DIYs & Mods

Melting plastic army men is loads of fun. Real army men, however – well, that’s an entirely different story. Dominic Wilcox either had a troubled childhood, or he was just as normal as the rest of us. After all, melting army men with a magnifying glass is every adolescent’s favorite pass time, right? He’s taken this fun, yet childish activity ...

Retro computer enthusiast Bill Kotaska has successfully built a replica of Busicom’s historic 141-PF printing calculator using vintage Intel chips. It’s the 37th anniversary of the world’s first single chip, customer-programmable microprocessor, the tiny Intel 4004. It was the Japanese calculator maker known as Busicom which later introduced the first product ever built around an Intel microprocessor. So, in light ...

We’re in dire need of some new LEGO stories here at Gearfuse, so be sure to send us some tips. In the mean time, check out this awesome LEGO Safe. It features a working electronic lock and weighs 14.3 pounds, making it quite the usable safe. It uses the LEGO Mindstorms NXT system, allowing for a fully programmable safe. Of ...

Here’s a decent mod, albeit not a beautiful one. Take an iPod Touch and strap a cardboard box to the back with a ghetto speaker inside it. Poke out a few holes, wire up a headphone jack and boom, instant portable speaker. It also does a decent job of keeping the iPod upright. Genius? No, but the ability to blast ...

Instructables never ceases to amaze me. This time around, we have some absolutely delicious LEGO gummies. User SFHandyman discuses how to use a silicone mold to form the candy and goes through the process of using Jello to create the actual candy. The only thing that could make these treats better would be if you could actually build with them. ...

The name is a bit odd, I have to admit, but this looks like one fun toy for the DIY enthusiast out there. It’s called the Meggy Jr RGB and it’s a programmable handheld console that features an 8×8 LED matrix made up of wonderful colored lights. It uses an ATMega168 microcontroller, similar to that of the Arduino. In fact, ...

This is about as cheap as it gets when it comes to DIYin’ your own speakers for an iPod. Designer Dmitry Zagga fashioned these together after having his credit card declined at the Apple Store. Look who’s laughing now. They’re just like the clubhouse telephones of days past, where simply attaching a string to two ends of a can fashions ...

The team at MAKE dug up a really cool video of Raphael and Max cooking objects with a Jacobs Ladder. Don’t know what a Jacobs Ladder is? Wikipedia has a fine and dandy explanation of it. Watch as these two clowns put a grape in between the current and let it cook. While I prefer to grill my food, this ...

We’re bug crazy. We might be called Gearfuse today, but tomorrow we’ll be called Bugfuse. What happens when a radioactive mutant goes berserk on a stairwell in an abandoned and destroyed hotel? Nothing, really. I stumbled upon this guy while feverishly searching for a fusion battery. I took some potshots at him and went for a pick pocket, neither one ...

Ryan was showing me some video of a hornet killing a cicada whilst we discussed posts about bugs. Then, I suddenly stumbled upon this video of a glowing trilobite beetle. Watch how it lights up in the dark like a raver’s glowstick. The ‘net doesn’t say too much about the creature but I did find this information on Mahalo: The ...