Lots of people buy noise makers for New Year’s eve, others opt to sing Auld Lang Syne – then there’s these guys.

The crew at Stone Brewing Company throw an annual bash at their brewery in celebration of New Years, and while [Dino’s] countdown timer is great for intimate settings, they needed something bigger to wow the crowd. A busted half barrel was all the inspiration they needed to build the “Doomsday Keg of Radness”.

[Mike Palmer], the Creative Director at Stone handed the keg off to the maintenance crew for some remodeling, and got ready to fit it with all sorts of lights and other goodies. Holes drilled in the keg were fitted with bright pulsing LEDs, while additional LED light strips were laid out around the perimeter. The bottom was cut out to accommodate a Moonflower LED module, and a 24” monitor was strapped to the side in order to display a countdown timer. An old Macbook jammed inside the keg runs the video display, while the rest of the lighting is remotely controlled with an RF transmitter.

Now mind you this all went down last year, but since the display was such a hit, they will be busting it out again for the 2011 celebration.

Check out the short demo video below to get a look at the Doomsday Keg in action.

You all know that person.

The one who picks up every present with their name on it, shaking it before busting into their best Carnac the Magnificent impression. Heck, you might even be that person.

[Jason] was thinking about how to combat the gift shaker in his life and put together a simple prank that’s sure to provide him some enjoyment when the shaking and guessing commences.

He bought a premade audio module that stores about 20 seconds of sound, replacing the pushbutton trigger with a pair of wires that can easily make contact when the box is vigorously moved. Everything was carefully mounted in a gift box before being wrapped and set under the tree to surprise the eager gift shaker.

We definitely like the idea, since there are a plethora of ways to customize/enhance [Jason’s] work to fit your specific needs. Whether you go with the kitten/puppy in a box theme, or wire in an incredibly loud alarm, your resident gift inspector will never look at presents the same way again!

Continue reading to see [Jason] explain his gift prank in more detail.

You’ve probably been fantasizing about getting amazing gifts this December, like robots with servo-mounted laser pointers and authentic battle damage. It’s time to realize that it’s unlikely that this will happen. Stay calm. You can still get sweet hacky things if you just forward this gift-giving guide to your friends and loved ones.

Join us after the break to see what we want and be sure to let us know what you’ve got your eye on.

Basic Tools

Everyone needs a good set of tools, but a depressing number of people lack even the most basic elements of an electronics workshop. Teeth may have served you for years but we highly recommend an adjustable wire stripper (fun fact: if you dress it up with googly eyes it looks like a dinosaur). This pair of flush cutters is honestly the most fulfilling hand tool available, making every hacking session a cathartic series of precise snips. For the ultimate experience consider the ever-useful electronics multitool. You can’t very well make good use of these tools without good visibility, so shed some light on the situation with the humble clamp lamp and its more capable cousin, the magnifying clamp lamp.

Luxurious Options

If you’re more of a martinis-and-caviar hacker you can spare some cash for fancy kits like those drool-worthy makerbot apparatuses or the succulent-sounding synth kits from PAiA. For a homegrown approach, you could put together simple kits for your own project ideas–a perfect excuse to teach the little ones how to solder!

Development Platforms

Nothing beats the narcotic possibilities of powerful general-purpose hardware. For an affordable and pint-sized software dev machine this Dell Mini comes to mind, great for a hackintosh. Does your hacker giftee really want a dog but can’t handle the constant stream of cleanups? Give them a beagleboard and encourage them to build a no-mess robopuppy. If you’re comfortable giving a child’s toy to a grown adult, don’t forget the ever-hackable furby. For a more personalized approach we recommend hacking a dancing santa from the local department store and converting it into a terrifying and festive Santapede gift–win prizes while you’re at it, but you’d better have it done by November 30th!

Undecided?

You can always go the route of gift certificates and let people pick out their own gift, you uncreative buffoon, to juicy sites like Adafruit, Seeed Studios, Sparkfun, Macetech. seeedstudio, littlebirdelectronics, and MakerSHED.

If you have more gift ideas please for goodness sakes share them in the comments! We all need to band together, some of us are really sweating about the holiday season. Whatever hacky loot you end up distributing, don’t forget to include the greatest hack of all: love.

Got 30 minutes for a holiday project and don’t want to get wrangled into some sort of decoupage disaster? Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories can show you just how easy it is to do edge lighting effects. Pictured above are three holiday cards constructed using scored plastic. You can use many different types of clear plastic for this, not just acrylic. The lighting is just an LED on a coincell. Black tape is used to prevent light leaking from the edges. The red and green version above is two stacked layers. This looks like something fun to scale up for a larger project or just to kill some time.

Gift-giving season is upon us, and it’s time for people to start panicking about what to give to their friends and families. Gift cards have gained in popularity over the years, as companies count on people to forget to use them. But how about gift cards that do more than store a token amount of cash? Best Buy is now selling a gift card that doubles as a speaker. It has a mini headphone jack that’ll plug into any audio player. You only need to spend fifteen dollars to get it. Target’s gone all out, with a gift card that is also a 1.2 MP digital camera. It comes with a USB cord and driver disk, and there’s even one with a 64MB USB flash drive. We’re very interested to see if these will take off, and what people will do with them once the cards are used up.

[via Gizmodo]

We’re barely past Halloween and people are already working on their next LED based holiday decorations. For Hanukkah, Gizmodo pointed out the PCB menorah pictured above. It uses a set of DIP switches to control which LEDs are lit. A couple years ago, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories put together a tutorial for building a more minimal LED menorah. Each of the nine LEDs are soldered directly to the legs of an ATtiny2313 microcontroller. Every time you power up the device an additional LED is lit. [Ori] liked the project and decided to take a slightly different approach. He used an LM3914 DIP18 LED bar driver. A potentiometer controls how many of the LEDs are illuminated.

Wow, Caribbean Conquest Day is such a dull holiday. If it’s a holiday at all: we’re at work today and you probably are too. We decided to post what we’re working on in hopes of breaking out of our holiday slump. Pictured above are two IR illuminator boards we assembled this weekend. We bought the kits from BG Micro. We’re planning on testing their camera blocking ability once we come up with a ~13V portable power source.

That’s what we’re doing. What have you been working on lately?

(If anyone can find a source for the welding goggles in the picture, we’d love to hear it.)