheaper, open source MP3 kits available. The Sakura, “The World’s Simplest Open Source DIY MP3 Player” is here ($72) and the Super Simple MP3 ($72) is here. These are more complicated to build and less user-friendly than the Daisy, but cheaper, much smaller, and may serve you better if you’re mainly interested in embedded type applications.

I can’t wait to see how all of these players get hacked and what sorts of cool cases and mods people come up with.

This Flickr set shows how Suh-weet! (love that Flickr handle) turned a US$2 metal CD rack from IKEA into a stand for her iBook. Unfortunately, they apparently don’t sell this rack at IKEA anymore. You could probably find something similar. There’s always the “cooling rack hack,” but that won’t raise your laptop… er… MOBILE screen/keyboard like this will.

[Via DIY:happy]

Target is using these really cool glowing LED GiftCards this holiday season to commemorate the launch of the Nintendo Wii. You knew it was only a matter of time before people starting crackin’ the cards open and futzing with the internals. The time is now. As someone points out in the comments to this Instructable, this thing would make a pretty cool project box for something.

MAKE posted a link to the Flickr photoset for the MAKE:Philly group. One of the things that they did at their most recent meeting was to have a Maker Challenge to build Trimets, the type of BEAM solar spinners I wrote up in MAKE Vol. 6. So cool to see all of those people hacking up old components scavenging for parts, pouring over circuit diagrams, blasting away brain cells with lead fumes, etc. In short: Good times!