The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the kitchen, garage and backyard from food to furniture to fun & games for your family.
LibriVox is an open source audio-literary attempt to harness the power of the many to record and disseminate, in podcast form, books from the public domain. It works like this: a book is chosen, then *you*, the volunteers, read and record one or more chapters. We liberate the audio files through this webblog/podcast every week. Subscribed! Link. You can also listen to human and computer read ones from Project Gutenberg. Link.
The most Maker friendly MMORPG is now free to start – Linden Lab, maker of the popular virtual world “Second Life,” is making membership to its metaverse free. The company said that because free membership will likely prompt a significant number of people to join Second Life, revenue from virtual land the new members buy will probably make up for the loss of subscription fees. “We’re going to make more because some of the people who wouldn’t have otherwise signed up are going to buy land,” Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale said this week. Link and Second Life.
G4 TV’s AOTS has links to the old favorite Oregon Trail as well as the emulators to run it. Try taking a journey by covered wagon across 2000 miles of plains, rivers, and mountains. Try! On the plains, will you slosh your oxen through mud and water-filled ruts or will you plod through dust six inches deep? [via] Link.
We are working with a partner to put together a focus group session related to technology related projects and the projects you Make on
your time. In this session, we will be brainstorming new ideas and getting your feedback on possible future concepts. This session is
hosted by Make magazine but conducted by an outside focus group facilitator and is designed to get creative ideas about how the
marketplace can better serve your needs. The focus group will be held in San Francisco on Saturday, Sept 17 from 10AM to 1PM. All qualified participants will be compensated for their time. Link.
Andrew points us to RipTide’s Arcade Style Dance Dance Revolution metal pad:
A small project site with instructions on how to make your very own home built metal Dance Dance Revolution dance pad. Once built you can play it on your PS1/2. If your a hardcore fan, you can also get a Playstation to USB adapter and run Stepmania so you can play Dance Dance Revolution on your computer! Link.
Starting from the beginning though, as even the designers of the real Dreamcast would have done, David sketched possible ideas of what he wanted the console to look like, which was followed by a clay mold, then a plaster cast of it. The next step involved taking a 14″ x 18″ sheet of plastic, and heating it up. Once that’s softened up, it sits on top of the plaster cast while a home made vacuum chamber (instructions on how to build one can be found here) sucks all the air out from around it, making it fall into the shape of the cast… Link.
Good news for Xbox modders… the developers of Xbox Media Center for have added to the CVS their efforts toward a working DVD player with menus. Previously menus were not included due to XBMC’s use of mplayer and its current state of not natively supporting dvd menus. [