DIYs & Mods

We all do some pretty dorky things in our time. Whether it be waiting two hours to get an autograph from William Shatner or cosplaying as one of your favorite Star Wars characters, dorkiness never escapes us. Hacking a video game to propose marriage is another feat that tops our list. A guy who goes by the handle TheRealPfhreak hacked ...

Who would have thought that our favorite microcontroller, the Arduino Duemilanove, could be used for taking incredible pictures with high speed photography techniques? Using a laser and sensors, this photographer used an Arduino to capture these amazing photographs. Can you believe that’s paint? Hit the jump for more unbelievable photos.

I’m no expert on synthesis but I know a good keyboard when I see one and this would most certainly make Frankie Goes To Hollywood proud. The project dates back to 1992 and features MIDI and VCF synthesis. Really a fine piece of DIY right here. Link [via]

Love your shiny, new G1 phone but don’t want to stay bound to T-Mobile? No problemo. The team at Love For Biz discovered you can unlock the G1 yourself in little to no time. Here’s how it’s done: 1. Insert friends activated T-mobile SIM into G1 along with battery 2. Power on and wait for setup screen 3. Go through ...

Have an extra melon around the house? Excellent. While I would suggest cutting that sucker up and digging in, MAKE and Instructables want you to turn it into a brain. A great little DIY project for Halloween, provided you don’t go around eating melon brains like a zombie. Manners first! Link [via]

Here’s an easy way to turn an Ikea dresser into an ulta-violet oven used for exposing printed circuit boards. Blogger Aris gutted the drawers and mounted the top with an array of 35 ultra-violet LEDs that are powered by an HP printer transformer with a 1A/37V output. That’s a heck of a lot of power. What resulted were some nice ...

Here’s a new take on the classic Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots toy everyone remembers from when they were young. Tamiya�s Robocraft boxing robots are very much like the classic game, except you build the bots yourself. Sure, they might not look like “Bolt Crusher Bob” and “Gear Grinder Greg” but they’re just as fun. Each robot operates on a ...

Talk about intricate craft! These steampunk goggles from Mike Brown are made with absolute precision, featuring leather bolted directly to the titanium eyepieces. 48 bolts are used to hold each lens in place. You can adjust the aperture in each eye to give you enhanced vision. Oh, and they’ll last for “500 years plus.” Quite possibly the finest work of ...

Two doctoral students, Martin Vuagnoux and Sylvain Pasini from the Security and Cryptography Laboratory at the Swiss Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, have discovered a potential threat to security that declares keyboards “unsafe to transmit sensitive information”. By monitoring signals produced by keystrokes, the researchers were able to reproduce what had been typed on 11 different keyboards using a variety ...

There are few things scarier than a politician on Halloween, except for the red ring of death. Alan Penner of Goleta, California carved a ton of tech-inspired pumpkins for his front porch. A Ubuntu pumpkin and various emoticon carvings decorate his lawn, with the red ring of death being the most frightening of all. With all the new games coming ...