Growing up as an only child, I spent a lot of time with an 8-track playing “robot” called 2XL. You’d get tapes and he’d ask you questions, to answer you’d press a button and then depending what you pressed it would play another portion of a track. It was pretty cool at the time and the Science tape was my favorite. Someone has made a Flash based one with many of the tapes you can try out and play. Memories! Link.
At Obtainium.net, you can get an old refrigerator (for example), get rid of one, or discuss what kind of art you can make with one. Many beautiful Burning Man projects have been sourced through this site, but it’s open to people of all faiths. Link.
MSNBC’s Gary Krakow got the DIY bug and made some holograms using the Litholo hologram kit. The article explains what holograms are, how they’re made and special “instant hologram film” used to make the home versions. Usually holograms require that there be no motion at all, but the home kit from Litholo gets around that and from what the article says, produces great results! Link.
The future of music mixing and sampling is here. It’s going to be around a ping pong table, with headbands…”We were playing ping pong with paddles that had piezo sensors in them. When the paddles hit the ball, they would actuate the starting and ending points of a sample – so the faster we played, the more ‘frantic’ the sonic output. It was a fun piece.” Link.
I’m hoping a Maker out there might consider check this out (and take pictures)- this site offers a GUI, console and source versions of a tool to change the graphics in the navigation system in Acura/Hondas. The trick seems to be to know the special codes to display the BIN files in your nav system, pop out the DVD, make a new one, mod the files and then hit some codes to have the car take the new graphics. This also seems to open up a lot of other hacks and mods if you can change other things. Link.
Here’s a great step-by-step on using Firefox, Greasemonkey and Flickr to GeoTag your photos to use with GeoBloggers.com. Once you get the script installed, you browse to your Flickr image, add a new “geotag” and enter in a zip code. You’ll then use Google maps to locate a position and it saves the location data to the photo. Once that’s complete you can submit the image to Geobloggers. Link.
The new version of iTunes (4.8) just came out and it now supports video. So it looks like we’re getting one step closer to use iTunes as a way to view video blogs and TV-like content (or whatever Apple has planned too). The next podcasting applications like iPodder will likely support ways of getting the videos in an easy way automatically (I’m guessing that it might work now, I just downloaded iTunes 4.8 a minute ago). Here are some screen shots of the video UI elements that were added. Link.
