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... and not try to keep things like this quiet:

"How I discovered Instructables' email database had been stolen"

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-I-discovered-Instructables-email-database-had/

"OSS/DIY medical gear!"
Measurement is already here.
Link #1 - http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/
Link #2 - http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=homemade+ekg
Of course, control is another issue, but there's still some things you can do with little more than a soldering iron:
Link #3 - http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-A-TENS-Machine-to-Remove-Pain/

You mean except the method shown in this instructable, http://www.instructables.com/id/LEDs-as-light-sensors/ ?

Just because it isn't very good at it doesn't mean it can't be forced to do the job.

We get this problem with adverts on TV too.

Amazingly there are no results on ebay for `normaliser`; no one has made a hardware dongle to plug inline of the speakers to fix the problem:

http://www.instructables.com/answers/I-need-a-hardware-volume-levellernormalizer-for-a/

Uzebox is cool!

While on the subject, I'd also like to point out some other projects I've found interesting:

OpenPandora, a community-designed, Linux-running handheld. The specs are pretty impressive, by today's standards, but were even more impressive when it was first introduced. Best thing is, they're now manufacturing and shipping!

For those who like to tinker themselves, there is the BeagleBoard, a cheap (as they come) single board computer with impressive specs, designed for open source software. The Wikipedia article lists a number of alternatives, some of which may be more powerful and/or cheaper.

One interesting alternative to the BeagleBoard is the Hawkboard, which is backed by its own community. It's slightly less powerful than the BeagleBoard, but, at 89 USD, also costs quite a bit less.

And then there's the ever-popular Arduino, which comes in several varieties. You can buy them assembled starting at about 20 USD, or build your own for under 10 USD. They can be extended with "shields", e.g. to get extra I/O capabilities. Pretty cool stuff!

Personally, I am still tinkering around with resistors and transistors and the like, designing and simulating circuits with Qucs (which I feel is a lot more production-ready than that website suggests) and my Nokia N900, but any of the above hardware looks like it might be a nice next step up.

i think apple uses non-oxidizing contacts (lightly gold plated) but also the contact blades inside the connector have a small spring-loaded mechanism on them so they technically do wipe, but the travel distance is much shorter (around a millimeter or so)

also, i found this:
http://www.instructables.com/id/MagSafe-for-the-Rest-of-Us-A-DIY-Magnetic-Power-A/
a guide to making your own MagSafe adapter at home :)

As someone pointed out: building a fusion reactor, while not trivial, is routinely done by tinkerers worldwide: see e.g. this Instructables guide .

No, the truly amazing thing here is what I found when I clicked through to the original story (as usual, not linked in the summary):

... here in Reno, we have the University of Nevada-Reno, and I went to the physics department. They offered to give me a bunch of parts, and after I got fusion, they offered to give me my own lab here to work in. So that was very helpful.

Allow me to be the first to say, WHAT THE YELLOW RUBBERY FUCK? In every university department I've ever had experience of, researchers and grad students fight tooth and nail to get funding for anything more expensive than an alligator clip. Meanwhile, these guys have sufficient resources to start handing out equipment and lab space to enterprising teenagers for science fair projects! Hmm, time to start looking for a postdoc position there, I think...

I'm not sure about this. When I read the title I was updating CyanogenMod7 in my rooted smartphone and my background thoughts were about some nifty projects I'm going to post on Instructables.com. Imagine my disillusion upon reading the summary.

I'm not really sure I like that idea. My uses for flashlights tend to be a) camping, and b) when the power goes out. Unfortunately with USB charging I would get one charge's worth of use in those situations.

Well, I bought a solar USB charger at Wal Mart for thirty bucks. Good enough to charge cell phones and iPods and still have juice left ... not quite up to the task of charging my Tom Tom without being completely depleted. (In fact, I've got two of them, and they're fairly rugged and come with carabiners so you can attach them to packs or what have you. They can also be charged with a micro USB cable.)

I think portable USB power is actually becoming fairly easy to get nowadays, and I've even seen things you can put together relatively cheaply to give you USB powered by batteries.

As much as possible, I won't buy devices which don't charge from standard USB ... there's craploads of ways to make that work out for you if everything uses the same cables. I've got a four port Kensington USB wall-socket thing ... it'll handle 110/220V and 50Hz/60Hz so pretty much power in any country give or take the adapter for the physical plug.

Between the Kensington and the two solar things ... I can actually cover a fair bit of my power needs --- I think charging the flashlight from USB is a brilliant idea.

http://hackedgadgets.com/2010/05/10/computer-keyboard-disassembly-and-cleaning/

http://www.instructables.com/id/Hacking-a-USB-Keyboard/

It's a tiny board. the chip is under a blob of goo. The only downside is it has to be a working keyboard so you can use a multimeter to know what pins goes to what key. It's tedious but not terribly hard. Once you know the key matrix you have for the princely sum of 9 dollars a USB dongle that you can wire up how ever you want. You literally have as many inputs as keys.

What I do not know is if it's possible to assign one keyboard to normal tasks and have the hacked keyboard only do some specific thing.

And where there's no shortage, everyone gets to pay inflated prices!! Let's hope they don't catch on you can make (albeit poor) plastic from MILK!

http://www.khanacademy.org/ http://makezine.com/ http://www.instructables.com/ http://www.arduino.cc/ http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ And many many more, but those are my favorites.

I agree. There is so much more that could be done before the expensive google car.

How about a speed-aware cruise control which hooks to your cellphone for $25.


I know I will get flamed, but wouldn't it be nice to get rid of accidental speeding tickets?

Jim Pruett, Founder
wikiSPEEDia.org

I read your blog and have a question and a comment, first the question: Have you tried using an SD card for Readyboost yet? On smaller machines such as that I've found having a dedicated Readyboost (and lets face it, 4Gb SD cards are cheap) will give it a nice pick me up, especially when it comes to game. Think of it as giving yourself some of the advantages of a hybrid drive for ultra cheap, as Readyboost will have small random reads cached to the SD (where the read speed is near instantaneous) while leaving sequential read/write to the HDD. I'd love to see what kind of gaming numbers you get with that unit before/after Readyboost.

Now the comment: Why the Starter hate? For years Linux guys have complained about how "bloated" MSFT OSes had become so you finally get a bloat free MSFT OS with all the bling bling and apps you don't like/use gone bye bye and STILL you bitch? I mean WTF? If you're only real hatred is the wallpaper you DO know that can be changed in seconds with the use of the free third party tool I just linked to, yes?

But considering by your own admission all you want the Windows partition for is gaming you should be damned happy to have Starter By having Starter over HP you probably saved a good chunk of time having to kill the features that would be useless for gaming, like WMP media sharing along with Aero and the other bling bling bells and whistles. Personally I wish MSFT would sell Starter retail for say $35, I'd be buying copies of it like it were going out of style! It would be perfect for older/slower hardware, for SOHOs and other places where you just want the OS to get out of the way so you can run your programs. Why all the hatred for a bloat free MSFT OS I'll never know, but personally I'd be damned glad to have all the copies of it I could get my hands on.

As for TFA it beats the Atom and that's all that matters to me. Anybody who has had to work on Atom machines knows with normal desktop usage they can quickly and easily get bogged down, especially if they are the non ION variety, so hopefully there will be plenty of models based around these chips so I can steer my customers clear of the suckfest that is Atom. The Radeon GPU should make video and flash nice and unskippy, and paired with Win7 Starter should make for a nice light little netbook with decent battery life and decent performance without breaking the wallet. Sounds good to me and I'll have to look into one of these for my GF's BDay a couple of months from now, sounds perfect for a little purse sized netbook she can take with her on the family camping trips.

Finally! A use for those POV wands!

Like this: http://www.instructables.com/id/Assembling-a-RS232-to-TTL-Serial-Adapter/ . You can use it to speak at levels lower than TTL (5V)

There is one problem with banning high powered lasers. An EUR 16 DVD burner has one and you can built it in a mini mag-lite for convinience. While the MAFIAA would support the banning of DVD and blu-ray burners I believe this is not feasible.
Disclaimer: dunno about the range of the damn things. It may only be a few meters due to cheap optics.

Unless you are seriously good at both hardware and software, you are not going to be doing this for any of the current consoles.

Wrong ! It isn't that difficul see http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Assemble-a-Cthulhu-PCB/

And it works great on the ps3 !

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Assemble-a-Cthulhu-PCB/

Unless you are seriously good at both hardware and software, you are not going to be doing this for any of the current consoles.

Wrong ! It isn't that difficul see http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Assemble-a-Cthulhu-PCB/

And it works great on the ps3 !

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Assemble-a-Cthulhu-PCB/

Or go to Instructables solar power pages and sew you own. Or Thinkgeek and for $20 buy the cells to power any AA or AAA device.

If you don't trust your own printer, you can try looking for them yourself.

Perform a search on ``simple CNC mill'' and you'll find lots of pages like:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Easy-to-Build-Desk-Top-3-Axis-CNC-Milling-Machine/
or
http://makeyourbot.org/mantis9-1

Unfortunately, milling involves side-to-side stress, so all the homemade ones I've seen have issues w/ slop &c., so as you likely had surmised, tolerances are an issue. If someone has plans for a mill which can do precise tolerances in hard materials, I'd be very interested.

William

Despite all the noise about 3D prototyping, what really works well is making stuff out of flat sheet stock. Milling is slow. Stereolithography is slow. But laser cutting, plasma cutting, and water-jet cutting are really fast ways to make shapes from sheets of material. So there are getting to be lots of projects that involve flat pieces cut from plastic or wood. It's also really easy to create patterns for cutting machines - it's just line art.

At TechShop, the stereolithography machine isn't used much, a small number of people use the CNC milling machines, and the 3 laser cutters are constantly busy. Most of the laser cutter files come from Corel Draw.

whether you can get approval for soldering, which still takes a decent fireproof bench and some ventilation.

Electronics soldering is quite safe. Most standard office furniture (e.g. particle board with melamine) should be fire resistant enough by nature to be safe enough, and any sane workbench would be a non-issue. A small square of hardboard (high-density fibreboard) as a temporary tabletop protection is an approach I've used with no problem in locations without a workbench.

An small to medium wattage soldering iron with a stand is quite safe.

While the soldering fumes can provoke and may cause to asthma (due to rosin fumes) and can contain lead oxide (in lead based solders), the health risk can be managed through ventilation such as an activated carbon filtered fume extraction fan, which you can make yourself.

Oh, and wear pants, soldering in shorts is dangerous.

http://freshome.com/2008/01/14/ceiling-book-storage-idea/
http://www.multipleautomation.com/hidden_ceiling_bed.htm
http://gizmodo.com/365748/bedup-saves-space-by-storing-your-bed-in-the-ceiling
http://www.garagewerks.com/serv_ceiling_storage.html
http://www.instructables.com/id/GARAGE-STORAGE-SOLUTION/

I am sure you get the idea.

If you take apart the cheap-ass Bic mechanical pencils, use a rubber band in a slit in the eraser and then wrapped to the pencil clip, you have yourself a pocket "gun".

I'm betting the teacher was tired of that.

Actually, we posted it on instructables as well, so technically, it is exactly as powerful as the most powerful DIY LED project on there ;-)

http://www.instructables.com/id/Ultra-bright-LED-Color-Changing-Spotlight-using-Op/

Cheers,

There are plenty of excellent DIY sites out there. I have a couple of projects featured on Instructables -- their interface makes is really easy to share your projects step-by-step.

Strange that Make Magazine is missing. Or Hack-A-Day.

http://www.instructables.com/id/The-EyeWriter/ This might work, but i do not believe he is full paralyzed but i guess if he loses control of his other appendages for some reason...

But do they really have to shred all the books just to scan them?

No. A book scanning machine is capable of scanning a book non-destructively. My unsubstantiated guess is that they are less harmful to the book than your average reader.

You can build one if you'd like. Instructable The automated page turners on the commercial models are awesome. Youtube video

Or you can convert an existing pair of gloves into touchscreen-capable gloves by using a needle a little bit of conductive thread:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Making-A-Glove-Work-With-A-Touch-Screen/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97nxZwHG5bA

I just watched that video. The BGA reballing process appears to be:

0) Remove all the old solder. First he melted it with a soldering iron and got a ball of solder, which he rolled off. Then he applied a solder wick (with the soldering iron to heat it) and scrubbed gently all over the chip package surface. Finally he wiped the chip package with a cloth soaked in some liquid (a solvent I'd guess).

1) Paint the chip package with some sort of goop.

2) Put a shield on the chip package. This shield has holes that match where the new solder balls must go.

3) Apply some sort of metal powder from a jar. The powder appears to be solder balls, each one just the right size to fit through the holes in the shield. He gently wiped the powder this way and that until there was one solder ball per hole (more or less). Then he took a pair of needle tweezers and carefully moved one ball at a time until there was exactly one solder ball per hole, with no holes empty.

4) Apply heat from a heat gun. Clearly this was to melt the solder balls and make them attach to the chip package.

5) Pop the shield off, and hold up the reballed BGA to the camera so we can see its perfection.

I guess the rest of the process is to very carefully drop the chip package where you want it to go, and convince the solder to melt. How do you do that? You mentioned a "reflow oven"? I Googled that, and there are lots of different ovens out there. I even saw a page for using an ordinary toaster oven for the purpose.

Looks like pretty finicky work to do by hand, but not completely impossible.

steveha

I take it you haven't seen this then. :)

http://www.instructables.com/id/Mouse-Mouse!/

Not alive, but it's a start.

How fitting to include my tribute in this tribute to tributes. Sorry for the unscrupulous plug: http://www.instructables.com/id/Princess-Peach-Pointillism

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-a-Solar-USB-charger-simple/

Design your own specs and be done with it.

There's a number of people that have turned old TV antennas into radio telescopes.

Here's an example:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Poor-Man-s-Radio-Telescope/

For more just google "DIY radio antenna"

There's even online stores that sell everything you need:

http://www.radioastronomysupplies.com/radio_astronomy_supplies.php

It could be an interesting project.

I don't think this will hurt MS much , a JTAG mod is out of hacker skill range of most Xbox gamers. http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-JTAG-your-Xbox-360-and-run-homebrew/

This has been covered to death here on slashdot, but basically one pass of /dev/random will pretty much take care of wiping a drive. Drive recovery companies will tell you that the hypothetical bit-by-bit recovery is possible, but is so ungodly costly that it's not worth doing unless there's something REALLY important on the drive (like pictures of your mom). If you're really paranoid, don't waste your time with shred, just dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda twice and call it a day. Shred takes F O R E V E R and really provides nothing more than a nifty status bar. If you're SUPER paranoid, dd the drive twice and yank the platters, play frisbee, build a tesla turbine or simply scratch the hell out of them and chuck them in the recycle bin.

Its time.
Lets begin an effort to thwart airborne eavesdropping.

I propose a home based monitoring system followed by a seeking-intercept-rocket to stop these drones.

Instructable, please join in.

You mean like this?

Or... like this.

For about $100 you can get this lil thing: http://www.pdamusician.com/dpscope/ works fine for hobbyists .. your needs might be different. They have an article about it on: http://www.instructables.com/ ,too

Yes a lot of knowledge has been lost, but even most civilization destroying events (not species destroying) would probably not cause that nowadays. There is a lot of data (Wikipedia for example) on many geospaced backups. These would be found within 100 years and people would start to figure out what the lost bytes were. It would give the new civilization a big jump in technology.
I even saw a way to make an offline dump portable: http://www.instructables.com/id/Wikipedia-in-your-pocket/ so the technology to read it would be available as well (assuming they have some form of electricity and it still works).

Things change, even on a large scale.

Good job, but still not as good as chainmail made out of coke tabs! Its a wonderful gift and a great way to let other warriors on the battlefield know, "Hey, I might kill you, but I won't kill the environment."

My money's on the Maker / DIY crowd! Hopefully, it works better than the Arduino powered Bedazzler.

I rather use my $30 Arduino.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Repair-a-Broken-Ethernet-Plug/
Repair a broken ethernet plug using a zip tie

There are some web sites dedicated to just source code: http://www.codeproject.com/ is a great place to find useful small applications with an explanation. http://sourceforge.net/ has excellent code. http://apache.org/ has very good projects. These sites don't require you to retype anything. While the programs in codeproject are small, some of the projects in source forge and apache are huge -- but many have very good small tutorials to get you up and running. For little hardware projects look at http://www.instructables.com/. Even the commercial products now have incredible online resources that in many ways surpass what we got in Byte, if you're not familiar with http://msdn.microsft.com/ check it out. Another approach is to install Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora, or any distribution comes with a package manager that allows you to browse applications by the thousands. I set one up in my house and my daughter had Tux Racer installed before I got home from work the next day. Computer magazines didn't go away, they were eclipsed. Oh did I mention http://eclipse.org/ its a full IDE, open source and a development environment as well.

I don't think there is a good general electronics hobby mag anymore.

Perhaps not, but there's still Instructables.

There are many things that identify things about the camera you use. As previously mentioned the EXIF data, though that can be easily removed. If they have access to multiple images from the same camera they can figure out the Noise Signature and link it back to your camera. Smudges on the lens. Some of these are talked about in the link below.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Avoiding-Camera-Noise-Signatures/

Also the capture pattern and compression artifacts can give away the manufacturer and usually model of camera used to take the picture. Some of these marking survive re-compression, but mostly disappear with resizing down.