So, did you hear about those Girl Scouts kicking ass with their home built telescope? [via] Here I thought they were only about overpriced cookies. The telescope is a “Dobsonian”; a design over 50 years old and named for creator John Dobson. People have been building these long before commercial telescopes were available. Here is a link to a pdf describing how-to build one of these monsters.
[thanks marc melcher]
Ah, the weekend, time to relax and
Here’s the latest entry in “future robot overlord watch”. Each stick is driven by a pneumatic cylinder. The control is generated using a midi file as the source. The system is completely modular. You assign instruments to individual channels based on what you have so it should be able to play any kit. My favorite quote from the FAQ: Q: What do you use to generate the midi files? A: Google.
[thanks synth-c]
The Atari Flashback is a game system that includes 40 original Atari 2600 games for about $30. The games are placed on a rom chip just like the original except it is soldered inside the case instead of on a cartridge. You can bypass the rom chip with a couple toggle switches and add an external cartridge adapter to play any of the original 2600 games. All of the pinouts are marked on board and the site has links to get the proper connector. Time to start hitting up ebay for the big game lots.
[thanks hk-47]
A few people sent this in, but credit goes to [chris tt] for providing all the necessary links. Here is the process for using the camera with windows. First you need to build a USB cable [pdf]. Next, plug in the camera and create an inf file using libUSB. Finally, grab the OPS program and start extracting the video. Here is the thread announcing the release. Congratulations to BillW, morcheeba, daBass and anyone else who helped contribute to the project.
UPDATE: MAKE:Blog has a chronology of how this latest development happened.
Ah, back in Nebraska, back to work, and back to regular installments of hacking. For the musicians out there (I know there are quite a few of you) here is a guide to building electronic drum triggers. Full disclosure: they sell the parts on the site. So here is a different link for some free info.
[thanks patrick]
There are a lot things to get annoyed about at Defcon: the lines, the heat, slow network
