Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, a Finnish crafter who presented today at the Reboot conference in Copenhagen, has written a draft crafter’s manifesto that reads like a blueprint for the Enlightenment crossed with an entrepreneur’s prayer. Good stuff. My favorite, #6 – Work inspires work. Seeing what other people have made generates new ideas and designs. [via] Link.
We’ve covered a few ways to make ebooks for Playstation portables (PSP) and now there are some sites popping up that offer books for download specifically formatted for your PSP screen. Unfortunately it some of these aren’t public domain. I really think there’s a market for ebooks on UMD and memorysticks, provided there were some somftware intelligence for font sizing, bookmarking and perhaps audio versions as well. Why not sell gamer guides for the PSP… Link.
Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference 2005 began June 6 with the Keynote by Steve Jobs, and continues with a full week of in-depth technical sessions, powerful hands-on labs, and exciting special events. On Thursday June 9th MAKE will show all things podcasting from 12:45 to 1:30pm with Phillip Torrone, Associate Editor, MAKE Magazine. I’m going to show a lot of what we put together in volume 02 of MAKE, how to do make podcasts, the tools, hardware, software, show formats, pretty much everything. If you want to meet up, look for me around the session! Link.
One of my fav shows, they made a jet pack from plans on the web to see if it would work. Adam and Jamie embark on the longest and most ambitious build they’ve ever undertaken: creating their own personal flying machine from scratch. Are these machines as magnificent as their designers claim? To make the project more realistic, the two limit themselves to a build period of one month and a budget of $10,000. They busted the myth pretty well. Link.
David Randolph from G4TV’s Attack of the Show has a great how-to on making a micro-sized NES controller. Earlier, they made the world’s largest. This little project (pun intended) is pretty easy to do; however, it will require a new skill: PCB (Printed Circuit Board) creation. In volume 02 of MAKE we have Step-by-step instructions for making your own PCBs at home. Link.
PC Magazine has a review of the RadioShack VEX Robotics system. The VEX system was built with the education market in mind and is part of Dean Kamen’s popular FIRST Robotics competitions. At $299.99 (not counting batteries), the VEX System is more than just a kiddy construction set. It is best suited for the scientifically inclined teen (or classroom), and is a perfect fit for the robo-hobbyist who can’t afford an AIBO, but might be willing to build his own metal companion. Link.
Here’s a neat site that will speak the RSS feeds (the headlines and news) from many web sites using its PanaVox Speak Perfect Speech Technology. At the bottom of the site there’s a link where you can add your own. It doesn’t seem read RSS ads (interesting). So anyway, tried it and recorded the output. It read the MAKE feeds from June 8th and it turned out okay, I like that the robotic sounding voice has a Scottish accents. Here’s the MP3 I made.
