The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for digital gadgetry, open code, smart hacks, and more. Processing power to the people!
Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios. — John Prine For Earth Day 2010, iFixit.com has announced an ambitious goal: To teach every person on Earth how to fix each thing they own. To that end, iFixit has expanded their wiki-like platform for online repair manuals beyond the Apple product line. In this […]
CrunchGear getting in on the manifesto action – I think we’ll see more people and more gadget sites tuning in, turning on and encouraging warranty voiding as companies try to be more restrictive. MAKE readers do not likely need any (more) encouragement :) but if you visit other techy sites people still are screwdriver adverse. […]
The folks at Microsoft emailed us details of their upcoming embeddedSPARK 2010 Summer Challenge: Launching on April 27th, we present to you the embeddedSPARK Summer Challenge, the Premier Windows Embedded Hobbyist Competition Summer version, based on Windows Embedded Standard! The contest will launch at ESC Silicon Valley, unfold over the summer, and conclude with the […]
Newer models of laptops manufactured by companies like Apple and Lenovo contain accelerometers — motion sensors meant to detect whether the computer has been dropped. If the computer falls, the hard drive will automatically switch off to protect the user’s data.
“As soon as I knew there were these low-cost sensors inside these accelerometers, I thought it would be perfect to use them to network together and actually record earthquakes,” says geoscientist Elizabeth Cochran of the University of California, Riverside.
So a few years ago, Cochran got in touch with Jesse Lawrence, a colleague at Stanford. They whipped up a program called the Quake-Catcher Network. It’s a free download that runs silently in the background, collecting data from the computer’s accelerometer and waiting to detect an earthquake.
Laptop accelerometers aren’t as sensitive as professional-grade seismometers, so they can only pick up tremors of about magnitude 4.0 and above. But when a laptop does sense a tremor, it’ll ping the researchers’ server. “And when our server receives a bunch of those, we then say, ‘This is a likely earthquake,’ ” Lawrence says.
This fun project reminds me of the video wall in the Arno movie Total Recall. •Custom Winscape software with configurable screen parameters •Two HD plasma displays for great contrast and wide viewing angles •Video playback resolution of 1920×1080 with sound •Still-image resolution of 4096×4096 •Fully embedded in the wall for aesthetics and silent operation •Tracking […]
Anyway, among the many interesting discoveries I’ve made there was a link to the Brick Wishlist Flickr pool, which is a collection of doodles, diagrams, and renderings, made by Lego fans, of elements they wished existed, but do not. These “requests” range from simple color options (as in user d-higdon’s “fall colors” idea for the “leaves” element (#2417), currently available only in green) to what would be, for Lego, anyway, fairly radical departures, like plates with studs on both sides.
Ari Krupnik is developing an iPhone app that interfaces with an R/C radio. Hope it gets approved by the Apple politburo soon!
