DIYs & Mods

Found on Flickr user Tableauvivant’s page, this above photo shows the musical components of a Hallmark musical greeting card. I must say, this is quite surprising. I was sent a few musical cards back in May and when I took them apart, I found a tiny PCB with a piezo speaker and some other circuitry. This appears to be a ...

Check out Guilherme Martin’s first attempt at making a robot. He uses an Arduino and motor shield with one servo for steering and a standard DC motor for movement. It’s dubbed “baratinha” meaning “little cockroach” in Portuguese. Using two micro-switches as if they were antennae, baratinha is able to detect obstacles in its way.� It’s just like a real cockroach ...

It seems like the cool thing to do nowadays is mod a Nintendo Entertainment System into another object. Whether it’s a coffee table or a lunchbox, the NES has gone down as one of the most modded systems in history. This time around, some motherfucker put it in a toaster. Yeah, a toaster. Pop in your Pillsbury Toaster Strudel and ...

Birds are classy. They deserve to be treated like royalty as they run a muck in our neighborhoods, waking us up with annoying chirps and shitting all over our cars immediately after they’ve been washed. Etsy seller Ohthepollybilities makes these quaint teacup bird-feeders with an ordinary China teacup and some well-placed chain links. The seller describes its possibilities as “endless” ...

Everyone loves cosplaying as their favorite Italian plumber. All it takes is a red shirt and some overalls and all you’re missing is a hat and phony mustache.� Well, don’t worry about buying some expensive Nintendo-licensed product made of fabric. Instead, make your own Mario hat with nothing more than some paper, printer ink and Band-Aids. Just don’t try grabbing ...

Just in time for the 2008 Green Design Festival in Athens, Greece comes a fresh look from Athanassios Babalis. Keeping it eco-tech, Athanassios created a shopping bag and a stool from recycled bottle caps. Think it was an easy task? Oh my friend, you are quite mistaken. Babalis collected the caps from his workmates and an extended network of friends ...

With Esquire‘s 75th anniversary taking place this year, the magazine released its latest issue with an E-Ink cover that comes with plenty of bits and pieces for DIYers to take apart and mess with. Phillip Torrone of MAKE points out the minor potential the E-ink cover has in regards to hacking but approves of its design with much enthusiasm. He ...

Check out this picture. What does it look like to you? If you guessed ballpoint pen, you’re correct. You win absolutely nothing because it wasn’t that difficult of a question to begin with and I’m not writing about a contest. However, if you’re into photography and want to be able to take macro photographs like the one shown above, there’s ...

I can’t read French but I’m sure our publisher Steve Rufer would be more than happy to translate. All I can gather is that someone took pictures of movie stars and merged them with money. This is a pretty sweet but where’s the Mel Gibson photo with the $1 bill?

Every now and then there comes a lamp that makes me tingle. I’m not referring to the Smoon Ombrella or the Centipede Lamp, though those two are weird in their own right. Designer Chris Natt was fed up with varying levels of light in his work environment, so he made this lamp, the Stimuli 3.0, that will keep the light ...