Jared at inventgeek did aninterview and HAD got some screen time. You can catch it here. We get mentioned near the end. Jared, your office is way too clean.

Today I’m jonsing for my mig welder that was lost during a move. Remember the microwave oven foundry? If you’ve got a few old ovens around, you can gut em and build an arc welder. The transformers generate the voltage, and an SCR circuit makes the arc adjustable. Of course if arc isn’t your style, you can build your own TIG welder. Since you can score an arc for $150-300, but a TIG costs more – I’d go TIG.

Eric sent in his aux-in jack for his factory oldsmobile radio. We seen similar stuff before, but the implimentation is clean and simple.

I can’t read Czech, but [Dzinn] sent in some interesting looking lens mods for a Gsmart LCD3 digital camera. The mod is clean and allows SLR type lenses to be used in place of the original (fixed?) lens.

[Dheera] sent in the latest in uses for blue LEDs – a classic building window 6×6 matrix display.

I dug up some more cool tube projects. The Altoobs – a altoid tin based ham transmitter. Too bad the power supply is freakin huge.

I was looking for one of these the other day. This hybrid (solid state + tube) headphone amp is portable, running off of 12V. The site is loaded with headphone amp designs.

I built a chu moy headphone amp a while back, but tube amps are getting my interest. Chu Moy released a nice writeup of a tube based headphone amp. Ironically, tubes are easy, getting the right transformer is the issue these days.

Allright, the keyboard light thing was a bit weak. Check out this el cheapo cd light spectrometer. The refractive properties of a CD are exploited to break up visible light into it’s components. Definitely an unexpected use of a CD. Of course, if you’re going for substance detection, you can use your CDROM as a spectrometer to identify uh, suspicous substances.

Another memory hack today. The TI calcs have gotten quite a following. (I’ll admit to writing blackjack for the 85 back in the day.) Michael, Brandon and Dan wrote a complete driver to let them use usb flash drives with the TI-84+.