diy

Make your own screen-cleaning spray on the cheap

Generic or not, some of the biggest rip-offs in the realm of consumer electronics have got to be cleaning solutions. Why? Because whether they're marketed to clean your phone, computer screen, keyboard, or mouse, the solution is nearly always water and alcohol.

For just a few bucks, you can make your own, equally effective screen-cleaning solution at home in large quantities. Keep one on your desk, one at home, and one for the road -- and never overspend on glorified water again.

You'll need:

8 ounces 70 percent isopropryl alcohol (rubbing alchohol) 8 ounces distilled water Small misting … Read more

How to animate Halloween decorations

As someone who likes any excuse to tinker and build stuff, Halloween is my favorite time of the year.

Last year I had some fun creating a custom spooky sound effects board, and showed you how to add some cheap portable speakers to your decorations. This year I'm stepping things up with a basic tutorial on "keybanging."

Don't worry, keybanging isn't as gross or violent as it sounds. The term was introduced to me in volume 30 of Make Magazine. A "keybanger" is a rudimentary prop controller that can be used to automatically … Read more

Seven awesome, unusual DIY USB flash drives

Whether you use them in your everyday work flow, or dust them off on occasion, flash drives are perhaps one of the handiest, most underrated gadgets out there. Despite the cloud storage trend, many of us still rely on these doodads when we need to transfer data in a pinch.

And thanks to the InterWebs, there's a seemingly endless variety of unique flash drives to match your equally special personality.

But, what's better than forking over $20 to $30 on a low-capacity, overpriced flash drive? Making your own on the cheap. After sifting through the Web for DIYs, … Read more

DIY: Install a cooling fan in your media cabinet

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

DIY macro lens for your phone's camera

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

Add lighting effects to your stereo

Adding blinking lights to anything is a surefire way to make it totally obnoxious. For some of you, that's a good thing.

Here are two techniques you can use to add sound-reactive lights to your stereo, boom box, computer, or pretty much anything that makes music.

The first option is to use something like an EL Wire Sound Kit. These are sold online from various places and include some combination of electroluminescent wire, a power adapter, and a special power inverter that drives the wire's power in response to sound picked up by an integrated microphone.

The whole … Read more

DIY e-mail purse looks a lot like a Gmail purse

What happens to e-mail when you print it out? Is it still e-mail or has it moved into a different plane of existence? Regardless of the existential questions that arise, you now have a very fitting place to put your printed e-mails. Stuff them into a DIY Mail Purse.

The DIY Mail Purse gets part of its name from the fact you have to assemble it yourself. Don't worry, ThinkGeek says it will only take 15 minutes of your time. It comes with precut polyester felt pieces, cotton rope, basswood splints, and a shoulder strap. Assembly is just a matter of running the rope through some holes.… Read more

Hobbyist builds working S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier

At least one scientist has tried to prove that the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier as depicted in "The Avengers" would fly about as well as an ostrich.

But that hasn't stopped an ambitious Russian modeler from creating a scaled-down version of the fictional aircraft carrier. And what do you know, it actually flies. … Read more

Custom BioShock pinball machine is Rapturous

There are plenty of geeky pinball machines in existence. You can conquer a pinball version of "Lord of the Rings," bash bumpers with Transformers, and roll your way through "Avatar."

What happens when the object of your obsession isn't available in pinball form? You make your own. Pinball hacker/maker rasmadrak is going all BioShock on a custom-made pinball machine.… Read more