Category: DIY

Okay, so this might be taking the whole iPod Shuffle-as-wearable thing a LITTLE too far — it’s a puffy coat for your Pod, complete with a hood! Wrong on a poodle, wrong on a Pod! More disquieting pics.

Japanese Shufflers have gone plumb crazy with modding their iPods with sticker skins. They’ve wrapped these rascals up in everything from faux woodgrain and classic Japanese art to the PowerPuff Girls and Shuffles with fake LCD screens on ’em.

Here’s a gallery of some of the sticker work. If you have a Shuffle and want to create your own skins, here’s a template. You can also find HOWTO instructions here. Unfortuantely, they’re in Japanese, but the images tell you pretty much what you need to know.

While Olympus is busy pumping big bucks into advertising a “wardrobe” music player you can’t actually wear, people are busy bejeweling, skinning, and otherwise adorning their iPod Shuffle, a digital audio player you CAN actual wear. Check out this gorgeous hardcase some guy milled out of aluminum using a computer-controlled milling machine. Schweet.

Hackaday has a nifty little circuit you can solder up to create a USB power source for delivering 5 volts of power to your USB-enabled mobile devices. Requires little more than a 9v battery, a Zener diode, a resistor, and a female USB connector.

There are weird PC case mods, and then there’s the Hummer PC, a 1/6th scale remote-controlled Hummer model with a 3GB Pentium 4 with 1GB of RAM and a 120GB hard drive packed inside. It even has a Thermaltake Water Cooling system in it! Use it as a regular PC, and when you get tired of spread sheets and fragging alien scum, you can unhook all the cables, grab your R/C controller, and let your pimped-out PC ride barrel down on the housepets.

Well, the iHome may have been a hoax, but it was mere moments after Jobs announced the “headless” Mac Mini at MacWorld before people started thinking about how to turn this expensive tissue box into a home media center for digital video recording, music, and photos. The current HOW-TO on Engadget delves into this subject.

Honestly, I don’t know why people are balking so often at the relatively small hard drives (40GB or 80GB) on these Macs for use as a DVR. Most folks have these size drives on their TiVos, and the Mac Mini has a CD-RW on it (which most TiVos do not) that can be used for dumping stuff down. You can easily set up the Mac Mini to get iTunes or other digital audio servered over your home network from another PC so that doesn’t have to live on the Mini’s HD. In the Engadget HOW-TO, they discuss how to use an old PC you have gathering dust in the basement as a server for the Mini.

You may have thought of using your spare time to throw a robot together, but where’s the life-threatening thrill of that? Adrenaline junkies or the merely destructive would probably prefer a do-it-yourself flamethrower project. Hey, even Mark Pauline had to start somewhere.

Street Tech pal Mark Frauenfelder and O’Reilly Networks have just announced a new magazine they’re launching in early 2005. Make: will concentrate on DIY projects using technology. The first issue will have articles on kite aerial photography, a homemade steadycam, and other cool projects. I can’t wait.

PC Magazine is reporting about two new sites which, like online DIY publishing houses, places power in your hands previously only available to corporations and rich hobbyists. eMachineShop and Pad2Pad will manufacture machine parts and circuit boards, respectively, to your exact specifications. You design them on your desktop using their specialized software and in a few days your new custom components will be in your hands. How cool is that?

Doing a search for cheaper than a Dremel brings up all sorts of groovy case modding and DIY robotics pages. What are some of your favorite Google searches (that relate to hardware hacking)?