The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the kitchen, garage and backyard from food to furniture to fun & games for your family.
It’s fireworks time! Skylighter.com has a recipe for a more powerful version of those balls that bang when you knock them together. You paint smooth rocks with a mixture that contains powdered glass, potassium chlorate, and sulfur (all disclaimers in place). Then let dry. Drop or throw the rocks, and they’ll “bounce” repeatedly with a loud explosion each time.
Link (scroll down to middle of page).
We’ve covered a few ways to make ebooks for Playstation portables (PSP) and now there are some sites popping up that offer books for download specifically formatted for your PSP screen. Unfortunately it some of these aren’t public domain. I really think there’s a market for ebooks on UMD and memorysticks, provided there were some somftware intelligence for font sizing, bookmarking and perhaps audio versions as well. Why not sell gamer guides for the PSP… Link.
I’m hoping the author can release/post the source in another country where the law permits more fair use (Google cache is still up)….The DVD Decrypter author has announced that he has been served with an order to cease his development of DVD Decrypter. The developer has been forced to hand over all source code and the domain that he was using. It is thought that it could be Sony who have served this notice, as it is rumoured that he broke their new copyright protection within 72 hours of its release. [via] Link.
Here’s how to turn a Nintendo controller (USB Retropad) in to a wireless version using a targus wireless keypad. The NES controller uses 8 inputs and one ground for it’s switch state input. The keypad uses a 4×5 matrix decoder. So I split the ground trace on the control pad into 2 parts (you can see this cut in the second image below) and gave each ground to a column on the keypad. Then I jumpered pairs of buttons on the control pad and connected each pair to one of four rows on the keypad, effectively giving me / 8 2 0 for A B Sel Start and * 9 3 . for Up Rt Lf Dn. Link.
Oldie, but goodie- XboxMediaCenter is a free open source (GPL) multimedia player for the Xbox™ from Microsoft. Currently XboxMediaCenter can be used to play/view most popular video/audio/picture formats such as MPEG-1/2/4, DivX, XviD, MP3, AAC, JPG, GIF plus many more less known formats directly from a CD/DVD in Xbox DVD-ROM drive or of the Xbox harddrive, XBMC can also play files from a PC over a local network and even stream media streams directly from the internet. Link.
Great resource. Bicycle frame building has a reputation as being an arcane art; something that’s practiced by wizened old Jedi masters, or else carried out by huge, complicated robots in Taiwan, attended by a small army of engineers, technicians, and metallurgists. This isn’t so. Frame building is a craft like any other, with simple, consistent rules that mere mortals can master fairly easily, given sufficient attention to detail and care. [via] Link.
Tons of free and amazing homebrew games! Load’em up on your emulators and flash carts! ...here are the eagerly awaited GBAX2005 entries, and yet again it has been a massive success – around 60 games/demos/utils entered for GBA, GP32, PSP, DS and Zodiac! [