I’m attending the funeral of my best friend’s father today. As a mechanical engineer, I always admired the man as an excellent machinist. What follows is a post I wrote last year about his gas powered blender. You’ll be sorely missed Mr. Frost.

My roommate Frosty has often joked about how many lawnmowers and weedeaters his dad has laying around. It seems that his dad has decided to take care of the clutter and I, for one, am scared. Yes my friends, a gas powered blender. It has been done before, but you’ve got to respect Greg’s scratch building prowess. Finally you can vaporize ice in mere seconds and with the way the handle bars are mounted it’s guaranteed to make the goofying process far more intimate than usual. By my count this means he still has four more engines in the garage; I don’t know what’s next, but god help us all.

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Here’s a pretty rough project for cutting records out of acrylic. It uses a standard turntable for the base. The carving head is a chisel shaped needle attached to a small speaker. Speaker movement is translated into needle vibrations. The head is hand cranked across the surface of the record. The final addition to the system is a vacuum hose to remove the acrylic threads. I wish they would have spent more time taking pictures of this thing than making flash animations.

[thanks vennox]

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U-Verse is AT&T’s fiber IPTV service. No matter how many set top boxes you have in your household AT&T limits the number of DVRs to just one. So, what hardcore countermeasure did they employ to lock down their users? They unplugged the hard drive! No. Really. You don’t even have to look at this article by Hack-A-Day reader [Chad Brantly]; just unscrew the the cover, plug the drive in, and you’re done.

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I always enjoy hackers who build items that have been mass produced for years. Take Charles Altmann’s DIY Turntable. Audiophiles would have to pay an arm and a leg to get something this unique. The base and platter are made from stacks of plywood. The spindle is a Harley-Davidson Shovelhead intake valve and guide. The motor drive is actually a stepper motor. Precision speed control is provided by computer generated sine waves. His homebuilt tonearm was what got him interested in building the entire table.

[thanks bp]

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