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Continue reading Water-cooled, luggable PS3 offers semi-convenient gaming for your on-the-go lifestyle

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Water-cooled, luggable PS3 offers semi-convenient gaming for your on-the-go lifestyle originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 29 May 2011 18:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Normally, if a grown man talks about building a fusion reactor and wants your 13-year-old to hang out in his garage, we’d expect you to smile, back away slowly, and perhaps alert the authorities. But, if that man is Microsoft program manager Carl Greninger there’s no need to run. The science fanatic recruited a team of teens, as young as 13, and worked with them to build a Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor — a (comparatively) simple nuclear reactor that smashes together atoms and produces neutrons. Check out the nearly 20-min video after the break to watch a bunch of high school kids generate ball of ionized plasma. And to think, all that’s in your garage is that ’65 Mustang you swear you’re gonna restore one day.

Continue reading Microsoft manager teams up with teens to build a fusion reactor in his garage (video)

Microsoft manager teams up with teens to build a fusion reactor in his garage (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 28 May 2011 02:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In today’s episode of “But will it run Zork?” a chap named Ulysses got the vintage game to run on a TDD (telecommunications device for the deaf) — a project he built to show off at the Bay Area Maker Faire last weekend. In a move we truly respect, he hunted down a rotary phone lifted straight out of the era when Zork was conceived (that would be the late ’70s / early ’80s). Then, he modified a modem so that the acoustically coupled TDD could be interfaced — transmitting at a slow 45.5 baud to make it easy for even ponderous readers to keep up, one line at a time on the TDD’s narrow display. Once this was sorted, things weren’t exactly smooth sailing when Ulysses started fitting the compressed Zork story file into the system. At first, he tried using an Arduino Pro and an Arduino Mega, but found that neither had enough memory to accommodate the compressed Zork story file. Ultimately, he took a different tack and settled on an embeddable FitPC. We’d love nothing more than to see this thing in action, but in lieu of a video we highly suggest carving out a few minutes and perusing Ulysses’ photo blog at the source link.

Telecommunications device for the deaf gets hitched to a rotary phone, hacked to run Zork originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 May 2011 10:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While many of you continue your quest for an Eee Pad Transformer, some folks, predictably, have already figured out how to overclock it. Netarchy over at the XDA forum posted a custom kernel allowing hackers to crank the tablet’s clock speed to 1.4GHz, the same peak reached by the ViewSonic G Tablet. Beware, though, that performance at that speed has proven unreliable, so for now the dev recommends a more modest 1.2GHz to avoid data loss, a meltdown, and “injury of assorted puppies.” Par for the course, really.

Eee Pad Transformer gets overclocked to 1.4GHz, deemed less than stable originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 May 2011 15:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The rapture has come and gone, but the Maker Faire powers on. Despite warnings of a May 21st doomsday, folks came out in droves for the annual celebration of all things DIY, and we were there to bring you the best in homespun inventions. This year’s Maker Faire was light on robots and big on corporate sponsorship. Among the giants supporting the little guys were Google, ASUS, and HP, but El Goog’s presence extended beyond its dedicated tents. The new Android ADK was big with at-home tinkerers this year, spawning a number of little robots and at least one DIY alternative.

Perhaps no other trend proved more pervasive than 3D printing, however — every time we turned around there was another MakerBot or RapMan pumping out everything from statuettes of attendees to cutesy salt shakers. There were robotic building blocks, a Heineken-themed R2-D2, DIY drones, custom keyboards, and a ton of repurposed gadgets, but it was an arena of destructo-bots, tucked away in the farthest corner of the San Mateo County Event Center, that really blew us away. We came away sunburned and bedraggled, but lucky for you, we did all the dirty work so you don’t have to. To see what made this year’s Maker Faire, hop on past the break for a video of our favorite DIY finds.

Myriam Joire contributed to this report.

Continue reading Maker Faire 2011, in pictures: Arduinos, Androids, and angry robots (video)

Maker Faire 2011, in pictures: Arduinos, Androids, and angry robots (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 22 May 2011 17:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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