The devs over at the Fedora Project are hard at work on the development version: Rawhide. They’ve just setup automated nightly builds of the liveCD which can easily be downloaded and tested on a CD, DVD, USB drive, virtual machine, or separate partition.

Rawhide will be released as Fedora 12 upon completion.  With this version you have a choice of Gnome 2.28 or KDE 4.3 for your desktop.  There is also improved power management, expanded support for mobile broadband, easy bug reporting, and many more new or improved features. So roll up your sleeves, download last night’s build, and help test some open source software.

[via Download Squad]

These wearable LED toys called Bliplace are freshly made and headed to Burning Man. They’re pretty much just a sound reactive toy, but [Tanjent] decided to go pretty in depth in the design. They are 1″ wide octagons with 3 super bright LEDs and a microphone. The microphone is sampled at 4400 hz by the ATTiny25v and the signal is split into high and low frequency streams. The center LED is low frequency, the sides are the high. They can run a full week on a battery. He’ll be handing out 350 of them at Burning Man, then releasing the source code, boards, and kits after that.

Generation 2.0 of RepRap, the self replicating 3d printer, is approaching realization. Code named “Mendel”, the new design will be wedge shaped rather than a box which offers a few benefits. The overall design is smaller than the original RepRap but the printable area is larger. This means more functionality with less building material. With each new generation of this project the assembly gets easier and total parts price drops making the RepRap available to a much wider audience.

The RepRap blog has put forth some design specs, a picture of the assembled prototype, and has links for general assembly information (ZIP). We won’t see a finished version of this released for a few months but so far it looks like a big leap forward.

Overclockers are always trying to come up with new, colder, and quieter ways to keep their PCs cool. [gigs] was so dedicated to this, he decided to lay 6 meters of copper pipe to use as a radiator in his new house’s foundation. As of now, the foundation is laid (copper pipes and all), and the forum posts come complete with finished slab pics, though there is no house to speak of yet.

[via Slashdot]

goodTimes.searchEngine is an experimental set up to display search engine results. Be sure you’re using Firefox or IE, because it isn’t working with chrome right now.  [Gordon] pointed us to it and asked for our feedback. We had a pretty quick list of improvements we would like to see, such as the category changes not popping up in new windows, or the new windows appearing on top for that matter. Or most importantly, a way to transition from the fancy preview window to a new tab or window. We are curious to hear your thoughts on this. What would make it better? Is it even needed? Is he building a tool to fix a problem that isn’t there? With Bing showing some nice new features over google, would something like this be of more use?

The new PS3 Slim has just been released, and ifixit has already posted a teardown. First, they easily removed the included 120GB hard drive, suggesting that upgrading it  shouldn’t be too hard. In order to get inside the cover, however, they needed to use a security Torx screwdriver. In the end, the Blu-ray drive turned out to be the bulkiest component, followed by some surprisingly gigantic fans. Hopefully this means that Sony won’t have to deal with overheating issues.

Related: Nintendo DSi Teardown

[nmcclana] has posted an assembly walkthrough for an Arduino-style prototyping board for the 80 MHz, eight core Parallax Propeller Microcontroller. While not board compatible with Arduino shields like the ARM-based Maple board we covered, it does have that familiar layout, and provides access to all 32 I/O pins, and the 3.8″ x 2.5″ footprint was kept in mind to allow easy creation of shields modules that can be designed using ExpressPCB’s miniboard service. The Platform Kit also has the advantage over other Propeller kits such as SchmartBoard’s offerings, which require soldering of surface mount parts. Kits are available at Gadget Gangster, and ready for your next design that needs a little more sauce than the Arduino can offer.

A bench vice can be one of the most used tools in your workshop.  For those that don’t have a workshop [Matt] built a vice that clamps to a table. He used scrap wood, MDF, threaded rod, washers, nuts, and wing nuts.  Cheap, easy to build, and very useful!

[via Toolmonger]