DIY

The tinkerers at North Street Labs retrofitted an NES zapper with a ridiculously powerful laser capable of catching vulnerable objects like matches on fire.

The laser is strong enough to max out a 2W laser meter. That's some serious strength. As North Street Labs points out, goggles are an absolute must at all times when handling the zapper. There is a physical turn key safety switch to keep it from accidentally going off.… Read more

Shoving all your home theater equipment into a single, closed cabinet makes sense when you want to keep your living room tidy. There's just one problem: overheating.

When you have things like a router, gaming console, cable box, and DVD player all mingling in one cabinet, things can get steamy. So much so, in fact, that a lack of air circulation can eventually fry your equipment. (Ring of death, anyone?)

The most obvious solution here is to remove the door from your media cabinet, but if you're bent on keeping the appearance of your living room clean, the … Read more

I came across this tutorial last week that showed how you can turn an ordinary phone camera into something capable of capturing extreme close-up macro photos. You know, the ones where you can see the hairs on a fly's head.

After the dust settled on the iOS 6 release, over the weekend I dug through the junk drawer in my kitchen and found an old laser pointer. I then located a bobby pin in the bathroom and some painter's tape in the basement. I now had the three necessary ingredients and the time to see if this thing … Read more

When you think of Super Mario, do you also think of insatiably ravenous semi-aquatic animals? No? You must not be Super Mario fan Kodykoala.

The custom toy crafter created a detailed and outlandish mashup of Hungry Hungry Hippos and Super Mario. The starving hippos are turned into Koopa Kids complete with pointy little shells on their backs. These minions of Bowser are from the "Mario Party" series.… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Building 3D models should be something everyone can do. That's the pitch from ZeroUI, a Silicon Valley startup that has created a technology platform designed to let anyone create their own digital models, whether a robot, drum, table, or anything else.

The Cupertino, Calif., company is relying on gestural input technologies such as Microsoft's Kinect, and soon, Leap Motion's Leap controller, as well as systems built into some computers, to allow users to create their models with nothing but their hands.

The company's name comes from the fact that its system has an extremely minimal user interface. Rather than requiring users to understand the mathematics and physics of a model they might want to build, the ZeroUI system simply allows them to stand in front of the input camera and use intuitive hand gestures to craft their 3D model (see the video below). … Read more

It's been 12 years since Chad Ruble's mother suffered a stroke that led to aphasia, a disorder that affects language processing but not intelligence. Most of the one million Americans who have the disorder experience difficulty both reading and writing, according to the National Aphasia Association, and Chad's mother Lindy was unable to recognize text and thus unable to use a keyboard.

So Chad did what any computer-savvy son should: he hacked a Kinect to help her.

After designing a visual dashboard of emoticons (happy, sad, angry, tired, etc.), each of which can be further qualified by an amount (expressed as signal strength -- one, two, three, or four bars), Chad says he turned to a Kinect, some gesture recognition code, and the simple OpenNI library for Processing to track the position of his mother's hand. A green arrow button sends the email and a red X resets the screen.… Read more

Got a battered old suitcase sitting around the house? Jeff Conley might be able to make music with it. The Boston indie-folk musician crafts working guitars and drums from vintage luggage. They're not something you'd find at the local Guitar Center, to be sure. But neither are the other offbeat entries to the Made of Imagination contest.

That project, co-sponsored by art site Booooooom, MTV, and Sony Xperia, tasks participants with creating their own instruments -- "beautiful, hopefully ingenious, and probably ridiculous" ones, that is. If they actually play music (or at least make noise of some kind), so much the better. … Read more

Welcome to the dark side of 3D printing.

The hobby is best known for creating colorful toys and trinkets, but some enthusiasts are working on design files that would allow anyone to print a working gun. These don't exist yet, but some believe it's only a matter of time.

Why would a 3D-printed gun be appealing? For one, it could potentially be cheap. You can buy a preassembled 3D printer for about $500. A spool of ABS plastic to print with goes for $50. Depending on where you shop, you can buy .38 Special ammunition for 30 cents a round. The plans will undoubted be distributed free like so many MP3s. … Read more

David Wu looks ridicule in the face and says: "Come on, ridicule, you lily-livered lout. Show me what you got."

You see, his enthusiasm for Apple products is such that he displays it with all the gusto of a potentate who builds a temple to his own personal god inside his mansion.

I am grateful to Razorian Fly for indicating that Wu exists and to Wu himself for allowing me to use his photographs, which he has posted on his blog.

Oh, I can't put off the reveal any longer. Wu has constructed an Apple store in his home office. … Read more