diy

The New York Port Authority had egg on its face recently when a stranded jet skier managed to breach JFK International Airport's security perimeter and walk across several runways.

Raytheon, maker of the $100 million Perimeter Intrusion Detection System, has some explaining to do.

But it's not all bad. Inspired by the breach (and Shark Week), Justin Huynh and friends at engineering firm Liquidware have concocted their own intruder alert system for far fewer bucks.

Essentially, it's a simple laser tripwire that sends alerts to Twitter when activated. So far, it works with toy sharks and not hapless jet skiers. … Read more

Jon Johns managed to max out the comments section on a Google+ post when he hit 500 comments. What got everyone so excited? Glow-in-the-dark candy, of course.

Johns, a community engagement specialist for O'Reilly Media (publisher of Make Magazine), shined a light on a Make recipe for creating Kryptonite Candy for a recent Maker Camp project. Johns talked with Crave about his secrets for making glowing candy that actually tastes good, too.… Read more

Today's laptops, smartphones, and tablets are smaller, thinner, and lighter than ever before. But to build today's ultraslim, ultraportable devices, designers and engineers often make their creations more difficult, if not impossible, to repair.

On this special episode of Cracking Open, I show you five ways manufacturers are making our gadgets harder to fix and give you a few tips on working around these self-repair roadblocks.… Read more

The internal flash of a dSLR comes in handy when shooting in low light and indoors but can sometimes be too harsh on your subjects. Bouncing the flash is a great way to distribute the light more uniformly, allowing for more than just foreground assets to show up in the photo. Bouncing the flash is also great for avoiding harsh shadows and those pesky red eyes.

So how do you bounce a flash? Well, the easiest way is to use an external flash attachment. The problem is that external flashes are bulky, heavy, and cumbersome to travel with. This makes them less desirable to carry around and decreases the chances you'll actually have one when you need it most.… Read more

SIM cards were long forgotten until a few years ago when Apple introduced the micro-SIM in its iPhone 4. 

Hardly measuring the size of a fingernail, the micro-SIM was created to accommodate the shrinking width of smartphones and tablets.

Since then, more phone and tablet manufacturers, like Samsung, have adopted this format. The only problem is, however, that not all carriers offer micro-SIM cards. So, what are the options for someone who wants to use an unlocked, micro-SIM-compatible phone, without a carrier that supports it?

A DIY, of course.

Here's the good news: there's really no difference … Read more

Anyone who's ever shopped for a piece of art to hang behind the living room sofa knows that big art typically comes at a big price. Even if you pick up some mass-produced Ikea canvas, you still have to contend with fitting it in the car, or paying someone to deliver it to your doorstep.

If you have more time on your hands than money, there are some easy solutions for printing infinitely large posters from even the most modest printer.

The first step is the image. Whether you're going to print in black and white or full … Read more

I have a friend who still looks out for her stolen bike wherever she goes. She might not be so obsessed with the loss if the bike had been made for $9 out of recycled cardboard.

Bike enthusiast and designer Izhar Gafni built a functioning bicycle out of cardboard. The inspiration came from a another inventor's cardboard canoe project.

Gafni ran his idea by some engineers who told him to give up the dream, that it was impossible. He tried it anyway. The result is an attractive, working bike that costs as little as $9 to make. Of course, that price tag doesn't include the immense amount of R&D time Gafni put into it.… Read more

Though YouTube shouldn't exactly be your most trusted source of medical advice, in at least one case, videos on the site can help people manage a common form of vertigo without having to see a doctor, according to researchers from the American Academy of Neurology.

However, as is the case with pretty much any aggregator on the Internet (think Wikipedia), one should proceed with a healthy dose of caution, because just over half the videos are accurate -- which means, of course, that the others aren't.

The researchers who reviewed YouTube videos of the Epley maneuver, which can … Read more

There's a lot of snake oil and questionable products lining the shelves of the average auto parts store. From octane booster to VTEC fluid (ha!), it's hard to separate the genuinely useful products from the chaff. So when A/C Pro sent me a few canisters of its do-it-yourself air conditioning recharge system, I was a bit skeptical.

The idea is that most aging car air conditioning systems that don't blow as cold as they should suffer only from low levels of refrigerant. The way A/C Pro works is that you plug a can into your … Read more