Category: DIY

This is a fun hardware hack: a cheapo alarm clock outfitted with an accelerometer so that it will go into snooze mode when you smack it, whack it, punch it, toss it off your nightstand, etc. That’s showin’ time who’s boss! Check out the video, it’s a stitch.

[Via hackAday]

Sorry I haven’t blogged in a few days. I was in Philadelphia for the opening of a zine show I co-curated with Street Tech co-founder Sean Carton (now a Dean at the school). The show, housed at the Design Center, features most of my late ’80s/early ’90s zine and mail art collections, with additional zines from Scott Huffines’s collection (he used to run Atomic Books in Baltimore).

Kudos to the Design Center for doing such a creative job of hanging the show. There are three rooms, the first is set up like a viney jungle of zines, with dozens of pubs in plastic bags hanging from fishing line at different heights, filling the volume of the space. The second room has two shelving insets densely packed with my mail and collage art collections and a few zine reading stations. The third room has a ratty reading couch and a coffee table covered with zines and more reading stations along the walls. There are also giant posters of zine covers on the walls.

It was mind-blowing to see my collection (stored in the attic for years) spread over these rooms and to realize that each item represented an exhange, either a literal exchange of my zine (Going Gaga) or a piece of mail art for someone else’s, or at least a letter with a few bucks in it, asking for a copy of someone’s pub. Scanning over the material hanging there, thinking about this connectivity (from all corners of the globe), it was like looking at a primitive, analog version of one of those network node maps. This was the “sneakernet” days of cyberspace and the blogosphere. We had the desktop computers, laser printers, copiers, and recording equipment to make this indie media, we just had to rely on a glorified pony express (the international postal systems) to distribute it.

The show is running through June 10th. Check it out if you get a chance.

UPDATE: Here are some images from the show on Sean’s Bad Blog.

After recently fondling a Mac Mini at our campus bookstore, I came across this in-dash VW install.

So sweet. I wish I could afford a Mini with standalone LCD for the ultimate road tripping multimedia machine.

Cory over at BoingBoing LOVES cardboard models and toys (aka “papercraft”). I sorta do too, but I have no patience to build ’em. I have a half-built, badly folded and sloppily-glued Chartres Cathedral model somewhere in my attic to attest to my skills. But I digress. Cory’s posted a link to a cool, and relatively easy to make, iPod stand. Looks like this guy made his out of the iPod box.

Our buds over at Solarbotics have finally put together special parts bundles for two of the three projects in my Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Building Robots book. The kit for the Coathanger Walker costs US$27.70 and the kit for Mousey the Junkbot goes for $19.60. These bundles do not include everything, so check your parts lists carefully. For instance, the Walker kit does not include the 40-tooth plastic gear and the Mousey kit doesn’t include a mouse. There are some bonuses though, such as a set of Solarbotics’s photodiode optical sensors for Mousey, which are likely more sensitive than the IR receivers that you’d pull from a mouse, as suggested in the book. The bundles also include a spool of Hydro-X solder, a fave among BEAM builders, including the Big God hisself, Mark Tilden.

These bundles couldn’t have come out at a better time, as a version of the Mousey project is going to be published in the second issue of Make magazine.

Lifehacker has a nice little link-list of hacks related to iPod, cellphone, and laptop batteries. We’d like to add a few hacks for AA and AAA-size batteries used in low-power devices such as remote controls:

Roll Your Own – If the batteries in your infrared (IR) remote control appear to have died, before replacing them, open the battery door and roll the batteries in place. Try the remote again and you may be surprised by the results. I just finally tossed away the batts in my TV remote after rolling them every week or so (whenever it stopped talking to my TV) for the past six months (or more!).

Save Half-Used Batts – Devices that draw a lot of power, such as anything with a DC motor, will require new batteries before the existing batteries are actually spent, in other words, they’ll still have enough juice in ’em for devices with lower power needs, such as IR remotes. If you have a multimeter, you can even find out how much juice is left, write it on a Post-It, and store it in a Ziplock along with the batteries (that’s what I do).

Reverse Polarity, Mr. Sulu! – If your remote control starts acting strange, or stops working altogether, and new batteries don’t fix the problem, before you throw it away, try putting in fresh batts, but put them in opposite to the correct polarity marked on the remote — leave them this way for about a minute. Then, put the batteries back as normal. This effectively acts as a reset which will (allegedly) work on some remotes.

Got any other battery tips? Add ’em to the comments.

The Mod Gods have a nifty little how-to on doing iPod-to-iPod file transferring.

Okay, THIS might be the geekiest project ever. Some guy has built a kitty security door on his home that uses facial recognition software to identify, and admit, his cat Flo, while locking out all other animal undesirables.

The first issue of MAKE had a much easier, more lo-tek, approach. A crafty pet owner built a little touchplate platform inside the kitty door which was rigged with a big capacitor and buzzer. If a cat lingered on the platform (as a reluctantly entereing non-resident cat would), it would discharge the capacitor and set off the alarm. The home owner, apparently permamently fixed to his easy chair nearby in the den, could then blast the intruding feline with a squirt gun.

[Say that title too many times and you could get yourself in trouble] Since Pringles cans may be feeling a bit devalued after the recent posting of the parabolic reflector antenna hack (which is easier to cobble together than the common Pringles can WiFi antenna), we thought we’d boost its hackability esteem again by posting this link to a cool pinhole camera made from the popular clone-chips container.

You really have to admire the guy who made his own wood and leather laptop out of an old Dell unit. Inspired by Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash”, he spent 4 months making it.