Category: DIY

After seeing a neighbor with a cheap pellet gun at a campout, and finding out it only cost $30, I started to get the itch to relive the glory days of my youth, blowing away plastic army men and soup cans. I wasn’t prepared to stumble across a global tribe of airgun hackers, or airsmiths. This pistol (right) is a Crosman 2240 with a scope, laser sight, flashlight, and bulk c02 attached. These guys take $50 c02 pistols and trick them out until they look like something from Assassins-R-Us.

There are a number of resources for airgunners, including the internationally flavored alt.sport.air-guns. It’s an odd but friendly mixture of varmint -shooters from South Carolina and 10m Olympic pistol shooters from Europe, using $800 pistols made by Swedish co-ops.

I’m not a real gun guy, per se, but I bought a $25 refurbished Crosman 1377c pistol, which can shoot groups of one inch at 10m in my basement. (if only *I* were that accurate). Sometimes I’ll take it to the fields behind my house and shoot from the hip at debris.

They are all hardware hackers of sorts, and regardless of ideology and nationality. know the importance of merging with the machine to make the perfect shot. These guns are relatively quiet, and shooting the pistol in the basement is paradoxically calming, and pretty fun.

If you thought those Billy Bigmouth animatronic bass were creppy and stupid before, just wait ’til you hear your mother-in-law talking to you through one! This guy is creating an embedded Linux videoconferencing system using a Billy Bass. So far, he’s only made the gag gift say whatever he wants it do say, and he hasn’t updated the site in a long time, but given the holiday season, and the fact you might end up with one of these suckers, we thought we’d offer some hacking inspiration. Any amount of hardware hassle is worth it if you can make it stop singing that damn "Don’t Worry Be Happy" song!

Nice piece on O’Reilly’s Wireless DevCenter on creating a wireless network, without a hardware router, using Windows XP’s built-in ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) feature. From the book, Windows XP Unwired, by Wei-Meng Lee.

Inventor and roboticist Trevor Blackwell has created a homemade Segway-like scooter out of wheelchair motors, a gyroscope, NiMH batteries for RC cars, and a battlebot motor controller, and some other electronic components. It only cost him about $2500 and about a week of work to do it.
Via raelity bytes.

Opcode: Direct 2 Disk. And it’s free.

Matt Haughey writes a review of Snapstream software, and says it compares favorably with his Tivo.
And Haughey is fairly fanatical about his Tivo.

A great little documentary on Fisher-Price’s now legendary Pixelvision.

Check out this amazing home built in-dash car PC based on a mini-ITX board. The Integrated Car Entertainment unit (ICE) is a spectacular example of what one can do with one of these boards if you’ve got a little cash and a lot of inspiration. The ICE integrates voice control features and a touch-screen from a glove-box mounted PC running Windows XP with 40 gig hard-drive. The whole thing is even removable so the owner can transfer files from his home PC. Amazing work!

Update: The creator of this project has set up his own page, and given me a few details about the equipment used. In particular I was interested in the screen, which it turns out is from Xenarc called the 700TS. It’s not cheap — around $600, but even so I’d reckon the parts for this project cost less than $1000. Not bad for such a kick-@$$ system.