Daily DIY

Our pal Gavin Harper cooked up this great how-to on making a geodesic dome…
In this article, we are going to be looking at a simple lightweight bamboo geodesic dome structure that you can erect in your garden as a temporary shelter for leisure use. This structure is so lightweight, that you could even safely give it to your kids to put up in an hour.

Geodesic Domes are great futuristic looking structures that enclose a large amount of space for minimal materials. At the Centre for Alternative Technology www.cat.org.uk I have just finished my last module of an MSc. Architecture: Advanced Environmental & Energy Studies. www.cat.org.uk/msc. Our team, Joe Lee, Ian Dalgliesh and myself Gavin Harper had to make a kit of parts for another group to assemble our timber frame structure. We were investigating structures and for our design project decided to build a Geodesic Dome.

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Irregular Shed writes - “One Epson DMD-206 display - the ones normally used on tills in supermarkets - hacked to be connected to a PC via its serial port, and hooked up to an IBM Thinkpad running Xubuntu Linux (Ubuntu with Xfce - because this is an old laptop). Why? Because I can =) “ - Link.

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Looks like if you’re a member of the ARRL you can order this kit, I’ll see what I can dig up… - “The ARRL Amateur Radio Education and Technology Program has cooked up a packaged project that detects and decodes the infrared messages from a TV remote. You probably have a number of them around the house. In fact, remote controls have become so important that when they are misplaced there is a sense of panic.” - Link.

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Bleep labs added some “making of” photos to the MAKE pool of anthropomorphic synthesizer monsters - the Thingamagoop. - Link.

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Use iTunes to sync your MP3s with non-iPods - “BadApple is a free plug-in for iTunes which allows you to sync your music library to any MP3 player (not just an iPod). After downloading and installing the software, you will have a “Sync to MP3 player” link you can click on from within iTunes. This will sync all tracks to a MP3 player. BadApple will work with a wide range of MP3 players such as the Creative Nomad, Dell DJ, Oakley Thump, Archos and more. Any unit that mounts as a USB mass storage device should work well with BadApple. You can even sync to a network drive. “ - Link. I’ll try it out later - or if a Maker out there wants to check it out and post any feedback in the comments, that would be cool too.

Pictured here, my non-iPod shuffle clone that can now sync with iTunes.

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Jay in London over at the Wooster collective has a video tutorial on making street art stickers - Link.

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Here’s are some build photos of MAKE Flickr photo pool member Mushmoth26’s Mini Galaga arcade - Link.

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Another workbench mod… this time with concrete!



My girlfriend and I decided to take your workbench and modify it some for our purposes. I thought you might be interested in seeing your handiwork being inspirational!

We then spray painted the frame Home Depot Orange and gray (to match the concrete). There’s pictures and such on my blog, here are the relevant links: Part 1 and Part 2.

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Blogger Vincent Cheung says he wants to publish private text on his weblog sometimes, so he devised a clever way to encrypt text with Javascript inside his posts.

Not quite sure when and why you’d want to do this - isn’t the whole purpose of publishing something on the web to make it public? - but it is a neat way to self-select your readers. For instance, you could make the decryption key your middle name or your sister’s name or your birthday month (something only people who know you well would know) to keep total strangers from seeing your secrets.

Dan writes - “I’ve been experimenting with making a hot glue gun more suited to intricate and precision modelmaking & prototyping jobs - smaller diameter nozzle, held like a pen rather than a gun, etc. It’s still work in progress, but I’ve put together an Instructable about the project so far.” - Link.

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