Kempa.com has a great overview of video on vinyl and the history of getting videos on all sorts of discs. In fact, there was a ‘format war’ of sorts that broke out amongst companies encoding video onto grooved discs, well before the VHS / Beta wars were waged. CED’s appear to have been the dominant iteration of this technology, though I’ve found reference to a number of similarly imagined formats, including VHD videodisc system, Magnavision/DiscoVision, phonovid and y. Link.
Wolfgang Puck is releasing self-heating coffee- can’t wait to pick one up and use it for some projects! It took a California company named OnTech seven years and $24 million to create the self-heating cans, which are activated by pushing a plastic button on the bottom. Water flows into a sealed inner cone filled with quicklime, which is mostly calcium oxide. A chemical reaction heats the coffee to a pleasant 145 degrees in six to eight minutes, the amount of time it might take to order, pay for and receive a latte from a barista. Link.
This fellow has a few cool projects, I like the TV Fish Tank- A friend of mine had a broken television, and for whatever reason, I decided I should make it into a fish tank. As a word of warning to anyone who may attempt something similar, this project has been a little difficult, mostly because I’ve never built a fish tank before, and it’s hard to get something that looks good and is also capable of holding 120 lbs of water. It’s easier if you use a smaller tv. Link.
Fireflies are networked nightlights for a local environment, the jars can be placed in different bedrooms or other spots around a home so people can communicate with one another through simply tapping on the jars. For example, if you tap the jar in your bedroom you will pulse the colored fireflies associated with that jar. The neighboring jars in your home will receive and pulse your taps, record them and then play them back. The neighboring jars can respond with their own tapping and broadcast themselves to the nightlights in the home. Pretty- here’s how to make them. Link.
Mini review: The $20 Griffin XpressCable digital audio cable for Airport Express is nice- if your looking to get the best quality audio from your AE (or iMac G5) to your stereo (with Toslink/Optical inputs) this worked out for me and it’s about half the price than the Monster cable version. Of course the other fun thing to do is to point a laser at it for science experiments. Link.
Waxy points to story about how Nintendo will be beaming demos wirelessly at E3. I don’t think there’s time to do a project around this before next week, but by next year we’ll likely have the ability to broadcast homebrew games, content and all sorts of things- for the DS and maybe the PSP depending on how all the hacks keep going. It could be a bit of war of the signals DIY vs demoware… Link.
In the Build your Own Arcade Controls Message forums there are tons of great ideas suggestions and how-tos- here’s on on flush mounting a Trackball. Frosty says “Basically, I set my router depth to match the depth of the top of the mounting plate (about 1/8″ of an inch), and routed the outline of the plate. When dropped into the recess, it sat flush with the top of the CP. The artwork was placed on the panel and mounting plate (covering it) and then Lexan on top of it“. Link.
