Category: DIY

Issue No. 5 of the amazing and wonderful Make magazine is now out. The theme is “Science, Weather, and Outdoors.” I have a number of pieces in here, including one on garage model kit makers, a look at GTD Tiddlywiki, and a profile of Ky Michealson, a.k.a. Rocketman. Check out the Table of Contents here.

Oh my god, looking at the PDF pages of this 1971 Centuri rocket manual lit up so many of my boyhood memory circuits, I swear I have smoke comin’ out of my ears. I was the Vice President of the Chester, VA Model Rocketry Club, which isn’t saying much in that I think we had three full-time members. I lived for rocketry and poured over every square inch of this 16-page manual. It’s such a brain-tickle to see it again after so many years.

[Via Make]

Cedric Shock has written a nice tutorial on how relatively easy it is to recover data (or at least make the attempt) from a non-bootable Windows hard drive using a Knoppix Linux CD. Many non-Linux users may be intimidated by the idea of delving into Linux to solve a Windows problem, but the CD-bootable Knoppix is one of the easiest Linux distros for newbies to deal with and Cedric’s tutorial shows how even the most moderately tech-savvy user can at least attempt recovery of a lost HD using this method.

[Via TechBlog]

Wikipedia, bless its globally-distributed pointy little hydra-head, has a really sweet collection of links to iPod-related hardware and software hacks.

HD Beat has a short piece on making your own high- quality “monster” component A/V cables. It’s actually fairly easy to do, but the tools will cost you close to US$100. This is the sort of situation where sharing tools with friends and neighbors (or buying/selling used on eBay) would come in handy.

We love the geekly fashion here at Street Tech Labs, and we get a kick out the whole retro- computing craze (how long do you think it’ll be before geek antique shops start poppin’ up?). These pastimes come together (along with a little DIY craftiness) in these download and print Space Invaders ring and earrings.

[Via Boing Boing]

Nifty step-by-step instructions for how to build a Stirling engine out of tin cans, a CD and other readily available parts. There are movies of the resulting contraption in action, too. Satisfyingly Rube Goldbergesque.

[Via Hack-a-Day]

That retro-gamegear hacking whiz Ben Heckendorn is at it again, this time creating a Colecovision portable, or Colecovision to Go as he’s dubbed it.

Oh those loveable mods. No, not the U.K. scooter-riding hipsters from the ’60s, the geeks and the computer and gadget cases that they hack for the transplantion of other computers and gadgets. The latest Frankenhack making the rounds is a new Xbox 360 crammed (with some unfortunate overflow) into an Atari 2600 case. Why, you might ask? The proverbial “Because we can” or “Because it’s there” are the only possible answers (and, of course, because the builder knows we’re going to be blogging about it).

[Via Gear Factor]

The Xbox 360 is barely out of the box and hackers are already gearing up to accomplish the inevitable: porting Linux to the next-gen game console. That’s what the Free60 project is all about, it’s a wiki-format site for collecting efforts to get the open source OS working on the new system.

Wanna take bets on how long it’ll be before this feat is accomplished?

[Via /.]