Tools

MAKE Creative Director David Albertson shared some of his fav tools with me – and now I’m sharing them with you! Not the latest gadgets, but two of my favorite tools are an Olfa Blade (yellow-handled box cutter) and the Whammy Bar (clawbar for removing nails, tacks and carpet staples). Oh, and I really like my Black and Decker Mouse Sander, it’s a small hand-sander shaped like an iron so you can work around corners and stuff, even though it makes a heck of a lot of noise.

This is one of my new favorite google map hacks – Why not take A9 Local images and insert them into Google Maps search results? (A9 Local images are storefront snapshots – taken by Amazon’s A9.com – of 15 major US Cities) How does it work? Greasemonkey lets me inject script into any page (viewed in Firefox), and the script I injected is set up to fetch an Address Search from A9.com, looking for a corresponding image. If an image is found, it’s displayed in the “Info Balloon” on Google Maps Link.

This experiment uses a custom XSLT to convert GeoURL’s site-specific “near” information in RSS format to create a Google Earth KML file. You can create a static list (a snapshot based on the current sites indexed by GeoURL) or a Google Earth network link, which can be refreshed from within the application to get an up-to-date listing. Link. Handy for some our past HOW TOs.

MAKE Flickr group pool member Broken Toaster posted some photos of a USB-powered Fluorescent Light project. It looks like it is made from an old broken USB drive, wired up, then placed in some type of project enclosure. Link.

The principles of its operation are simple: The fan creates an air flow which is cooled by contact with the 4 bottles full of ice. In this way, the temperature of the air flow is reduced to a more tolerable level. The more bottles the better… You must closely watch it unless you want a swimming pool on your carpet or floors. [via] Link.