Reviews

This looks good- Bridging the gap between instructions included with LEGO sets and the unlimited world of freestyle LEGO building, The Unofficial LEGO Builder’s Guide is a nuts-and-bolts approach to making original models from those famous plastic bricks. Written by Allan Bedford, a lifelong LEGO fan whose most ambitious model to date is a 5,000-piece replica of Toronto’s famed CN Tower, this new title draws together core techniques, principles and reference information. Link.

I’ve been meaning to try them out- this sounds great…The cool thing is there are several videos on there that I’ve always wanted to buy from my car parts and restoration catalogs. My first two selections are both from the Welding Section since I’m planning on picking up a MIG welder within the next couple of weeks. I also really like their blog where they interview real customers to find out about their projects and announce new videos. Link.

The amazing rocketbelt. The flying device was made famous by fictional heros like Buck Rogers and James Bond, but it was developed for real by the US Army in the 60s, and amateur rocketeers continue to build and fly their own rocketbelts today. My new book tells the full true story of the rocketbelt and the men who are building them, uncovers a bizarre murder mystery involving the device, and includes an instructive essay on building your own amazing flying machine. The book is The Rocketbelt Caper: A True Tale Of Invention, Obsession, And Murder by Paul Brown Link.

MAKE pal David Weekly posts about his Vonage experience, I’ve been hearing a lot of stories like this lately, I went Skype and Gizmo, haven’t looked back …there started to emerge some wierdnesses. Like how the ringing sound would keep playing a few seconds into an answered conversation or into the beginning of a voicemail greeting. Or how the router itself would reboot about once a day, sometimes requiring a full power cycle in order to start routing packets again. Or how incoming phone calls sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, depending on the phase of the moon or something… Then he couldn’t cancel. Link.

MAKE pal Russell Beattie has an extremely detailed hands-on review of the new Apple Mighty Mouse with loads of pictures and screenshots. There’s no other moving parts besides the main clicker. I’m not sure what sort of magic Apple put into this thing, but it detects left, right and middle clicking accurately, even though there’s no other buttons. It’s pretty wild. What’s amusing is that I used a one-button mouse for a while when I first got my Mini, and I kept “right-clicking” using that mouse and obviously nothing happened… Link.