brainwagon

Some clever lads at Cornell University have adapted a classic Etch-a-Sketch so you can draw with a serial mouse. Like many projects I link to, it’s not that it’s difficult, it is just interesting that someone actually did it. It also uses Atmel microcontrollers, which I prefer over the more widely used PIC chips or […]

Slashdot ran a story about a gadget to turn your water bottle into a tripod that can be found in Japan. Adam at fiendishthingy.org has his own Bottle Cap Tripod which can be made for $1.50, thereby singly matching the innovation (or lunacy) of Japanese manufacturers. Obligatory useful hint: Camera tripods are threaded for ordinary […]

Slashdot provided a link to Neil Fraser’s 3D mouse hack. He takes the parts from a couple of mice and makes a gadget that can track positions in 3 space. Perhaps interesting from an academic view, but not really a very pragmatic 3D input device.

SENT is a Motorola Sponsored phonecam art show. If you click the link, you’ll see new photos every five seconds, many of which are pretty darned cool. You can take good pictures with mediocre cameras. My wife does similar things with her Sidekick photoblog.

In case you are running out of geeky things to do with gadgets you could try wire a PocketPC to an Ipod to allow wireless file swapping to anyone within range of your wireless. Even if you poo-poo illegal file swapping, there are some things of interest here: namely, the use of Apple’s Rendezvous/Zeroconf/Howl stuff […]

I ran across a website that claimed to be a Japanese name generator. When I tried mine out, I got 渡辺 Watanabe (near a crossing) 一真 Kazuma (one reality). I have no idea how this works, but I thought it was cool.

Another cool link from the Geometry Junkbox: George Hart’s instructions on building Soda Straw Tensegrity Structures. I can see myself wandering off to the store to buy soda straws, paper clips and rubberbands tonight.

Well, the plug in aquarium was completely useless, so this would have to score higher merely on the basis of utility. The iDuck USB Memory Storage Device is half rubber duckie, half USB memory drive. Strangely enough, I was thinking that I’d like a devil duck version, but I’ve been beaten to the punch.

Every once in a while, I run across a gadget so silly even I can’t bring myself to buy it. This has got to take the cake though: ThinkGeek :: USB Mini Desktop Aquarium. And you are talking to someone who actually has a computer with a fishtank in the side.

I’m tired of machines taking up several cubic feet of my under desk space, so the recent trend towards smaller machines suits me fine. I made an Spacewalker SV24 system a couple of years ago, but it is fairly long in the tooth, so I was glad to see Ars Technica: Small Form Factor Guide, […]

Dan Lyke was musing about learning about FPGA technology on flutterby, which is a topic which has long been in the back of my mind for future projects. I rescanned the list of links I created on FPGAs a while ago, and found that Digilent has a new Pegasus FPGA board which looks promising. It […]

Cringely mentioned the Hauppauge MediaMVP gadget in his column. It’s a semi-cute toy: a stand alone box which connects to 10 or 100 megabit ethernet, and streams media files from your PC to your television. It sells for somewhere between $80 and $100, which is pretty cheap. What’s really interesting is it’s hack potential. According […]

This website runs on a spiffy little VIA motherboard, so I was glad to see that VIA is about to release some new motherboards. You can read this preview on

A couple of days ago I was talking about small robotic flyers, I should have known that somebody at the Seattle Robotics Society would already have done something like this. Check out BXFlyer Four Rotor Helicopter for a description of a four rotor robotic flyer similar to the commercially available DragonFlyer. Addendum: I found a […]

On Tech Now! this morning, I found out about the Octodog’s Frankfurter Converter. When there are products this silly in the world, can the Apocalypse be far behind? The webpage includes a justification for the existance of such a silly novelty item. According to them. The method of slicing a hotdog linearly can reduce the […]