In case you missed them the first time, here are our most popular posts from the past week:

In first place is a post about a video by [Rear Admiral Grace Hopper] where she talks about how to visualize a nanosecond using a piece of copper wire.

Coming in at second is one that we are pretty excited about here at HAD. The Raspberry Pi has finally launched! For those of you who haven’t been following its progress, this is a small (roughly the size of a credit card) Linux computer that costs only $35 for the better model! We can think of all sorts of things that we would like to use them for but alas, even we can’t get our grubby hands on them quite yet since they are already completely sold out.

Next we have a weather station for the virtual weather within Minecraft. This project uses a small LCD and an Arduino to tell you if you need to be wearing your virtual raincoat.

If you have been looking for a way to anodize titanium at home instead of sending out your parts to a service, here is a post for you.

Finally, we finish up with a post that we like a lot. It is about three remote controlled ‘airplanes’ that were flown near the Brooklyn Bridge that look a lot like people when seen from a distance.

In case you have been on vacation, here is the best that we have had on our blog in the past week:

In first place is a post about [the University of Pennsylvania’s] quadcopter team. This time they have a group of twenty quadcopters flying in formation.

In second place is a post about a nice project by [Joel] where he converted an overhead projector into a TV projector by projecting through a LCD TV. He went all-out on this one by using a CNC machine to cut out a special holder for the LCD and the fans necessary to cool it.

Next up we have a post about a project where a 55 gallon plastic barrel is turned into a wind turbine. We’re not sure about how much power this would produce but it would probably be fun to play around with.

Following that is a follow up post about Printrbot, an inexpensive 3D printer which we previously posted about. It was a successful Kickstarter project a couple of months ago and now the design files have been released into the wild. Check it out!

Finally we finish off with a post about how to build a solid-state Tesla coil. It’s presented in an Instructable with 12 easy steps so that you too can feed your high-voltage addiction.

In case you were asleep at the wheel, here are our top stories of the week.

Our most popular post was one that shows you how to make your own ‘personal assistant’ using Wolfram Alpha, text to speech software, and the phone network. It still won’t get your coffee though. You’ll just have to do that yourself.

Coming in at second place was a post about how to use your Android camera phone as a Geiger counter. Of course, this hack will work with any device that uses a CMOS sensor to do its imaging but they have gone and wrapped it up into a nice app.

Do you have access to a laser cutter and a burning desire (pun intended) to make gears? In this post Alex makes some acrylic gears using an Epilog laser cutter.

When is our government going to get it through their heads that we don’t want the internet to be controlled by a small group of corporations? Probably when the lobbyists stop giving them money by the boat load to do just that… It seems like several times a year a bill comes through that would severely restrict the internet or would at least allow someone to shut down a website without any sort of due process. Luckily, groups like the EFF are paying attention and are well organized for getting the word out there. This post was our stand against the current bills that threaten our internet freedom.

Finally, on a lighter note, we have a post about how to do ultrasonic welding on the cheap using a ‘heat staker’ and a small drill press.