When I was a kid, my brother and I climbed up on a ladder and pocked those glowing stars all over the ceiling in the room we shared. We thought we were cool, but inevitably, the sticky good that held them up failed and we often ended up with stars falling on our heads at night. Over at Instructables a guy has offered up instructions on how to turn your ceiling into your own star field, and it looks cool.
The original TV series of Batman may have over-err’d on the side of tights, but it had a few fantastic gimmicks. This Batman-themed hidden entrance was actually for a school homecoming dance, and was the work of Low Voltage’s Jimmy; he rigged up a reproduction Shakespeare bust (complete with hidden button), disguised door and even a motorized opening mechanism.
Part of Nokia’s challenge to cement the N900 and Maemo is in drawing developers to the open-source platform, and to do that they’ve kicked off PUSH N900, a “unique design, hacking and modding project”. To mark the event – which will see winning proposals rewarded with an N900, funding and support to deliver on their idea – the Finns commissioned four sample projects, inspired by the ’80s and using the N900 in distinctive ways. These ended up including a 3D ViewMaster camera, digital Rolodex, 80’s radio tagger/Last.fm integration, and a Speak and Spell mashup.
If, like me, you’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that computers are powered by tiny animals rather than the “electricity” government conspiracy, then this DIY iMac hamster cage might appeal. Up for sale on eBay – for a whopping $350 buy-it-now, no less – it’s an original blue iMac with the guts removed and mesh walls inserted.
We’ve had a few Steampunk items come up on here before, and we’d be lying if we said that we didn’t hold a natural affinity for these things. How can you not? The workmanship alone makes these gadgets pretty amazing, and whil the aesthetics might not be for everybody, we find it hard to deny the sort of primordial attractiveness these devices have. Like this cell phone for example, which was caught on picture from Russia, and encompasses everything Steampunk in one solid form factor. We’ve got plenty of shots after the break.
Touchscreen netbook mods aren’t new, but until the Heath Robinson spirit they channel ceases to entertain us, we’ll keep featuring them. Latest to get the finger-friendly fettling is HP’s Mini 1000, with owner timm.mccoy of the MyHPMini forums slapping in a 10.2-inch resistive touchscreen panel to turn his Atom-based netbook into a dinky tablet PC.
Video demo after the cut
Would Sharper Image have lasted longer if it billed its alarm clocks as capable of “more violent and persuasive measures” should the owner not get up? That’s likely something we’ll never know the answer to, but it’s okay because we’re too busy trying to avoid the wrath of “The Perfect Wakeup Machine“: the handiwork of four mechanical engineering students at Colorado State University, this monstrous alarm first tempts you out of bed with freshly brewed coffee, before escalating to more dramatic methods.
Video demos after the cut
There are quite a few companies out there who will sell you a ruggedized laptop, cellphone or digital camera, but they’ll also help themselves to a healthy amount from your wallet in return. The gang at Popular Mechanics decided to see if – with only the sort of typical supplies you could find at Home Depot and Staples – they could make their own versions for a whole lot less money. That, of course, provided the ideal opportunity to give one of Dell’s Inspiron 1545 notebooks a good kicking.
You may recall the bizarre back-mounted K’nex gattling gun from all the way back in September 2008; K’nex builders obviously have a secret fetish for homemade weaponry, as another has put together this working replica of an AK-47 assault rifle. Not something you’d find in the K’nex instruction book, perhaps, but a pretty close impersonation of the real thing all the same.
Normally we look at these excellent Instructables and move on, but if there was ever one to lever us off our jaded blogger behinds then it would be this DIY air hockey table. The handiwork of oldschoolstructure, it consists of a couple of sheets of chipboard, 4,608 holes and a second-hand leaf blower.
JP
