Learn how to tie stopper, hitches, loops and bend knots – great videos! “This is a site about knots: how to tie them, how to appreciate their beauty. Even the seriously knot-challenged among us can learn to tie many useful and popular knots by following along with the short, step-by-step instructional video clips on this site.” Link.
Chris is looking for things to do with 20 old hard drives “I have twenty 3.5 inch hard drives collecting dust in my garage (10Gb and all working) and I will use them to do things. What things I haven’t decided yet, but I already have a couple of ideas. We have 20 nice shiny discs, as many read/write heads complete with arm, 40 very powerful magnets, and so on. It’s actually only the imagination that sets the limits. In this first part we go through the, maybe trivial but vital, task of taking the drive apart in its components without damaging anything.” Link.
Here’s another iSight tripod – Steve writes “My dad is a master deal finder. Over the thanksgiving holiday, I traded him a broadband router for this super nice pro camera tripod that he located for $6.95 at his local Salvation Army store. The only thing it was missing was any way to mount a camera.. a problem I’m sure I can rectify with an inexpensive solution from a camera store, or an even less expensive solution from my garage. While my camera’s in the shop, I figured I can use it for a really great iSight tripod.” Link.
Handy open source app (Mac) – “I wanted to be able to listen to the songs on my iPod for some time now. This is because I don’t want to fill up the hard-drive of my iBook with music, but be able to access my Music when I’m on the way. I found some solutions but none really made me happy. Then I found mt-daapd which did exactly what I wanted except for one thing. mt-daapd can export any folder as an iTunes-music-share. The missing piece was, that it doesn’t detect if an iPod is connected. So I wrote a simple programm that detects if an iPod is connected and then automatically shares it with mt-daapd.” Link.
I think most of the online worlds will eventually swing this way – Multiverse is in beta “Make a complete Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) or virtual world for less money and in less time than you could have dreamed possible. Participate in the game industry’s most exciting frontier. Build the features that make your game unique, leveraging the expertise of the networking and infrastructure experts who helped build the web. Deliver your vision to a built-in market of players–without having to ask a publisher’s permission or give up your intellectual property.” [via] Link.
This is an incredibly cool, yet creepy panorama of a human head. I’d like to use this to make my Second Life avatar! “We’re trying to make high quality texture maps for game models. Using an FX-1 psuedo HD Sony camera, (its 1440 pixels, which is Sony’s anamorphic short-hand for a 1920 16:9 image,) placed sideways, I filmed Yoshi as he rotated on a turntable in front of the camera. The bank-robber cap was his idea. This resulted in about 1200 frames of a 360 degree pass around the head.” Thanks TowMater! Link.
If you’ve ever taken a spin on one of those theme park rides that show movies, shift/thrash the audience simulator-style you might like the idea of building your own. Jared, the Maker writes – “For some time I have wanted to make my own, seeing the NASA shuttle simulator and other similar training simulators all over. Well one day while playing mech 4 I realized that I had the power to do so literally in the palm of my hand. So I decided to mod out my simulator. Well a lot of R & D went into this and this is actually a prototype for the main build to come.” Link.
