weekends

Artist/nerd Steve D'Angelo calls this a sculpture, but we think it's more than that. It's an awesome sculpture.

It's called Action Buttons, and that's exactly what it is. Steve, a Crave reader in Pennsylvania, has put a collection of arcade game buttons on the surface of a small plywood box and wired them up to old-school audio samples downloaded from the Web that play when the arcade-like buttons are pressed.

The sounds aren't from specific games but sound like they could be, with titles like "energize," "fire laser," "… Read more

DIY Weekend, a new Crave series spotlighting readers' do-it-yourself creations, kicks off with the Hennepin Crawler. Members of Krank-Boom-Clank, a three-person kinetic industrial arts collective in Santa Rosa, Calif., spent one night a week for six months building the quirky contraption, one of their "mutant ride-able sculptures of delight (aka 'freak bikes')."

Built for four riders, the Crawler can handle both street and limited railroad-track cruising at The Great Handcar Regatta (and, of course, the playa at the annual Burning Man countercultural arts festival).

The creators of the Crawler (Clifford Hill, Skye Barnett, David Farish, and former Krank-Boom-Clank … Read more

Here at Crave, we're giant fans of do-it-yourself projects, and we feature them a lot on these pages because we love the smell of solder and the look of grease stains (even if some of our significant others don't). We've seen some pretty awesome stuff made by regular people to fill needs other products don't--or just because making one's own wacky contraptions is plain fun (robot flower girl, we're talking about you).

We've covered DIY creations including a homemade Lamborghini, automated knock-detecting door lock, snow chopper made from junk, mind-controlled spybot, biometric bridal bouquet, … Read more

It's no surprise we spend money on the things we value. So the question is, how much would you invest in a decent hi-fi or sound system? Bear in mind that a good quality system will last a long time, so amortizing the investment over a period of five or even 10 years should be factored into the expense. The coffee's gone in a matter of minutes.

Let's see, at $4 a day, a $20-a-week Starbucks expense works out to $1,000 a year. You're not going to stop anytime soon, so Starbucks, or any daily … Read more

Decisions can be difficult in the morning. Waking up requires a whole checklist of things to go through. Luckily (hopefully), as this is a daily practice, our checklist becomes routine, and we go through it on autopilot. Until we hit the coffeemaker and we are faced with our first true decision of the day: what type of coffee to make? Since mornings aren't necessarily the best time to be considering questions of utmost importance, perhaps it's best to play it safe and make two different types.

Covering one's bases in the morning is all fine and good, … Read more

The Zune forums are alive with complaints that a bunch of music has suddenly disappeared from Zune devices. The reason: it appears that Microsoft has pulled a bunch of music from the Zune Marketplace. If users downloaded this music to their devices via the subscription-based Zune Pass service, then it apparently disappeared when they synced their device. (I'm talking about subscription-based "tethered" downloads, of which users get an unlimited number per month. The Zune Pass also offers 10 permanent MP3 downloads per month, and those downloads have not been affected.)

I'm not a Zune Pass subscriber, … Read more

As is the tendency at year's end, this week Crave has seen several "best of" lists, including the 10 best cell phones of the year. Not to be single-minded, we also put out the 10 worst cell phones of the year. But it's not just phones, we listed the 20 most notable tech products of the year, period.

We also shared a collection of last-minute gifts you can print. If you have a printer, you now have stocking stuffers. Getting a new HDTV for Christmas? We're here to help.

Did you hear about the wicked … Read more

I finally made it out to the 52nd Annual International Auto Show at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco yesterday, and I'm sure glad that I made the trip. Today is the final day of the show that started over this last Thanksgiving weekend, and in case you can't or didn't make it out to the Moscone to see it all in person, here's an in depth highlight reel to show some of what you may have missed.

Yes, I know the soundtrack to this clip is kinda annoying, but this web video is quite … Read more

Wilson and I both saw that new movie "Paranormal Activity" over the weekend, and although it's being touted as the new Exorcist, we both think it's more like an uncreative, boring version of The Blair Witch Project. Lots of build-up and suspense for a pretty vanilla ending, but I'm not sure what we expected out of a $10K movie. Maybe we've all just been completely spoiled by blockbusters like Roland Emmerch's upcoming disaster movie, 2012. Jeff's not a huge fan, per usual, but watch this insane clip and TRY NOT TO PANIC.

We've seen and played with our fair share of ridiculous iPhone apps before, but the new Puff! app is the latest Japanese game that might raise some flags...amongst other things. Dancing the line between SFW and not, the program allows you to literally blow up the skirts of women, a la Marilyn Monroe. The app uses the iPhone's microphone to sense the virtual gust of wind that "gives the onscreen character a brief moment of embarrassment."

Speaking of inappropriate things, Marge Simpson just scored the cover of Playboy Magazine. In what seems like the worst business plan ever, the November version of the popular men's magazine will feature a 3-page pictorial with "implied nudity..." we're not even sure what that means, but we can't imagine hordes of teenagers flocking to the nearest liquor store to pick up this issue. Besides, we would rather see Lois Griffin on the cover...no offense, Margie.

Video coming soon, check back later today!… Read more