Eva combined $1056.95 worth of Ikea EXPEDIT shelves to build this awesome megashelf -- I'm such a sucker for the wall o'books.

Eva's zes kasten (via Apartment Therapy)

Ideablob has a collection of projects that users of their system have submitted to a user response contest to win funding.

Here is a quote from their About Us page:

ideablob.com is where entrepreneurs and small business owners can share and grow their business ideas - and have a chance to win $10,000 towards fulfilling them.

Great ideas are generated every day by people all across the country, and now these ideas have a place to live and grow. Eligible individuals can submit their business ideas to ideablob.com, and based on votes from the ideablob.com online community - which includes other innovators as well as friends, family, colleagues, associates, teachers and mentors -one idea every month will win $10,000.

As individuals take part in ideablob.com's growth, their business has the potential to grow right along with it.

Why ideablob.com? Advanta began in 1951 with an idea, less than $100 in seed money, and big dreams. Today, as a respected company with close to 1,000 employees and well over one million small business customers nationwide, we empathize with entrepreneurs and small businesses and support their growth.

Design Green Now is one of the current featured projects. Their video is above.

The DGN panels will take place in 3 NYC universities. The design jam, is lead by SmartDesignWorldwide.com The panelists will uncover the challenges they face and the methods they have embraced to succeed in designing for sustainability.

Seven Rivers Water has an idea for providing drinking water in public:

When people want water in public, they are faced with tough choices. They can either buy an expensive bottle of water and risk adding to the 100 million water bottles thrown away each day OR they can drink from water fountains, which offer "free" hydration at the risk of exposure to germs and/or poor taste and quality. Seven Rivers will offer a superior, healthy alternative. We will develop a water vending machine that will purify and dispense water into customers' reusable bottles or our own eco-friendly cups. Our water will be more affordable than bottled water and will eliminate plastic bottle waste. We will install our machines in places such as colleges, high schools, and hospitals.

Coffee Connections is interested in creating a better funding model for coffee growers.

We will provide rural income generation opportunities to coffee farmers, discourage negative urbanization, and encourage the completion of education of farmers' children: by improving crop yields, further developing the coffee value chain and connecting farmers directly with international markets.

The Ideas section has several pages of proposals for funding. Members of the site vote up their favorites and each month the winner gets $10,000.

You may remember the recent article on Slicemodeler, which also has an entry:

Sliceform modelling for schools

SliceModeler is provided as a tool for educational institutions to create physical models of the 3D objects they design with Google SketchUp.

1) Use the SliceModeler plugin for Google SketchUp to design a sliceform model.
2) Build it from from material like cardboard, wood, stone, metal, concreet.
3) Place it in your environment.
4) Put documentation of it online.

Thanks Amy!

So how about taking a look through the entries with your Maker eye? What do you see that should be funded? Users can only vote for a project once, but we can create buzz around a project and increase its' funding chances. Tell us what you think in the comments.

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We introduced a lot of new products in the Maker Shed this week, and we have a lot more announcements planned for this week. I really like our new components and sensors. It's something we have always wanted to offer, and now we do. Check out all the new arrivals in the Maker Shed.

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cayenne8 writes "I want to experiment at home with setting up multiple VMs and installing sofware such as Oracle's RAC. While I'm most interested at this time with trying things with Linux and Xen, I'd also like to experiment with things such as VMWare and other applications (Yes, even maybe a windows 'box' in a VM). My main question is, what to try to get for hardware? While I have some money to spend, I don't want to, or need to, be laying out serious bread on server room class hardware. Are there some used boxes, say on eBay to look for? Are there any good solutions for new consumer level hardware that would be strong enough from someone like Dell? I'd be interested in maybe getting some bare bones boxes from NewEgg or TigerDirect even. What kind of box(es) would I need? Would a quad core type processor in one box be enough? Are there cheap blade servers out there I could get and wire up? Is there a relatively cheap shared disk setup I could buy or put together? I'd like to have something big and strong enough to do at least a 3 node Oracle RAC for an example, running ASM, and OCFS."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Generation Loss from hadto on Vimeo.

The pitch for this little video has the elegant and demented simplicity that is the hallmark of all great ideas: "Open the last saved jpeg image. Save it as a new jpeg image with slightly more compression. Repeat 600 times"

Generation Loss (via Beyond the Beyond)

Johnr99a writes: "I put up my first EC2 server yesterday in less than an hour. I think I could start it up again in 5 minutes or less. I have been computing personally and professionally since the '80's but have never owned a PC. I depend on work and public (library, school, etc.) machines. This works well today due to Google's cloud and flash drives. But, now I own my own server in the cloud! And, the price of ownership is finally right: $0.125/hour and no software licenses, maintenance, replacement costs, etc. I really feel powerful. I can configure the server as I choose, use it when I want and run it from anywhere. What could be better? It's all due to your efforts, Dave! Huge hugs!"

I am thinking about next steps. This first step seems to have been a success. Yes!

Here's what's been going on this week on the CRAFT blog:

Week three of Mending Month is over, with some great tips on mending clothes and housewares!

Matt Mets made a lemon cello for the label to go with his homemade limoncello.

Sean Ragan shows us how to use ball chain to make a plant hanger.

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Here are the Show Notes for Episode #003 of Make: Talk. Our guest was Forrest M. Mims III.

News of the Week
Before we talked to Forrest, Dale told us about his meeting with Rodney Brooks and Patrick Sobalvarro of Heartland Robotics and how they talked about radical changes happening in small-scale, cottage production and the role that makers are having and can have in the future in this arena. (Rodney Brooks is also one of the founders of iRobot and the former director of the MIT AI Lab.)

Dale also talked about the open source hardware event he'd participated in at MIT's Sloan School of Management. He talked about MIT's Eric Von Hippel, author of the book Democratizing Innovation. In the book, and on this panel, they talked about how innovation so frequently comes out of garages and basement workshops, out of the inspired hands of amateurs, rather than from the highly capitalized efforts of corporate R&D labs. You can read a free PDF copy of Hippel's book here.

Our First Caller!
We also had our first caller to the show, George Hrabovsky, president of the Society for Amateur Scientists branch in Madison, WI, known as MAST. George called in to say hi to Forrest, but Forrest was off doing his daily collection of scientific data, so we talked to George about what he does: Running MAST, doing microbiology experiments, consulting for Mathematica, and storm chasing, among many other things. Being our first caller, he won a Maker's Notebook.

Forrest on Fire
Forrest was a whirlwind of fascinating information and scientific wonderment. He talked about his new column in MAKE, "Country Scientist," and the solar aureole photos he shows how you can take in his first installment. He also talked about some of the simple instruments he's made for doing scientific data collection, such as the solar photo occluder rig found in Volume 17 and a sun photometer for measuring atmospheric haze, made from an LED turned into a spectrally-selective photodiode. Details of that device can be found here.

[Sarah Mims]

One of the cooler parts of the show was Forrest telling us how he's gotten his kids passionate about science, and how his daughter, Sarah, has made some novel scientific discoveries about aerosols, with a page on NASA's Earth Observatory describing them. She flew kites with paper cups suspended beneath them (with Petri dish agar inside) to collect dust samples from the sky above their Texas home. In that dust, she found viable fungal spores that had traveled all the way from Central America (carried by massive fires) in one test and sand from the Sahara Desert in another.

Next Episode of Make: Talk (Friday, March 27th, 12 noon PT, 3:00pm ET)
This coming Friday, we'll be talking to our pal John Park, host of the Maker Workshop on Make: television, contributor to MAKE magazine and Make: Online, and a character mechanic at Disney. We'll be talking to him about the TV show, his love of coffee and coffee gadgets (he did the "Florence Siphon Brewer" article in Volume 17), and other topics that strike our collective fancies. Also, we'll be sharing our favorite tricks, tips, and tools for the week, and giving away prizes!

And don't forget, this is live, call-in radio. The show runs for 45 minutes. Call in during showtime (12-12:45pm PT) and ask questions. The number is: (646) 915-8698. We hope you'll join us this Friday!

More:
Make: Talk episode 2 show notes and next episode
Make: Talk episode 1 show notes and next episode

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theodp writes "While the universal remote has served humanity with distinction, its days are numbered, and your smartphone is to blame. Whether you want to control your music, your television or your PowerPoint presentation, there's probably a solution using your phone. Try as it might, the universal remote simply can't navigate the digital world the way the smartphone can — it's a lot easier to put the remote's abilities in the smartphone than vice versa."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A promotion arrived in my email, offering 40 percent off on products from a company I'd done business with in the past. I was interested in a website construction tool that's gotten good reviews, and clicked the Buy button:

Without my asking, the company had added "Extended Download Service" for an extra few dollars. I dislike this kind of thing -- unrequested add-ons that have little utility in any case-- and I know I'm not alone in feeling this way.

In any case, I clicked the trashcan to remove the extended download service (something that any user could do at no extra cost with any remotely serious kind of backup system), and got back here:

I entered the promotional code and clicked "Apply" -- and what shows up again on the next screen? You guessed it: that extended download service:

At this point I closed that tab in my browser.

I realize we're in a recession, but this kind of behavior doesn't win new customers.

Peter N. M. Hansteen writes "Some spam houses have invested in real mail servers now, meaning that they are able to get past greylisting and even content filtering. Recently Peter Hansteen found himself resorting to active greytrapping to put some spammers in their place. The article also contains a list of spam houses' snail mail addresses in case you want to tour their sites."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Karsten sez, "The Tor Project together with The Electronic Frontier Foundation have been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2009! We are now looking for great students to join us in summer and work on either EFF's Switzerland project or on Tor. See the linked blog post for more information. Thanks!"

This will be our third Google Summer of Code after 2007 and 2008. In our first year we had four students working on making relays work better (and not crash) on Windows, on a library and tool to try alternative path selection algorithms, on a fuzzing library to look for parsing problems, and on scalability and privacy for hidden services. In our second year we had seven students. One of our successful students of the 2008 program wrote a nice blog post reviewing how GSoC went for him, for the other students, and for the project in general.

We have made resolutions for our third GSoC participation to make it even more successful than in the past years. We have set ourselves the limit of accepting no more than 4 students (plus up to 2 students mentored by EFF). Rather than being persuaded by all those great applications, we want to focus on the most promising projects and students. We plan to assign up to 3 mentors to each student to provide optimal support. We will try harder to encourage students to interact with the community and become a part of it. It may be challenging to discuss project ideas on a mailing list or in a chat room with dozens or hundreds of unknown people listening. But communication is an important part of the GSoC experience (if not the most important).

(Thanks, Karsten!!)

There's still time to start making or just watch this week's Weekend Project: DIY Stilts . You can view the video here, or subscribe in iTunes to get all our Weekend Projects and PDFs delivered each week.

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Mike Chapman points out this InfoWorld article, according to which you shouldn't immediately expect much in the way of performance gains from Windows 7 (or Linux) from eight-core chips that come out from Intel this year. "For systems going beyond quad-core chips, the performance may actually drop beyond quad-core chips. Why? Windows and Linux aren't designed for PCs beyond quad-core chips, and programmers are to blame for that. Developers still write programs for single-core chips and need the tools necessary to break up tasks over multiple cores. Problem? The development tools aren't available and research is only starting."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wikileaks needs your help:

Wikileaks is currently overloaded by readers. This is a regular difficulty that can only be resolved by deploying additional resources. If you support our mission, then show it in the way that is most needed. On average, each donation catalyzes the publication of around 150 mainstream press articles, exposing human rights abuses and corrupt government around the world. These exposures result in substantial reforms and have changed national election outcomes.

Wikileaks is overloaded by global interest (Thanks, PaulR!)

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Obama Administration's Department of Justice, with former RIAA lawyers occupying the 2nd and 3rd highest positions in the department, has shown its colors, intervening on behalf of the RIAA in the case against a Boston University graduate student, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, accused of file sharing when he was 17 years old. Its oversized, 39-page brief (PDF) relies upon a United States Supreme Court decision from 1919 which upheld a statutory damages award, in a case involving overpriced railway tickets, equal to 116 times the actual damages sustained, and a 2007 Circuit Court decision which held that the 1919 decision — rather than the Supreme Court's more recent decisions involving punitive damages — was applicable to an award against a Karaoke CD distributor for 44 times the actual damages. Of course none of the cited cases dealt with the ratios sought by the RIAA: 2,100 to 425,000 times the actual damages for an MP3 file. Interestingly, the Government brief asked the Judge not to rule on the issue at this time, but to wait until after a trial. Also interestingly, although the brief sought to rebut, one by one, each argument that had been made by the defendant in his brief, it totally ignored all of the authorities and arguments that had been made by the Free Software Foundation in its brief. Commentators had been fearing that the Obama/Biden administration would be tools of the RIAA; does this filing confirm those fears?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Singularity Hub has a story about the development of technology that will some day allow for the constant, real-time monitoring of your medical status, and they take a look at current technological advances to that end. Quoting: "Did you ever stop to think how silly and also how dangerous it is to live our lives with absolutely no monitoring of our body's medical status? Years from now people will look back and find it unbelievable that heart attacks, strokes, hormone imbalances, sugar levels, and hundreds of other bodily vital signs and malfunctions were not being continuously anticipated and monitored by medical implants. ... The huge amounts of data that would be accumulated from hundreds of thousands of continuously monitored people would be nothing short of a revolution for medical research and analysis. This data could be harvested to understand the minute by minute changes in body chemistry that occur in response to medication, stress, infection, and so on. As an example, the daily fluctuations in hormone levels of hundreds of thousands of individuals could be tracked and charted 24/7 to determine a baseline from which abnormalities and patterns could be extracted. The possibilities are enormous."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paper based designs can lead to paper clip designs. It is good how he has each of the parts he needs ready to show.

Look ma, no pliers!

This one has a good narrative explaining the choices involved.

The video in this one is blurry, but the design is neat, and the subtitles definitely help. Using pliers seems to be a rarity in the clipstand artform.

A search for ipod paperclip gives some decent results, but nothing for G1 paperclip. What's up with that?

So here are a few ideas of ways to hold up your phone for viewing. If you have a better idea, please comment it up. Got a video? Send along the link. Took some photos, did you? Add them to the MAKE Flickr pool if you would.

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On Friday evening, Battlestar Galactica ended its four-season run as one of the most popular science fiction shows in recent history. 2.4 million people tuned in for the finale, and reactions to the ending — positive, negative, and often a mix of both — are springing up all over the internet, as are tributes and retrospectives. Producers Ron Moore and David Eick held a Q&A session after the finale to discuss certain aspects of the story and spell out the final status of several plot lines. Fans of the show will have a chance to see the Cylon side of the story this fall in a two-hour TV movie titled "The Plan," and we've previously discussed the spin-off prequel series, Caprica, the pilot for which will come out on April 21st. Be warned: these links and the following discussion will contain spoilers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's likely that this post will provoke another flame from Mozilla-land, so in anticipation, let me explain that my ideas aren't special.

I started writing publicly about ideas I can't implement myself a very long time ago, starting with a piece I wrote for an Apple newsletter in the mid-80s wondering what a computer that was built into a car might look like. Later, I put these ideas on products, like UserLand IAC Toolkit, where I thought it would be great if databases, graphics programs, comm apps, etc all had programming interfaces so we could create scripts that used them as toolkits. I wanted to see the combination of the command line and the GUI, and thought the Macintosh was the place to do it.

I remember very clearly where I was when I realized that I could publish these things on my own, not as part of someone else's newsletter, or waiting for a product to ship, that with just a website, I could share ideas that I couldn't implement, in the hope that they could help move things forward faster. That's where the archive starts, and the first such piece was an outline of how Apple and IBM could cooperate on Mac OS, in 1994. Since then I've done it many times.

This has earned me a lot of ire in the tech world, I never understood why -- my missives are usually ignored, proving that no one has to listen. But I've heard from friendly people inside the BigCos who explain that this is the reason I don't get invited to their conferences or press events. Apparently they're scared of something. Too bad, cause I really am harmless.

Anyway, the pushback I got from Mozilla (and I say it was from Mozilla because no one else from the company said anything publicly to contradict what Mr Dotzler said) was: "We don't want to hear from you." He said it with more vigor and more detail. That's okay Mr. Dotzler but you don't get a say in whether I speak or not, because there are other users, and other browser-makers, and I like to leave milestones so in case I was right I get to gloat (and if I'm wrong others get proof that I'm stupid). I find the discussion itself useful, often when people disagree they show me things I hadn't considered, and that kind of learning is precious. But of course no one has to listen.

Anyway, enough preamble.

Here's the problem not just with Firefox but with browsers in general.

Their evolution was deformed by Microsoft's "strategy tax."

That is, browsers are not allowed to compete with two Microsoft cash cows: Office and Windows.

Who said this was so? Well, Microsoft did. And since they had a monopoly in browsers for a very important period in the growth of the web, this became an unwritten rule, an assumption that no one challenges. People roll their eyes when you say that the web should evolve to become a spreadsheet, email program, graphics app, or whatever. But that doesn't mean it's wrong. I've seen plenty of people roll their eyes at ideas that eventually became booms. Like PCs, and blogs, and on and on.

But in fact, even though that's the unwritten rule -- the web has evolved in those directions. The problem is, in doing so, the web which was wonderful for its View-Source simplicity, became a Tower of Babel that you need a degree in rocket science to program for. This both wrong and unnecessary.

For an example of how ridiculous it has become, why is it that we have to install a plug-in to view a video on YouTube? Why can't the browser do that on its own?

Another example. I have a two-level expand-collapse display on my blog. I'm one of very few blogs that has this. Why? It was a pain in the ass to program. And it's only two levels. Why isn't this something the browser can do with no programming. Let me mark up my text to indicate a hierarchy and give me (the author) or the user the option to browse it in an outline.

I think you get the idea. We're stuck -- on the one hand simple stuff is still simple, I can produce a 1995-era web page exactly the same way I did in 1995 and it still works. Thank gods for that. But if I want to use the latest UI techniques I either have to master the art, and it's not easy to master, or hire someone to do it and then the idea suffers in translation, and is only open to people who can afford to hire programming help.

Firefox, or any other browser, could blast right through this.

And it is especially important that Firefox hear this, because in my gut -- I have to believe that Google understands this, because they have people whose job it is to make spreadsheets, word processing, mail, maps, calendars, etc work better in the browser. When they meet with people on the Chrome team, I'd bet anything they ask for special features in the browser. And why shouldn't the Chrome guys give them what they want? It would make their apps more efficient and potentially more beautiful and easier to use. This is something every user would love.

So that's my rant for the day.

Asa, have a great time telling everyone that I'm an unappreciative fuck.

Houston 2600 sends this excerpt from the Register about an open-source security assessment tool Microsoft presented at CanSecWest: "Microsoft on Friday released an open-source program designed to streamline the labor-intensive process of identifying security vulnerabilities in software while it's still under development. As its name suggests, !exploitable Crash Analyzer (pronounced 'bang exploitable crash analyzer') combs through bugs that cause a program to seize up, and assesses the likelihood of them being exploited by attackers. Dan Kaminsky, a well-known security expert who also provides consulting services to Microsoft, hailed the release a 'game changer' because it provides a reliable way for developers to sort through thousands of bugs to identify the several dozen that pose the greatest risk."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNet reports on legislation currently being drafted that would transfer federal cybersecurity responsibilities away from the Department of Homeland Security. Instead, they would fall under the authority of the Executive Office of the President, creating an Office of the National Cybersecurity Advisor. A tech commission recommended relieving the DHS of cybersecurity responsibilities late last year, saying it simply wasn't prepared to deal with organized online threats. More recently, the director of the DHS's National Cybersecurity Center resigned, citing interference from the NSA. The new legislation would "put the White House National Cybersecurity Advisor in charge of coordinating cyber efforts within the intelligence community and within civilian agencies, as well as coordinating the public sector's cooperation with the private sector. The adviser would have the authority to disconnect from the Internet any federal infrastructure networks — or other networks deemed to be 'critical' — if found to be at risk of a cyberattack. The private sector will certainly speak out if this provision is included in the final draft of the bill, a representative of the technology industry who spoke on condition of anonymity said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Image from KuiperCliff

The Steven writes in the comments:

You say DIY bride, I think of Helen O'Loy by Lester Del Rey

Well, maybe you haven't heard of ol' Helen O'Loy either. O'Loy sounds a lot like Alloy, doesn't it?

Spoiler Alert: Don't read the wikipedia entry, it gives too much info.

Spoiler-less synopsys:

Dave and Phil are two pals who spend a lot of time together. Although Dave is a robot repairman and Phil is a doctor, they become increasingly interested in building their own robotic housekeeper. Finally they produce "Lena", a housekeeping robot who does a pretty good job of things, but she still lacks the common sense that comes from having emotions. After trying - and failing - with mechanical glands in Lena, they order a high quality Dillard's robot to experiment with. The results are good, but a little bit too real as their new creation, Helen, falls madly in love with one of them.

Maybe you want to read it for yourself, then Google Books is your friend. Or if you want to hold a real atomic version, then you can have that too.

Read any good robofiction lately?

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narramissic writes "Researchers with security consultancy IOActive have created a worm that could quickly spread among Smart Grid devices, small computers connected to the power grid that give customers and power companies better control over the electricity they use. '[The worm] spread from one meter to another and then it changed the text in the LCD screen to say "pwned,"' said Travis Goodspeed, an independent security consultant who worked with the IOActive team. In the hands of a malicious hacker, this code could be used to cut power to Smart Grid devices that use a feature called 'remote disconnect,' which allows power companies to cut a customer's power via the network. The robustness of US power networks has been a hot-button issue after a technical glitch in 2003 caused a cascading power failure in the eastern United States and Canada that affected 55 million people."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LEGO hacker Philo Hurbain needed a way to model some of the more complex LEGO parts for use in the LDraw LEGO CAD program. Most LEGO parts are easy to model, but something like the tiny LEGO frog, shown above, is a little more tricky. Philo's solution: a 3D scanner made entirely of LEGO, save for a needle that's used as the probe.

I am a LDraw parts author, and as such I am always interested to find new ways to model LEGO parts. Many parts have a clear geometric structure and are relatively easy to create, but parts like the frog pictured above have no defined geometric shape and are very difficult to model. I toyed for a while with the idea of a 3D scanner... The solution came with 2008 LEGO Technic sets that include a new part, the linear actuator. These nifty device convert the rotation movement of a motor into a linear movement. Coupled with the high resolution of NXT encoder, I had all the elements to build a 3D scanner, precise enough for my purpose.

...

The probe module (red/yellow) moves the probing needle back and forth as well as up and down. When the probe needle touches the object, the location of the contact point is recorded. The object module (white/blue) is able to move back and forth the object and rotate it. All the movements combined provide either a cartesian or a cylindrical scan.

If you're interested in making one of these, Philo has posted the MLCad files for the device, the pbLua source that operates the NXT brain, and instructions for turning the scan coordinate log into a usable mesh.

NXT 3D scanner [via Dan's Data Blog]

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From the MAKE Flickr pool

• Laser sundial [above, bottom-left]

• How-To: Sample sequencer w/ Meggy Jr. + Arduino WaveShield

• DIY photobooth looks classic

• LED badge hacking

• MIDI control panel based on Arduino with a personal touch [above, bottom-right]

• Trumpet Hero mod [above, top-right]

• Keeping time with ChronoDot [above, top-left]

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MJackson writes "BT has revealed new details about the roll-out of its £1.5bn programme to deploy super fast fibre optic broadband to as many as 10 million UK homes (40%) by 2012. Scotland will become one of the first places to benefit from next-generation broadband services, with more than 34,000 homes and businesses in Edinburgh and Glasgow receiving speeds of up to 40Mbps and potentially 60Mbps from early next year (2010). Overall, BT Openreach, which is responsible for ensuring that all rival operators have equality of access to BT's local network, aims to deploy Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) based next generation broadband services next summer (2010) to 500,000 homes and businesses in the UK."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This Pool Racer project is built on the 3pi.

The Pololu 3pi robot is a complete, high-performance mobile platform featuring two micro metal gearmotors, five reflectance sensors, an 8×2 character LCD, a buzzer, and three user pushbuttons, all connected to a C-programmable ATmega168 microcontroller. Capable of speeds exceeding 3 feet per second, 3pi is a great first robot for ambitious beginners and a perfect second robot for those looking to move up from non-programmable or slower beginner robots.

Their resources section has a mess of good stuff, project ideas, info on motors and electricity, and some great customer projects.

Look like fun? Have you tried this system? Drop us a line in the comments, and send over some pictures and video to the MAKE Flickr pool.

In the Maker Shed:

Pololu 3pi Robot

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Matt_dk writes "Does a twin Earth exist somewhere in our galaxy? Astronomers are getting closer and closer to finding an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit. NASA's Kepler spacecraft just launched to find such worlds. Once the search succeeds, the next questions driving research will be: Is that planet habitable? Does it have an Earth-like atmosphere? Answering those questions will not be easy. 'We'll have to be really lucky to decipher an Earth-like planet's atmosphere during a transit event so that we can tell it is Earth-like,' said Kaltenegger. 'We will need to add up many transits to do so — hundreds of them, even for stars as close as 20 light-years away.'" The abstract of their paper offers a link to the complete paper as a 17-page PDF; here is a short description from 2007 of the same researchers' work, outlining the type of spectral signature that an Earth-like atmosphere would be expected to show.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Patty Maes of the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab introduces what may be the must have gadget in the not so far future.

The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user's pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user's hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques. The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers (visual tracking fiducials) at the tip of the user's fingers using simple computer-vision techniques. The movements and arrangements of these fiducials are interpreted into gestures that act as interaction instructions for the projected application interfaces. The maximum number of tracked fingers is only constrained by the number of unique fiducials, thus SixthSense also supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction.

Thanks Lyle and Susan.

Want to give this system a try? She says it can be made from off the shelf parts for just $350. Post up your ideas in the comments, and show us your stuff in the MAKE Flickr pool.

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Arnie87 writes "One Microsoft Way has an interesting article suggesting that the reason Microsoft is focusing so much on speed with Windows 7 is the whopping sales of netbooks. The article concludes by saying: 'If you plan on adopting Windows 7, you have the netbook to be thankful for, because Vista's successor would be a very different beast if Microsoft had less motivation to pursue performance.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MyrddinTheGeek needed a cover for his Kindle:

The Kindle 2 unfortunately doesn't come with a cover so I made one with a makers notebook. I cored out the pages to the thickness of the kindle. Now I have a hard sided cover a few extra pages for notes and all the reference pages in the back.

Shawn Augustson, of ArduinoFun, mounted a breadboard and an Arduino on the cover of his Notebook.

 

Shawn also sketched up this idea for an Arduino-powered fridge alert system that he breadboarded... er in his Maker's Notebook.

More:
The Maker's Notebook page on Make: Online

In the Maker Shed:

 

Pick up The Maker's Notebook ($19.99) for all your big ideas, diagrams, patterns, etc. Exclusive to the Maker Shed: Sticker sheets and a band closure to customize your book.

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Over at Orange Crate Art, Michael Leddy linked to a fun page of "Call Letter Origins" revealing the meaning behind the letters of many radio stations. Here are a few:

CILQ
Toronto, ON
CILQ='silk'
Note: was to be easy listening, silky smooth, now rock

HCJB(SW)
Quito, Ecuador
H)eralding C)hrist J)esus' B)lessings
Note: in Spanish - H)oy C)hristo J)esus B)endice

KAND
Corsicana, TX
Wolf Brand Canned (KAND='canned') Chili Company, wanted W)O)L)F) but FCC regulations prohibited

Call Letter Origins

Model Boat Mayhem is a great resource for model boat builders. The site has a bunch of good info, pictures, advice and more.

There is an active forum for builders with loads of tips and help. People on the forum are helpful and civil from what I can see.

Here are some other boat building resources from Make: Online:

• At Maker Faire Austin this past year I met up with Jerry from the North Texas Battle Group.


• Speed control circuit for radio controlled boats by Phillip


• Mini hybrid electric engines from the forums


• Model yacht plans (and construction photos) The plans are 404, sorry

Where do you get your info about building projects? Who helps you learn techniques? Post up your ideas in the comments and bring on your photos and video to the MAKE Flickr pool.

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