Tag: DIY

We know that you've always wanted your own 'Super Mario Bros.'-style block to smash open for golden coinage. In fact, we know you regularly dream about it. No? Just us? Well, after seeing it in action above, you'll probably change your tune. Sadly, you can't buy it. But, if you're handy enough, you can build your own by following the not-for-beginners Instructable here. ...

Two of the most popular toys amongst DIY enthusiasts right now are the Arduino and the Microsoft Kinect. So what happens when you combine them? Probably the most impressive hack of either device we've ever seen. Created by Michael Zöllner and Stephan Huber from the University of Konstanz, NAVI (or Navigational Aids for the Visually Impaired) allows the blind to easily navigate an ...

If your kids are currently in the room, it's probably in your best interest to refrain from watching this video. No, it's not because of bad language or nudity or violence. It's because, if they see this monstrosity of a birthday cake (and working model of 'Angry Birds'), they will not rest until you construct it. And that would take us months. ...

3-D movies are all the rage, but if your eyes are not fans (like mine), here's a way to avoid the headache-inducing eye-strain without being a killjoy. Turns out you can simply hack two pairs of cheap 3-D glasses to create two pairs of 2-D glasses. Simply swap one lens out of each, so one has two right lenses and one has two left lenses. ...

Geeks, tinkerers and amateur engineers obviously love Rube Goldberg devices, those overly complicated, ridiculous contraptions that accomplish mundane, everyday tasks. Akay, a Swedish street artist, has assembled one impressively complex technical apparatus that both defiles and brightens the urban landscape with a single and (seemingly) simple swoosh. Using a bicycle and a diverse array of ...

Our favorite group of New York DIY aficionados set up a booth at a Pepcom event tonight, but not at CES itself. The Quirky crew did show all of its typical crowd-sourced wares, developed by their community of "influencers" (letting those with ideas make money, and change, in the realm of gadgetry), but Quirky had something rare to offer, too. Within the prior 24 hours, the team had built a ...

Gearheads with cash to burn might want to bid on this amphibious, 762-horsepower HydroCar, which is currently listed for $777,000 on eBay. Rick Dobbertin spent nine years and more than 18,000 hours personally building the HydroCar, which can go from driving on land to floating on water by lowering and extending a pair of giant pontoons. Despite all that work, Dobbertin never could figure out how ...

The modding and hacking community is simply having a field day with Microsoft's Kinect. It was just a couple of weeks ago that we highlighted a few of the fun and impressive things that people much smarter than us were doing with the latest in motion-controlled gaming peripherals. But those innovations already look simplistic next to the crazy things being cooked up in living rooms and labs ...

Info about this mod is a little tough to come by, but it appears that a German man, through the simple application of physics, has turned his Segway from dorky death-trap to speedy, dorky death-trap. By slapping a pair of large carriage wheels on his gyroscope-balanced nerd-mobile, YouTube user mastersector managed to top out at blazing 25 mph. Check out the video after the break. ...

In case all the shake-ups at NASA have gotten you down in the dumps, perhaps you can take solace in those thrifty Brits and their newest entry in the space race: paper airplanes. Three private citizens -- Steve Daniels, John Oates and Lester Haines -- raised $13,000 (£8,000) in funds to launch the 'Vulture 1' glider (which measures three feet across) and its attached helium balloon into ...

Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web. The bar has been raised for scary, homemade Halloween gadgets: Michael Colton built a remote-controlled flying ghost helicopter to scare the candy-hoarding children. [From: Engadget] The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal dives into the Google Books search algorithm. Books present the ...

Anybody who owns a smartphone or works at the computer all day knows that modern man is at the beck and call of various pings, rings and vibrations. Ian Page has considered this fact, and has created Bondage Happens -- conditioning headgear that, for two weeks, will inject a sip of lemon juice into his mouth every time his phone rings. (We call it drool-dialing.) See a video of the project after ...

It's easy to earn our respect with adorably geeky children's costumes -- but if you're an adult playing dress-up, you've really got to go all out. Melissa Dunphy did just that with this incredible Krang costume for her husband, made with her own two hands. It talks. It moves. It's the best costume we've see this year. Check out the video after the break. ...

Rather than carve a plain ol' jack-o'-lantern for Halloween, the guys at Hack A Day installed a 5-by-14 matrix of LEDs inside October's favorite squash. Like Kitt from 'Knight Rider,' the pumpkin flashes a series of disco-like patterns, along with the seasonally obvious greeting "HAPPY HALLOWEEN." The project took eight hours of soldering and required more than 70 holes to be drilled, commanding ...

Last year, John Savio became the envy of trick-or-treating Apple fanboys everywhere, with his human-size, fully functional iPhone Halloween costume. At the time, we were convinced that he'd reached the zenith of Halloween geekdom. We were wrong. This year, Savio's upped the costume ante once again, with his latest human-size, jailbroken iPhone 4. With a touchscreen. To create his masterpiece, ...