Twinkle Toes

Twinkle Toes
Add a flashing, tricolor UFO to your roller skates
Dan Bassak | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 4 pgs | 2 mb

Skatetown is our local roller rink in Bloomsburg, Pa.
For years, it's also been my artistic LED experiment
laboratory. I started by taping single-color LEDs to
skates. They were so popular that one session on
the floor looked like a swarm of fireflies.

My latest LED invention is the UFO Toe Stop. It
uses a disk-shaped "flying saucer" unit that con-
tains a red, green, and blue (RGB) LED. I wanted to
blend the colors in interesting ways, so I wired it to
a PIC-controlled RGB microcontroller that comes
with programmed routines such as fixed colors,
fast-changing rainbows, or dazzling strobe effects.

I also used some translucent jam plugs (small
bolt covers used in skate dancing) that I bought in
the rink's pro shop as light diffusers.
...

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Paulownia Archery Bows

Paulownia Archery Bows
Dan Albert | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 3 pgs | 2 mb

When we took possession of our humble London
home, I was shocked to find that all the window
treatments had been removed. So we suffered
the rat-in-a-maze Ikea gantlet to get a good price
on new Venetian blinds. I hung the new blinds
immediately but it took me months to get around
to tailoring them by removing the extra slats.
As soon as I did, I realized that I had a maker's
trifecta win in my hands: easily worked hardwood,
prefinished and free.

First I built a new box for our kitchen plastic wrap,
then my daughter wanted some doll furniture. Next
was a laminated beam to repair our baby stroller,
and a few slats to serve as drawer dividers for the
clothes dresser I'd built ages ago but never quite
finished. But the piece de resistance was a set of
archery bows that I whipped up to the delight of the
neighborhood kids.
...

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My Second CO from NB

Above, my second CO from Neobux
Thanks a lot, NB!
I still hope there are other next CO from you
Yeaaah!!!

Malam Pertamaku

malam ini malam pertama buat aku
pertama kali membuktikan bahwa
engkau bukanlah SCAM
meski cuma sekian
bahagia rasanya hati ini
rasa penasaran
tuntas sudah

malam ini
malam pembuktian bagimu
untukku
NEOBUX

terimakasih TUHAN
terimakasih untukmu... NEOBUX
salut untukmu... NEOBUX
juga buat ALERTPAY... thanks

semoga masih ada
malam-malam berikutnya
seperti malam ini

ah, asyiknya...
dua kali dapat
BUX!

Viva Easy-share !

this day is the beautiful day in my life
you know what? because of you..., easy-share
the day that i received my fee from you
the very very first payment for me
thanks GOD...!
thank you, easy-share...

VIVA EASY-SHARE !
although some peoples out there called me an 'abnormal' person because
using you, STAY ALIVE... FOREVER!!!

Best Regards
see you in the next payment, i surely hope so

USB Motion Detector

USB Motion Detector
Turn your PC into an ambush multimedia
Ken Delahoussaye | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 3 pgs | 1 mb

Gone are the days when people's interest could
be held by simple radio or television. Today we're
bombarded with information and we crave interac-
tive experiences that don't waste a single second
of our time. Advertisers recognize the difficulty of
presenting messages that cut through the clutter,
and they've come up with creative ways to capture
our attention.

One example: the multimedia kiosk, now common
in shopping malls, movie theaters, and airports.
Complete with an internal computer, sound card,
and video graphics monitor, these dazzle stations
can be a powerful advertising tool --- especially
when they have motion detection circuitry that
triggers a video presentation at the precise moment
an unsuspecting patron comes near.

This article explains how to construct a USB
motion detector that will give your computer this
hey-you ability, using a free Windows presentation
applet I wrote, USB Multimedia Presenter, so that you
can start your own kiosk advertising campaign. You
can also use the setup for practical jokes, or just to
amaze or amuse your friends.
...

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The Disembodied Voice of Judy Garland Speaks!

The Disembodied Voice of Judy Garland Speaks!
How to make a Ghost Phone
Greg MacLaurin | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 3 pgs | 1 mb

Currently, I'm obsessed with analog telephones.
I don't know why. My last obsession was with the
severed hands of mummies, but let's not get into
that. Today it's phones. And these Ghost Phones are
fun. The idea is simple: hide an MP3 player and its
headphone inside an old analog telephone, and you
can listen to someone talking to you!

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Chladni Plate

Chladni Plate
Edwin Wise | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 11 pgs | 3 mb

BEATIFUL ACOUSTICS
Use a broken speaker, bits of wire, and
tape to prepare a coneless voice coil
driver, then use it to generate standing
waves on a sheet of metal, making
sound visible. Magic!

My knowledgeable friend Robin once
said that you don't need to worry about
having too big an audio amplifier,
because speakers are usually damaged
by under-powered amps working too hard
and clipping the signal, creating rough
square waves with too much power.
I learned that this is true when I melted
a speaker's coil by running a strong
20Hz signal through it, to drive a vortex
cannon (MAKE, Volume 15, page 114).

On the bright side, I now had a nice
speaker magnet to use as the foundation
for something else I wanted to try,
a Chladni plate!
...

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DIY-brary

DIY-brary
Rick and Megan Prelinger couldn't find a library
with what they wanted, so they made their own
R.U. Sirius | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | pgs | mb

It's an overcast Monday afternoon as I arrive at
8th and Folsom in San Francisco's seedy, bohe-
mian SOMA district. I find 3018th Street and then
buzz Room 215. A voice says hello. I tell him who
I am and he buzzes me in. I take an elevator to the
second floor, walk past several closed offices, and
enter a small room packed to the rafters with four
rows of shelves filled with books stacked 15 feet
high. This is not your typical 21st-century urbane.
haute-culture library.

The Prelinger Library (prelingerlibrary.org) is
the brainchild of Megan Shaw Prelinger and Rick
Prelinger. Founded in 2004, it's a DIY, appropriation-
friendly, intuitive, and highly personalized context for
organizing and sharing this couple's books, periodi-
cals, printed ephemera (like obscure government
documents from the Department of Indian Affairs),
and - most of all - their obsessions. In addition to
its physical presence in San Francisco. it has an on-
line presence of more than 3.000 scanned volumes
at the Internet Archive (archive.org).
...

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Wheelchair Safety System

Wheelchair Safety System
Bryant Underwood | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 1 pgs | .4 mb

My daughter Katy uses an electric wheelchair
and last year she went off to college. Her mom and
I were concerned about Katy's safety in navigating
the campus -- she might get her chair stuck or have
some other type of trouble and not be able to get to
her cellphone.

So I used a Parallax microcontroller to control
a GSM cellphone as a "telematics" system for her
wheelchair. Inside the gray box mounted on the
back of her chair. I use the phone in speakerphone
mode with an external microphone and speaker.
...

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Remote Volume Knob

Remote Volume Knob
Paulo Rebordao | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 2 pgs | 1 mb

There's nothing like hard work to get your mind
running. Having to get up from the couch to adjust
the volume on my old stereo amp several times
each night got me thinking. I didn't want to buy
a new stereo, so I came up with a plug-in remote
volume controller that you can easily adapt to
anything with a reasonable-sized volume knob.

My circuit uses a Picaxe-08M microcontroller,
which is programmable in BASIC, and a TSOP2238
infrared receiver, which sees signals from any
Sony (or compatible) TV remote. The removable
device hangs off the volume knob, attached with
velcro.

At the top, an R/C servomotor turns the knob
through about 180° of travel, which should be
enough range for most environments. At the
bottom, 3 AA batteries act as a "keel," weighing
that end down so that the knob is forced to turn.
...

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G-Meter and Altimeter

G-Meter and Altimeter
Double-duty aerospace instrument on a shoestring budget
David Simpson | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 4 pgs | 2 mb

Here's an aerospace instrument you can build for
$5 that will measure the crushing forces that a
model rocket withstands and the rarified strata it
attains. It isn't exactly six-sigma technology in
terms of accuracy, but it's darn fun.

The device, which you install in the rocket's
payload compartment, uses 2 small bands of
heat-shrink tubing that slide over a dowel to record
the maximum G-force and altitude attained. As
the rocket accelerates, the G-force band is pushed
down by washers on a spring, and as the rocket
rises, the altitude band is pushed down the rod by
the expansion of a pressure chamber made from a
pill bottle and a rubber-balloon membrane.
...

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Pole's-Eye View

Pole's-Eye View
William Gurstelle | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 9 pgs | 3 mb

A POLE-MOUNTED
AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHY RIG

Sometimes nothing is as important
as perspective. My goal in photography
is often to find a view no one else has
found, to be able to see things from
unusual and insightful vantage points.

The most practical way to obtain the
elusive aerial perspective is by attaching
a camera to a pole. While not trivial, it's
not complicated, either. Making a pole-
mounted camera rig like the Sky Eye
takes about a day, not including trips to
the store. You can make the rig and
use it the same day.
...

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5-Minute Foam Factory

5-Minute Foam Factory
Bob Knetzger | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 9 pgs | 3 mb

FRY BY WIRE
What keeps your coffee warm but also
rides the cold Pacific surf? What's in the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but makes an
annoying, squeaky sound? Even though
it's banned in over 100 cities, you can
find it just about everywhere. What is it?
It's expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam.

Styrofoam is a great insulator (for hot drink
cups and wall insulation), lightweight and
stiff, and impervious to water (great for
surfboards). Unfortunately, it's also
impractical to recycle and can be an
unsightly part of the waste stream. Our
landfills and waterways are filling up with
discarded coffee cups, store meat trays,
and take-out packaging.

With this easy hot-wire foam cutter, you
can reuse this leftover EPS foam to create
treasures from trash!
...

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The Spinning Cylinder Illusion

The Spinning Cylinder Illusion
Donald Simanek | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 3 pgs | 1 mb

I've not been able to track down the origin of
this homemade toy, but it isn't very well known
outside the community of physics teachers. It's
a kinetic illusion, one that depends on physical
motion to make you see something that isn't there.

A familiar example of a kinetic illusion is the
strobe effect sometimes seen in old movies, causing
the spokes of a carriage wheel to seem to be turning
in the wrong direction.

In its simplest form, this toy consists of a hollow
cylinder of rigid plastic. The version in these photos
is 4cm long and 1cm in diameter, with 2mm wall
thickness. It was cut from a piece of polyethylene
plastic tubing that happened to be lying on my
workbench. Whatever tubing you use, be sure to
choose a very straight piece.
...

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Flipping Faces

Flipping Faces
Reveal the assymetry in familiar features--- including your own
Erico Narita | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 2 pgs | .3 mb

None of us is perfectly symmetrical, but our eyes tend not to notice irregularities in faces we see many times. Anyone watching national TV news, for instance, had eight years to get familiar with Dick Cheney's lopsided grin, and a previous generation had an equal amount of time to get used to Ronald Reagan's crooked smile.

To see these features more clearly, select one half of the face and reflect it, so that the 2 sides become identical. Then select the other half and reflect that, and compare the 2 versions. The results will be surprising.

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Shadowless Closeups

Shadowless Closeups
A simple setup for better auction photos
Charles Platt | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 2 pgs | .3 mb

A friend of mine used to take the photographs for the sales catalogs printed by Sotheby's, the old-school auction house. Since many of the items up for sale were worth tens of thousands of dollars, they had to look good.

When I'm selling little items on eBay, I think it's still worth taking a little trouble to enhance their appearance instead of just using a flash photo of something sitting on a kitchen table. The main thing I learned from my friend is that if you place an object on an elevated glass plate and use a large, diffuse light source, your object will seem to float in space instead of sitting on its own shadow.
...

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Create an Insect Eye

Create an Insect Eye
Make a multifaceted image from any portrait photo
Charles Platt | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 2 pgs | .4 mb

I wanted an insect-eye effect in Photoshop, but I wasn't satisfied with the ones that I found as plugins. So I made my own. This procedure works with Photoshop 6 or later.

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Warholize!

Warholize!
Turn your favorite blonde into a silk-screened glamour queen
James Grant | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 2 pgs | .3 mb

When Andy Warhol made his famous silk-screened prints of Marilyn Monroe, he started with a simple idea: use a high-contrast black-and-white photo, and overprint it with bold swatches of color. Is that idea simple enough for us to emulate it with modern image-editing software? Let's find out. This will work in Photoshop 6 or later versions.

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Surface Mount Soldering

Surface Mount Soldering
Techniques for making modern circuits
Scott Driscoll | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 8 pgs | 2 mb

When cellphones were housed in briefcases,
manufactured electronics had easy-to-solder
leads. Now phones fit in pockets, and the smaller
surface-mount devices (SMDs) inside are driving
through-hole components into extinction.

SMDs can cost less than their old-school equiva-
lents, and many newer devices, including most
accelerometers, are only available in SMD format.

If you design printed circuit boards, using
SMT (surface-mount technology) and putting
components on both sides makes them cheaper
and smaller. This may not matter on a robot, but it
helps a project fit into a mint tin or hang off a kite.

SMDs are designed for precise machinery to
mass-assemble onto densely packed PCBs. Their
tiny leads may look impossible for human hands
to work with, but there are several good, relatively
inexpensive methods that don't require a $1,000-
and-up professional SMT soldering station.

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Alien Projector

Alien Projector
Brian McNamara | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 1 pgs | .2 mb

This simple projector shines an image of an alien
on the wall. It uses an LED as the light source and
projects an image varying in size from a few inches
to several feet.The simple circuit consists of only a
battery, resistor, switch, and LED.

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24 Hours of Make: Television

24 Hours of Make: Television
Building a TV show is a project in itself
Dale Dougherty | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 4 pgs | 1 mb

It's already late on a Sunday in September in
St. Paul, Minn. In the studios of Twin Cities Public
Television (TPT), there are ten people working
on Make: television, a new PBS show that will be
a companion to this magazine.

The set is a workshop, within a larger workshop
normally used for set construction. The team is
shooting a build for Maker Workshop, the segment
that shows viewers how to make something in each
episode. It's important to get this segment right. It's
like demonstrating a recipe on a cooking show, but
the ingredients and the process are more technical.
...

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Sparky 2: No Sellout

Sparky 2: No Sellout
My robotic alter ego steps out -- open source
Marque Cornblatt | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 4 pgs | 2 mb

I spent much of my childhood dismantling toys
and gadgets and cobbling them back together in
interesting ways. One proud example combined
a slot car, a one-function wireless remote, a 9-volt
battery, and a few fabricated gears and bits to
create (in my mind, in the early 80s) the world's
smallest remote control car.

The 2-inch vehicle was top-heavy and had too
much torque, but it accelerated violently to the
right every time I pressed the remote button -- it
worked! - until it finally tore itself apart, like a tiny
top-fuel dragster. In my mind it was a success, and
it sparked my lifelong interest in interactive, kinetic
projects.
...

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Make Vol. 15- 2008: Workshop

Make Vol. 15- 2008: Workshop
Pdf | 6 pgs | 2 mb

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Make Vol. 15- 2008: Home

Make Vol. 15- 2008: Home
Pdf | 6 pgs | 2 mb

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VoIPing the iPod Touch

VoIPing the iPod Touch
How makers gave you the feature that Apple held back
Erica Sadun | Make Vol. 15- 2008 | Pdf | 2 pgs | 1 mb

It's a maker's dream: turn your homebrew ideas
into a concrete reality and then ship that product.
This dream came true for iPod hackers Dr. Marian
Kepesi, "Eok," and Samuel Vinson. They designed,
built, and shipped an iPod touch microphone and
developed VolP(voice over internet protocol) soft-
ware to place phone calls using that mic.

Last November, Kepesi was poking around on his
iPod Touch. A postdoc at Austria's Graz University
of Technology, he had previously worked with third-
generation iPods and was interested in the new
Touch line.

During his explorations, he discovered an impor-
tant fact about the iPod Touch's bottom connector
port: its line-in audio was active. Live pins meant
that the iPod Touch could connect to an external
audio source. It was compatible with recording or,
better yet, with VolP for talking over the internet.
VoIP compatibility was a long-standing goal of the
iPhone and iPod Touch hacker community.
...

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The Penetrating Magnets Illusion

The Penetrating Magnets Illusion

"Magnets are fascinating things, and they behave in
unexpected ways. I will show you a little-known
property of magnets, which actually allows them to
pass through one another."
Donald Simanek | Make Vol. 15- 2008 | Pdf | 2 pgs | 1 mb

Back in 2004, I invented a physics toy using
magnets, one I hadn't seen described elsewhere.
So I called it Simanek's Penetrating Magnet Illusion.
It obeys Newton's laws, like the others, but why
should Newton get all the credit?

This toy is inexpensive and absurdly easy to build.
Find a dozen small, flat ceramic magnets, 1" diameter,
1/4" thick, with a 3/8" hole in the center. You can get
them at RadioShack or hardware stores. You don't
need a full dozen, but extras are good to have.
...

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Great Balls of Fire!

Great Balls of Fire!
Keith Hammond | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 5 pgs | 2 mb

It's true: chemistry sets today don't measure up
to the classic kits that once scorched Formica
kitchen tables across the nation. But you can
still find respectable kits if you know where to look.
More importantly, anyone can make their own flam-
ing, fuming, booming DIY chemistry set as good as
those from the golden age - or better.

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The Amazing Seebeck Generator

The Amazing Seebeck Generator
Andrew Lewis | Make Vol. 15- 2008 | Pdf | 9 pgs | 3 mb

FLAME ON
With no moving parts, this simple energy-recycling
generator scavenges waste heat from a candle and turns
it into usable electricity.

Peltier cells are flat devices that draw heat from one side
to the other through a thermoelectric principle called the
Peltier effect. The cells are commonly used to pump heat
away from CPUs or graphics cards, and are also found
in camping coolers and heaters. The Amazing Seebeck
Generator uses one of these devices in reverse, to turn a
heat differential into electricity, rather than using electricity to produce a heat differential.
...

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Compressed Air Rocket

Compressed Air Rocket
Rick Schertle | Make Vol. 15- 2008 | Pdf | 13 pgs | 4 mb

PAPER, TAPE, COMPRESSED AIR... LIFT-OFF!
Blow your friends away as you send this 25-cent
rocket hundreds of feet in the air. You can build this
easy launcher and rocket with common hardware store
items in an afternoon.

All the parts for this simple but impressive air rocket and
launcher are cheap and easy to find. Building it is a breeze
and the modifications are endless. It's legal in a big city,
reusable, clean, and can be launched even in high winds
on a small field.

Believe me, folks are quite taken by the 200- to 300-foot
flights fueled by 18 or so bicycle pumps of compressed air.
Whether you're launching on your own or with a whole
group of rocketeers, watch the crowds gather ... 3,2,1,
and away!

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The iConveyor

The iConveyor
John Edgar Park | Make Vol. 15- 2008 | Pdf | 6 pgs | 2 mb

The iConveyor is a simple motorized conveyer
belt with an RFID (radio frequency identification)
reader under the belt. It lets you visit websites
or load applications on your computer by simply
dropping a chip in the belt. Each wooden chip
has an RFID tag attached to it. The reader picks
up the unique ID number of the tag and sends
the number to your personal computer, through
a cable. A computer program written for the
iConveyor looks up the name of the website or
application assigned to the ID number and loads it.

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The Year People Learned to Fly

The Year People Learned to Fly
Celebrating the 30th anniversary of the flight of the Gossamer Condor
Ben Shedd | Make Vol. 11- 2007 | Pdf | 3 pgs | 1 mb

One of the great home-built family maker projects
celebrated its 30th anniversary on Aug. 23, 2007:
the flight of the world's first truly successful
human-powered airplane, the Gossamer Condor.

The plane was designed and built by Dr. Paul B.
MacCready, along with his family and friends, on
weekends over a year's time in 1976-77. The goal
was to win the first Kremer Prize, a $100.000
reward for the first human-powered airplane that
could take off using human power, fly over a 10-foot
marker, make a complete left turn and right turn
around two pylons spaced half a mile apart, and
then fly over the 10-foot marker again at the end
of the mile-long flight.
...

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Vortex Cannons

Vortex Cannons
Edwin Wise | Make Vol. 15- 2008 | Pdf | 9 pgs | 3 mb

DOING DONUTS
A smoke ring, or vortex, is a beguiling thing to watch:
a coherent, moving structure made out of thin air. Here
are 3 cannons that can throw these "chunks of air"
across a room.

I'd been aware of vortex cannons for quite some time,
mostly as an interesting toy, and after I kept stumbling on
the concept while touring the web, I decided I had to build
my own. There's something fascinating about taking a
substance as ubiquitous and amorphous as air and trans-
forming it into a coherent and persistent structure, almost
like a crystal. I also hoped to find some use for my cannon,
perhaps to propel scents or give the touch of a ghost in
a haunted house.
...

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My Daughter's DNA

My Daughter's DNA
One father's search for the scientific answers
that no one seemed to have
Hugh Young Rienhoff Jr. | Make Vol. 15- 2008 | Pdf | 4 pgs | 2 mb

If you scrape the inside of your cheek
with a pop-sicle stick and mix it with a few homely
salts and a shot of grain alcohol, you'll see a
fluffy cloud of material floating in the glass.
It looks like cotton, but it's really the code of
you. DNA is deceptively ordinary-looking.

The human genome - the totality of each person's
genes within their body - is a vast chemical space
with 6.6 billion bits of DNA information that con-
stitutes genetically what we are as Homo sapiens.
In that vastness, it's easy for a single deviant bit of
DNA to hide. I suspected that. like many of those
with genetic conditions, my daughter also had a
single DNA base that was awry. Finding that variant
is like looking for a single person in a world of 6 billion
people. It's a near-impossible task unless you have
clues for where to look, for which genes might be
altered. Clues like this always begin with the patient.
...

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Make Vol. 15- 2008: Music

Make Vol. 15- 2008: Music
Pdf | 40 pgs | 13 mb

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Spin the Birdie

Spin the Birdie
Larry Cotton| Make Vol. 11- 2007 | Pdf | 11 pgs | 4 mb

BIRD SHOT
Birds make lousy subjects for digital
photographs. They're fearful, fidgety,
and, well, flighty. But you can improve
your odds of getting awesome avian
photos by moving your camera closer
to the birds --- and you farther away.
And while you're at it, why not get
them to pose for you?

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Evil Mouse Prank

Evil Mouse Prank
Control your co-worker's cursor!
John Edgar Park | Make Vol. 15- 2008 | Pdf | 2 pgs | 1 mb

Joe Bowers is sneaky, resourceful, and rotten to
the core. Whatever you do, don't get in a prank war
with him.

Returning to my desk from a coffee break. I sat
down, grabbed my mouse. and ... nothing. The
cursor was stuck to the left wall of my monitor.
I shook my mouse wildly. The cursor moved up
and down just fine. But when I jerked my mouse
viciously to the right, the cursor nudged a little,
then slammed back to its new favorite position,
clinging maddeningly to the leftmost pixel.

Blowing on the mouse's nether regions didn't help,
so my officemate, Hide Yosumi, took pity on me. "Do
you hear something?" he asked knowingly. There
was a high-pitched whine coming from behind my
workstation. I looked and saw that a strange mouse
was plugged in. Not just any mouse. A prank mouse.
...

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Mister Jalopy's Urban Guerrilla Movie House

Mister Jalopy's Urban Guerrilla Movie House
Your own DIY drive-in
Mister Jalopy | Make Vol. 11- 2007 | Pdf | 11 pgs | 3 mb

Rather than lamenting the slow death of
drive-in theaters, I decided to build my
own, mount it on an adult tricycle, and
take the movies anywhere there's an AC
outlet. Vibrant online communities of DIY
projector enthusiasts have ironed out the
kinks and built the focal calculator soft-
ware tools, and they're building homebrew
machines with jaw-dropping results.
...

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Swiveling Balcony Hoist

Swiveling Balcony Hoist
Take the sting out of a walk-up apartment by installing your own lifter
Matthew Russell | Make Vol. 11- 2007 | Pdf | 4 pgs | 1 mb

Apartment-style living has its
advantages, but getting a bicycle
off the balcony, through your
living area, and down several
flights of stairs just to go get
some exercise isn't one of them.

Carrying groceries up and taking
trash down several flights of stairs
isn't so much fun either, but you
can mitigate these pains by building
a swiveling hoist on your balcony.

The whole setup costs right
around $50, and takes only a
few hours from start to finish.

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Rock the Bike

Rock the Bike
Social biking with Fossil Fool and the Juice Pedale
Paul Spinrad | Make Vol. 11- 2007 | Pdf | 4 pgs | 1 mb

IF YOU'VE NEVER BEEN ON A BICYCLE
cruiser ride before, here's what happens. You and
your party gather someplace in town and maybe
have some beers and/or dinner. Then you ride. The
city and the night are yours. If you're lucky, one of
you is on a Soul Cycle, supplying the soundtrack.
...

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Retro R/C Racer

Retro R/C Racer
Frank E. Yost | Make Vol. 11- 2007 | Pdf | 13 pgs | 4 mb

RIVETING TALE
Using scrap sheet metal and pop rivets,
you can construct a model 1930s British
Midget racer that combines vintage "tether
car" styling with modern R/C capabilities.

Radio control (R/C) toys are fun, but their plastic bodies
are so obviously mass-produced. To create something
more interesting, I wanted to find a metal toy racer 10
inches or longer that I could transplant some R/C insides
into. I soon discovered that the best candidates were all
precious collectibles.
...

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Bend It Like Bach

Bend It Like Bach
Tim Kaiser's fabulously weird world of music
Karen K. Hanseb| Make Vol. 15- 2008 | Pdf | 5 pgs | 2 mb

When English soccer star David Beckham bends the
ball, the international sports world watches in awe. When
American musician Tim Kaiser bends a circuit, the audi-
ence listens just as intently, be it in an art or performance
space, or a bar, bookstore, or library.

MAKE, Volume 12 (page 14) introduced readers
to Tim Kaiser, but even people who've never
heard of him have probably heard his sounds.
These may emanate from the instruments
Kaiser himself creates and plays, such as
Bungee Drums made from concrete post forms
or the New Metal Violin made out of the battery
compartment of a minesweeper. Or they may
issue forth as distorted or modulated samples
from one of Kaiser's Atomic SonicFX Boxes in the
hands of other artists.

Among those emitting Kaiser sounds are
Duran Duran and film score producer BT (Brian
Transeau), who recently featured some of
Kaiser's instruments in his recording This
Binary Universe.

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Make Vol. 15- 2008: Upload

Make Vol. 15- 2008: Upload
Pdf | 8 pgs | 3 mb

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Stonemonkey Makes It Easier

Stonemonkey Makes It Easier
An electric motor linked to existing bicycle gears turns
any bike into a sell-your-car-already vehicle
Rick Polito | Make Vol. 11- 2007 | Pdf | 3 pgs | 1 mb

TODD FAHRNER DOESN'T WANT TO MAKE IT
easy for you. But he does want to make it easier.

A bike-centric, car-less existence has always been
possible for strong people with strong feelings. but
with Fahmer's Stokemonkey kit, it gets easier. With
an electric motor linked to existing gears and an
Xtracycle hitchless trailer to extend the wheelbase
and cargospace, the Stokemonkey scenario turns
any bike into a sell-your-car-already electric vehicle.
...

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Kitchen Floor Vacuum Former

Kitchen Floor Vacuum Former
Bob Knetzger | Make Vol. 11- 2007 | Pdf | 11 pgs | 3 mb

FORMING LASTING IMPRESSIONS
From take-out coffee lids to airplane
interior panels, vacuum-formed plastic
is everywhere. And for good reason:
vacuum forming makes light, durable,
and cool-looking 3D parts. Here's how
to cook some up in your kitchen.

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Free VoIP

Free VoIP
Got broadband? Add phone service for $0/month
Dave Mathews | Make Vol. 11- 2007 | Pdf | 4 pgs | 1 mb

These days, many people don't even have landline-
based telephone service; they get all their calls on
their mobile and office phones. But once I settle in
at home, I want people to be able to call me on a
nice, comfortable cordless phone, even if it's Iost in
the couch. At home, the cordless battery is always
charged, and it doesn't matter if I'm in a fringe
mobile service area.

If you already have a broadband connection, you
can get a home phone without paying for POTS
(plain old telephone service) cra Vonage style
digital phone service. Here's now to do it the easier
way, without having to run your own private branch
exchange (PBX) Asterisk server.
...

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Bicycle iPod Charger

Bicycle iPod Charger
A sidewall dynamo powers both lights and tuneage
Mark Hoekstra | Make Vol. 11- 2007 | Pdf | 3 pgs | 1 mb

After buying an Pod mini a couple of years ago, I started experimenting with ways of extending its battery life. First I tried the Perfectmate hand-cranked flashlight/charger, only to find out that it takes up to 20 minutes of cranking to generate just enough power to boot the device. As well as making me appreciate how much power today's lithium-ion batteries can hold, this got me thinking about otherways to human-power my Pod.
...

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U-G-L-Y Your Bike

U-G-L-Y Your Bike
To deter thieves, camouflage your bicycle as a piece of
crap while keeping it a first-class ride
Rick Polito | Make Vol. 11- 2007 | Pdf | pgs | mb

Nature is the master of disguise. The tiger swallowtail caterpillar starts out camouflaged as a bird dropping to discourage hungry birds. Take a tip from the crawling turd and keep your bike from getting swiped: dress it down as a pile of rolling junk.

Having an ugly bike doesn't mean having a junky bike. Looks and performance have no exclusive relationship. A savvy bike thief may see the gem under the Krylon, but he also knows he can't sell it as quickly as the tricked-out speedster at the other end of the bike rack.
...

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DIY ECGs

DIY ECGs
Dr. Shawn | Make Vol. 11- 2007 | Pdf | 3 pgs | 1 mb

THE HEART'S PUMPING ACTION IS DRIVEN
by powerful waves of electrical activity that
cause weak currents to flow in the body,
changing the electric potential between different
points on the skin by about one thousandth of a
volt (one millivolt,1mV). Hidden within that activity
is an enormous amount of information about what
the heart is doing, and anyone who can detect it
can peer into the workings of this incredible organ.

Fortunately, you don't have to be a cardiologist
with expensive equipment to pick up and decipher
that signal. Anyone can do it with this homemade
electrocardiogram (ECG) device. an analog-to-digital
converter (ADC) to digitize the signal and send it to
a computer, and a remarkable book that I'll tell you
about later.

You can assemble the circuit itself in an after-
noon for about $40. The ADC will cost a bit more.
between $50 and $300. But these devices open a
universe of opportunities to the home-based experi-
menter, and so every citizen scientist should invest
in one. (I've negotiated a great deal on one of these
devices especially for MAKE readers. Read on.)
...

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Scanner Camera

Scanner Camera:
Mod a flatbed scanner to take photos that deconstruct time and motion
Mike Golembewski | Make Vol. 14- 2008 | Pdf | 9 pgs | 3 mb

Several years ago, I built my first scanner camera. The idea was simple: I would use an ordinary flatbed scanner with a homemade large-format camera. The camera would focus the image onto the scanner bed in place of photo paper or film. I expected this to be a quick little art project made with a cardboard box, the cheapest flatbed scanner I could find, and lots of duct tape.

But when I got it all to work, the results were wonderful. Stationary objects photographed normally, but moving objects appeared twisted and distorted into fascinating shapes. At first I thought there was something wrong with my contraption, but then I realized that the movement of the scan head was meshing with the movement in the recorded scene. The distortion is similar to the effect created by moving an original on a photocopier mid-copy, but extended into the real world.
...

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