The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the industrial arts from metal and woodworking to CNC machining and 3D printing.
Monopole writes – “Review of the new Nano-ITX EPIA-N8000E Fanless motherboard. It’s just a slightly too large to fit in a 5 1/4″ drive bay. But I’m sure makers will be stuffing it into just about anything else!” [via] – Link.
Zonk on Slashdot has an excellent review of the only two “games” I “play” for the Nintendo DS – “When is a game not a game? Because it’s software designed to run on the Nintendo DS, Electroplankton and Animal Crossing: Wild World are packaged and sold as traditional games. Despite that, they don’t have many […]
Hannes writes in with a great product at Macworld for going paperless – “The Fujitsu ScanSnap Mac – It was announced at Apple Expo last September in Paris and I bought one instantly. Within a few afternoons I scanned a few thousand pages (and threw away more than 10000 pages of paper!) and now I have no more paper at home (only books!). All of these pages are now saved as PDF and alltogether use around 800MB, so they easily fit on a 1GB SDcard, that I can view on my MDApro.” Link.
This looks like a great DVD full of how-tos, here’s a review from Kathy Sierra – “Without a doubt the coolest present I’ve ever gotten is The Book of Cool, which is really a set of DVDs (plus a companion picture book) on how to do… cool tricks. You might not want to learn rope tricks, but how about rugby tricks, bar flairing, card magic tricks, or my favorite–skateboard tricks? Besides being cool–it’s also a simple and elegant example of video instruction…There’s something for nearly everyone in this thing and it’s quite a lot of fun to watch, even if you don’t want to learn how to do a fake reverse thumb spin with your pen.” Thanks Terrie! Link.
Review of one of my favorite new devices of 2005 by Barry Gerber – “When I first heard about LeapFrog’s Fly Pentop Computer it seemed like a perfect product for a half-serious half-humorous review. After all it is marketed as a toy for ‘tweens (ages 8-13) and you conjure up one sort of functionality or another by writing with the pen on a piece of paper. I mean, how much could such a device actually do?” Link.
Jackson has a review of Farm Show… he writes “Was hanging out at my family cabin in Washington State over the holidays, and one of the most eagerly awaited pieces of mail for the year showed up — Farm Show Magazine’s best of issue. It’s got all sorts of awesome DIY stuff. One dude turned an old Ford F-150 into a 10HP electric truck that’ll go 40MPH. Another dude took a tank from a rail car and turned it into a giant furnace that burns those big rolls of hay. It heats a reservoir of water that’s then piped to all the buildings on his property, with old truck radiators used as the indoor heating elements. The hinge for the furnace door is an 8′ axle salvaged from a John Deere combine. There’s a guy who built a wheelchair transporter out of a garden tractor, or the guy who modified a roto tiller so it could pull him in his wheelchair while he drove. There’s even an Oregon company featured that makes custom heavy-duty jeans which I’m totally going to pimp as a fashion statement. Anyway, you’ve got rural ingenuity, DIY, environmentalism and everything else that makes America grand. Highly, highly recommended.” Link.
James Alguire has a review of our new book Makers on Slashdot – “Makers: All Kinds of People Making Amazing Things In Garages, Basements, and Backyards by Bob Parks, and published by O’Reilly, celebrates the basic human desire to create, to nail together two things that have never been nailed together before and see what it does. While I have worked in construction, built computers from scratch and done my share of soldering, I still felt a sense of wonder after reading about the 76 projects outlined in this book.” Read the rest of James’s review…” Link.
