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DIY Projects, Inspiration, How-tos, Hacks, Mods & More @ Makezine.com - Tweak Technology to Your Will

DIY Projects, Inspiration, How-tos, Hacks, Mods & More @ Makezine.com - Tweak Technology to Your Will
by Ken Sharp April 25, 2005 Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) have become a necessary luxury over the last several years. Millions of people rely on these devices to pause and rewind live television, and to keep track of broadcast schedules and record programs for them. Many consider them just as essential to their daily lives as their cell phones. Several months ago, I finally became sufficiently jealous of the millions of DVR owners to motivate me to put a DVR in my own living room. I earn a living as a computer engineer, so I understand how long it can take to write custom software. Here's how I did it. You'll need: with at least 256MB of RAM (512MB is better), plenty of hard drive space, and a good video card. presumably from your existing home theater system). I used a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 card, $149 at hauppauge.com . I used BeyondTV, which was bundled with the Hauppauge card, but is available from SnapStream separately for $70 at snapstream.com . Automation software, $20 at promixis.com

5 Ways To Hack Your Brain Into Awesomeness Much of the brain is still mysterious to modern science, possibly because modern science itself is using brains to analyze it. There are probably secrets the brain simply doesn't want us to know. But by no means should that stop us from tinkering around in there, using somewhat questionable and possibly dangerous techniques to make our brains do what we want. We can't vouch for any of these, either their effectiveness or safety. #5. So you just picked up the night shift at your local McDonald's, you have class every morning at 8am and you have no idea how you're going to make it through the day without looking like a guy straight out of Dawn of the Dead, minus the blood... hopefully. "SLEEEEEEEEEP... uh... What if we told you there was a way to sleep for little more than two hours a day, and still feel more refreshed than taking a 12-hour siesta on a bed made entirely out of baby kitten fur? Holy Shit! We're pretty sure Kramer did this once on Seinfeld. How Does It Work? #4. #3. 1. 2. 3.

AAXA P2 Pico Projector - LCoS Based Hand-held Pocket Projector - LED Micro Projector AAXA Technologies is pleased to introduce the AAXA P2 Pico Projector - the brightest pico projector on the market. Designed for the professional user, the AAXA P2 micro projector employs an ultra-efficient optical engine design, new LCoS chip, and high-power LED to achieve a stunning 33 lumen output at 800x600 resolution. The AAXA P2 projector brings true business presentation capabilities to the micro projector market. Professional features include a direct VGA connector supporting up to 1280x720 resolution for laptop connection, an infrared remote control, dual 0.5 watt stereo speakers, and on-board gamma correction. The P2 is packaged into a pint-sized unit measuring 4.3" x 2.3" x 1" and weighs in at only 260 grams(**). Battery life is rated at 35 minutes, with optional 70 and 180 minute batteries available. Super Color and Image Quality In addition to wide color range & deep color saturation, the single LED light source eliminates motion blur and color break up ("Rainbow Effect").

How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything - Alexis C. Madrigal An exclusive look inside Ground Truth, the secretive program to build the world's best accurate maps. Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions. This is the data that you're drawing from when you ask Google to navigate you from point A to point B -- and last week, Google showed me the internal map and demonstrated how it was built. Google opened up at a key moment in its evolution. And for good reason. "If you look at the offline world, the real world in which we live, that information is not entirely online," Manik Gupta, the senior product manager for Google Maps, told me. This is not just a theoretical concern. Google is locked in a battle with the world's largest company, Apple, about who will control the future of mobile phones. But that would entail actually building a better map.

Free Books A lot of people keep asking about a good list of programming books. Hence, we are building this list to save your time and to spread the knowledge. Some of these books will definitely help us to evolve our coding skills and thought processes for developing better solutions. We will do our best to keep updating this list, hope you find this list useful, here we go. Meta-List Graphics Programming Language Agnostic: NerdDinner Walkthrough Assembly Language: Bash Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide See .NET below Django Djangobook.com Emacs The Emacs manual Thanks Emacser (October 17, 2010) Forth Git Haskell Dive Into HTML5 Java JavaScript Linux Advanced Linux Programming Lisp Lua Programming In Lua (for v5 but still largely relevant) Maven Mercurial NoSQL CouchDB: The Definitive Guide Objective-C The Objective-C Programming Language Parrot / Perl 6 Perl 6 (Work in progress) Perl PowerShell Mastering PowerShell Prolog PostgreSQL Practical PostgreSQL Python Learn REBOL Thanks Nick (October 19, 2010) Ruby Scala Scheme Smalltalk Subversion Vim

AAXA M2 Micro Projector - LCoS Hand-held Mini Projector - XGA LED Pocket Projector AAXA Technologies is pleased to announce the release of the AAXA M2 Micro Projector, the world's first XGA micro projector. Weighing just 1 pound yet producing a vivid 110 lumen image with Vibrant Color technology, the AAXA M2 Micro Projector is the next generation ultra-portable multimedia projector. With power to produce 100" images*, a versatile media player, built-in storage, and an array of input options, the M2 redefines what is capable in mobile projection technology. The AAXA M2 micro projector is the most powerful and fully-featured projector in its class. The M2 mini projector feature a new high-speed video and image processor that supports up to 1280x720 resolution resolution video at 30 frames per second and a wide array of image and music formats. The M2's connectivity is unmatched with HDMI, VGA, and composite A/V inputs. Additional features include infrared remote control, adjustable tripod, and a 3.5mm audio output for headphones or external speakers. Long LED Life

Downwind Faster Than The Wind Cart This instructable will take you through the construction of a working model of the wind powered cart that answers the question that sparked so much controversy across dozens of internet forums. It resulted in tens of thousands of posts of heated debates, on-line and print articles in Make, Popular Science, Wired, Der Spiegel, and many other magazines and blogs around the world, and has appeared on the Discovery Channel's "The Daily Planet". My buddy and I built a full-sized manned version of the vehicle (see the video of the "Blackbird" above) and established a world record for direct downwind speed of a wind powered vehicle. We've spoken at NASA, AIAA, Stanford, SJSU, and a number of other venues on this controversial topic, and won the Editor’s Choice award at the 2011 Maker Faire. The question: Is it possible to make a wind powered vehicle that goes directly downwind, faster than the wind, steady-state? Learning objective: Critical thinking!

Top 10 Free Ways To Discover New Music Online Bored with your music and want to discover some new bands or singers? There are two main ways you can do that online. You can use services which create music maps, allowing you to explore artists similar in genre to the artists you already listen to. Some of these websites have a community built around them, which gives fans the opportunity to interact directly with these new talents. Here is a list of 10 free sites to discover new music. TuneGlue TuneGlue is straightforward and easy to use. Using TuneGlue, you start out with 6 similar artists, and can continue to explore and expand on them. Music-Map A less flashy alternative to TuneGlue is Music-Map. Music Roamer Music Roamer adds another dimension to music map sites, by not only providing suggestions of similar artists, but also allowing you to listen to music directly on their site. Bloson The simplest alternative to these first three websites is Bloson. Zune One Track Mind The Hype Machine TheSixtyOne OurStage PureVolume

A Step-by-Step MySQL Tutorial For Self-Hosted Wordpress Bloggers If you’re a blogger, the chances are that you use WordPress, a powerful solution that is the engine behind many popular websites. There are two ways in which you can use WordPress, ideal for those with some technical know-how and those without. The first is to use the hosted blog service at WordPress.com, which is similar to Blogger in that you don’t pay any fees and all of the background maintenance is automatic. The downside to this is that you are restricted in which plugins you can add. For those who prefer more control over their blogs and have some technical ability (although not much is required) then the self-hosted option available from WordPress.org is probably preferred. Choosing this option may require you to have some knowledge of setting up a MySQL database, importing and exporting data, creating backups and understanding how to perform checks and repair the database. Setting Up The Database Adding A Database User Exporting & Importing Data In phpMyAdmin File Too Big?

How to Become an Early Riser It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom. – Aristotle Are morning people born or made? In my case it was definitely made. In my early 20s, I rarely went to bed before midnight, and I’d almost always sleep in late. I usually didn’t start hitting my stride each day until late afternoon. But after a while I couldn’t ignore the high correlation between success and rising early, even in my own life. … and the next morning, I got up just before noon. Hmmm… I tried again many more times, each time not getting very far with it. It’s hard to become an early riser using the wrong strategy. The most common wrong strategy is this: You assume that if you’re going to get up earlier, you’d better go to bed earlier. It seems there are two main schools of thought about sleep patterns. The second school says you should listen to your body’s needs and go to bed when you’re tired and get up when you naturally wake up.

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