Someone else’s apathy often becomes someones motivation. The guys at Gordian Labs got sick of trying to use Nike’s website so they dug into their iPods to find the data generated by the iPod+Nike running shoe add on. Then they put together a handy site for processing the data from the iPod. The site also accepts GPX data, so you can combine it with GPS data to track your runs and your routes. After they showed it to me, I prodded them and they put together a short How-To on getting the data under Mac, Windows and Linux.
Wii Laptop How-To (Part 1)
Part one of Ben’s Wii Laptop How-To series is up. Ben spends it discussing gutting the Wii, starting up his CAD process for designing the enclosure and makes the thing even smaller than it was before. Because the Wii is so small to begin with, I think alot of people assumed that he just slapped it into a case and added the display.
Concrete Cast Speakers
[Markus] sent in his 5.1 concrete speaker project. Each speaker is cast from a single piece of concrete. The inner cavity is created using the dear old lost-wax technique. The writeup is in german, but the process is pretty clear.
Magnetic Strip Resistor MIDI Controller
[Joel] sent me a tip where I discovered this fun hack. It reminds me of the old pencil lead resistor trick. It looks like Ableton Live has been inspiring quite a few original controllers.
From the post: (Myspace doesn’t seem to have individual post linking)
“If you REALLY want to do this, the code is here. It is sloppily written in PASM for the Ubicom SX microcontroller running at 50Mhz addressing an ADC0808 (datasheet) 8 bit parallel ADC, because it’s the year 1993.”
Make Your Own Laptop
[Richard] pointed out this mini-itx laptop. The idea behind this particular design is to enable upgrading every component as needed. The case is aluminum, and the wiring inside is an exercise in patience. It’s not the first DIY laptop we’ve seen, and it doesn’t have batteries, but it’s the first I’ve seen with two internal hard drives.
Update: There is a battery, it just gets very little mention. It’s hiding under the DVD drive and one of the hard drives. Anyone know what kind it is?
Ben Heck’s Wii Laptop On Engadget
[Ben Heckendorn] put together this little beauty on engadget. It’s not quite as over the top as the XBox 360 laptop, but there’s a reason for that. He’ll be putting up a How-To series covering the construction. If you’ve been pondering building a portable yourself, it’ll be a nice jump start for your hardware hacking skill-base.
PS3 DVR How-To
If you glanced at the PS3 and thought it was too expensive, this might help you justify spending your green. [ken_vs_ryu] put up a mini tutorial on running mythtv under Linux on the PS3 with an external USB capture device. When you consider the cost of a decent machine, video card and blue-ray drive, it’s not a bad deal. (I’m not sure how many Plextor ConvertX encoders you can run at once.) To get things working, you’ll have to thumb through the Gentoo Wiki for the details on setting up the ConvertX.
