diy

Forget expensive wrapping paper anyone can buy in stores. Photojojo has provided a tutorial that will teach you how to create your own photographic paper. Give your loved ones something original while giving your images a new lease on life.

First, you'll need a printer that can make A3 prints or larger, a pair of scissors, adhesive tape, and ribbons or bows. While photographic paper is better quality, regular copy paper is preferred as it's thinner and easier to work with when wrapping your gift. … Read more

Remember the days of Betamax, turntables, and Zenith TVs with rabbit ears and big honking dials?

Siri has just taken a little trip back to those simpler times of yore with a quaint little hack that turns the voice assistant into an operator reachable via rotary phone (cue the Jim Croce, those of you who remember hearing a voice say "operator" on the other end of the line).

Computer programmer Davis Remmel ripped apart a $2 Bluetooth headset purchased on eBay, fitting its earpiece into the earpiece section of the old phone and the microphone into the mouthpiece. The headset is enabled by dialing "1" on the rotary encoder.

In the video below, Remmel picks up the 20th century handset, dials "1," and delivers the command "Call John Doe." Siri then says, "Calling John Doe's mobile," and proceeds to call the number on Remmel's iPhone 4S, which is connected to the rotary phone. (For more on Remmel's rewiring job, see this detailed account on his blog.) … Read more

This software engineer really, really loves Christmas...and symphonic metal, as his cube decoration contest entry shows.

Redditor and software engineer Billiam5 posted this video on Reddit late last night demonstrating his achievement in action, replete with dancing Christmas lights synced to the song "Wizards in Winter," by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra (TSO).

According to the artist himself, Billiam5 used the Arduino prototyping platform and Flash-based animation programming to bring the LEDs to life:… Read more

Creating art with that splendidly elaborate gadget known as the typewriter is, of course, nothing new.

We're all familiar with the more, shall we say, prosaic variety--as famously produced by Ernest Hemingway, Ray Bradbury, and all the rest of those pre-personal-computer literati types (or typers).

There's even plenty of non-word-based typewriter art. Leopoldo Maler's flaming sculpture "Hommage" is a favorite of this particular keyboard jockey. And my wannabe graphic-designer/art-historian side loves H.N. Werkman's '20s-era "Tiksels" (think ASCII art meets modernist abstraction).

The "Chromatic Typewriter," however, seems to have found its way into new territory. … Read more

Handwritten gift tags might be a thing of the past.

This holiday season, JC Penney is offering Santa Tags, a new option that allows gift-buyers to record voice messages for their recipients to play back upon unboxing their gifts. And it's all done with QR codes.

The voice message is attached to a QR code, which the recipient scans with a QR scanner on a mobile phone, and the voice note is instantly played back.

Pretty cool.

But you don't have to go to JC Penney to make this happen, because there's an even better DIY option … Read more

While it may appear that Instructables contributor dimovi has been staring at a blank, white computer screen for hours, he's actually getting some super secret work done.

Dimovi hacked an old LCD monitor with a knife, paint thinner, superglue, and a pair of 3D glasses pilfered from the movies to create a privacy screen that keeps prying eyes at bay.

I know this all sound very MacGyver-ish, but it's actually pretty simple.… Read more

It's not often we describe a PC as cute, but we can't help but conjure that word on seeing Via Technologies' Artigo A1150 DIY PC kit. It produces a Windows desktop that measures just 5.7 inches by 3.9 inches by 2 inches--itty bitty enough to fit in the palm of your hand.

Now, it's entirely possible our cute meter's getting swayed by Via promotional materials featuring a kitten, but there's no denying this machine falls under the rubric of ultracompact.

The little A1150 expands Via's Artigo line by adding a 64-bit 1GHz dual-core Eden X2 processor and a VX900H media system processor. It has HD video support, HDMI and VGA display connectivity, Gigabit networking, Wi-Fi support, and five USB ports. It supports up to 4GB of DDR 1066 MHz RAM and a 2.5-inch (laptop) SATA hard drive or solid-state disk. … Read more

At first I thought the Tweephone might be a joke, but upon second look, I see that it's just a fun little hack. A twee one, even.

The "world's first analog Twitter client" lets you tweet with the turn of a rotary phone dial. An Arduino platform inside the retro-looking phone chassis interprets your dial turns as letters in much the same way you used to have to keep punching keys on an alphanumeric dialpad to get the right letters when texting. To get an "a," for example, you have to dial 2 once; to get an "f," you dial 3 three times. Yes, yes, that's a lot of labor for 140 characters, but has tweeting ever looked so charming? … Read more

Everywhere you turn, it's Siri this and Siri that. Now Siri can help make all that Siri news go down smoother with a frosty cold brewski, poured just for you.

Advertising agency Redpepper wanted to spice up Siri's skill set. Naturally, the tinkerers turned to a monster truck toy and a can of Dale's Pale Ale. Hence, Beeri was born.

Beeri is an RC truck that has been modified to check the Twitter account @beeribot over Wi-Fi for new tweets with the "pour" command.

The makers achieved this by using an onboard open-source Arduino physical computing platform (as did this tweet-printing toilet paper dispenser). Beeri also has an unopened beer can strapped to the front bumper.

Redpepper created the @beeribot account and assigned a contact to it on the iPhone 4S. The soon-to-be-beer-drinker tells Siri to tweet, "Could you pour me a beer?" to @beeribot.

The truck picks up the word, revs itself up, and smashes into a sharp object to pierce the beer can. The frothy beverage flows down through a hole and into a pint glass below. … Read more