From traditional crafts to modern crafts, we’re covering news and interesting projects to educate you and keep you inspired. Design trends and pop culture related projects are here to inspire.
“Early users of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 are coming up with innovative ways to fix some of the first reported glitches plaguing the new videogame console. One of the fixes involves dangling the unit’s power supply in midair with string…Other 360 owners joined in, saying that once they cooled down overheated power units — by using fans or in one case, a half-filled bottle of frozen water — their consoles stopped crashing.” [via] Link.
Gene is looking for a scriptable USB-IR controller – “So far I have not been able to find such an animal. I bought the first generation of Robosapian. The robot from wowwe toys. It comes with a real crazy remote control. You have to press many keys in certain combinations to make the robot do anything. If I could program a dynamic IR device with the codes and then create scripts.. It would be possible for me to make my robot do all kinds of neat things. Also I am into doing time lapse videos. That is where you setup a camera and let it run for about an hour.. I throw the video into my computer and use the editing software to speed things up. That is fine.. But I have an Olympus 8mp digital SLR camera. It also has an IR control out. A programmable IR device as I described above would really help me out with my camera. I could setup a high resolution picture every 15 seconds using a laptop on location replacing the IR controller. This would produce a very high quality time lapse once I put it in my editing software.” I think the USB-UIRT might be a good start, any other suggestions for Gene? Link.
Just in time for the holidays, Macworld UK has published some iSock knit patterns by Sally Kentfield. There are 3 different patterns to choose from including this Santa iSock pattern. Great gift ideas especially for those new video iPods. Macworld article. Link.
Great Instructable on making your own book wall hanging. I saw this in person a couple weeks ago, and I’m making a few as gifts for the holidays! – “Take one of the many beautiful books available at project Gutenberg and convert it into a wall sized readable book. Makes great gifts for the literary types in your life. This is the complete text of Flatlands, and how to generate and print it, at 60 x 42 inches. That’s huge! Take a look at the PDF.” Link.
“Getting music to your Symbian phone is not as easy as it should be… If you are using a Nokia phone you may be able to use the Nokia Music Manager (which is part of PC Suite). This How-To shows you how Mass Storage Synchronizer can be used to copy music from iTunes to a memory card (which you can then put in your phone). This does not syncronize iTunes with the phone, it copies music from the PC (iTunes library) to a memory card in a USB memory card reader. ” Thanks Ewan! Link.
It wouldn’t be too hard to make your own pong clock (software app / Macromedia Flash) and put that on a LCD picture frame… “The dutch design company Buro Vormkrijgers has designed a clock which uses the popular videogame Pong to show the time. A random game of Pong is played, and when it’s time to change minutes or hours, one of the two sides will score, thus changing the score and the time. This has got to be one of the most inventive ways of using Pong ever!” There is video in download archives, showing how the clock works in real time. [via] Link.
The Tasmanian Conservation Trust put out a call to everyone to use the following pattern to knit small sweaters (or “jumpers”) for penguins in a case of a major oil spill. They received an overwhelming response, over 15,000 sweaters! According to the Conservation Trust,”In the case of a major oil spill, these jumpers will be used to help rehabilitate Little penguins (Eudyptula minor) that have been oil affected. Oil clogs the feathers of these tiny seagoing birds, and reduces their insulating and waterproofing qualities. Even worse, the penguins attempt to clean themselves by preening, and rapidly become poisoned.” [via] Link. (Additional news story from Australia.)
