Make a living in the virtual world…
Wired article about earning a living by selling the things you make, in the virtual word – “Jennifer Grinnell, Michigan furniture delivery dispatcher turned fashion designer in cyber space, never imagined that she could make a living in a video game. Grinnell’s shop, Mischief, is in Second Life, a virtual world whose users are responsible for creating all content. Grinnell’s digital clothing and “skins” allow users to change the appearance of their avatars — their online representations — beyond their wildest Barbie dress-up dreams.” Link.
Andrew Carol’s LEGO contraption “Before the day of computers and pocket calculators all mathematics was done by hand. Great effort was expended to compose trigonometric and logarithmic tables for navigation, scientific investigation, and engineering purposes. In the mid-19th century, people began to design machines to automate this error prone process. Many machines of various designs were eventually built. The most famous of these machines is the Babbage Difference Engine. Because of engineering issues as well as political and personal conflict the Babbage Difference engines construction had to wait until 1991 when the Science Museum in London decided to build the Babbage Difference Engine No.2 for an exhibit on the history of computers. Babbage’s design could evaluate 7th order polynomials to 31 digits of accuracy. I set out to build a working Difference Engine using LEGO parts which could compute 2nd or 3rd order polynomials to 3 or 4 digits.” [
Tom sent in this fun how to from Jared and Dan “The idea for this project evolved out of necessity. Dan and I are both avid gamers. After a few hours of gaming with our normal high-end mouse pads you get a build up of sweat. The mouse and mouse pad becomes slippery and you start to loose your competitive advantage due to the loss of precision. While there are a couple mice on the market that have small fans in them to dry out your palm, they all have major failings in precision and accuracy. So after some thought and discussion we chose to build out our own custom mouse pad with a blower in it to suck the air down through the pad and away from the gamer’s hand. The result is astonishing!” 
Joelsprayberry on Instructables writes “This is a DJ CD case turned upside down with 2 layers of hardibacker board (pegboard with no holes). I run an acoustic guitar through all of these pedals to create “live loops” so I needed to have an extremely quiet sound with no low hum or buzz. I ran George L’s audio cables and tons of 9volt power. I think this may be the most amount of pedals you can get into one space.” 
Google Maps Mania always has excellent finds like this one for MCE and Xbox 360 owners…“Here’s a great tip for browsing Google Maps from the comfort of your couch using the Microsoft Windows Media Center. Colin Savage picked up the Google Maps API and the Software Development Kit for the Media Center to create this page. Colin explains how to add the page to your own Media Center so you can use it to browse Google Maps.” 
Cool manual from 70’s spotted on Retro Thing! “Here’s a link to a classic 16-page design manual for model rockets. It covers how solid rockets work along with basic design, and construction. Includes a couple of pages about multi-stage and large scale designs, too.” [
