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Make magazine--purveyor of awesome and amusing DIY projects and kits--has added a new product to its online store -- the Cellular Automata video synthesizer kit. It may look like a hippie guitar pedal, but actually it creates endearingly retro (but mostly annoying) audio and video akin to an Atari 2600 meltdown. The kit offers RCA audio and video outputs, costs $50, and is mostly preassembled. You will have to find your own enclosure (the rainbow-colored wooden box is only a suggestion) and solder on the knobs and a reset button.

The video synthesizer works off a mathematical idea called … Read more

If you're inspired to create your own MP3 player but are either too cheap or too clumsy (in my case, both) to use Make Magazine's Daisy MP3 player kit, South Korea has the solution. The MOTZ DIY Music Box is a coin-sized, flash-based MP3 player kit that sells for $40 (U.S.). Once you've got it, you can join the corporate bandwagon of cramming an MP3 player into just about anything. The tough part will be finding something ridiculous that someone hasn't already tried putting an MP3 player in. The MOTZ is USB 2.0 by … Read more

You may not have Snoop Dogg's private collection of weapons or the ability to pay for limousines to drive you everywhere, but you can have the rapper's drywall.

The picture shows off samples of QuietRock and QuietWood, wall coverings from Serious Materials that dampen sound. If you outfit a room with this stuff, no one can hear you rap inside, according to CEO Kevin Surace (who, needless to say, is not the model in the picture). This sort of drywall also allows you to put a home theater in a room that's next to a bedroom.

Customers … Read more