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Wow, check out this battery powered rope Ascender!

Nathan Ball, hangs 50 feet in mid-air from his battery-powered rope ascender, a device that can raise more than 250 pounds at 10 feet per second. Ball is the 2007 winner of the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, an award that recognizes students at MIT who have demonstrated remarkable inventiveness.

The Rope Ascender created by Atlas Devices is a powerful new tool that enables “reverse rappelling” up buildings and other vertical surfaces at unprecedented speeds.

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We are back after couple days of hibernating! Yes, sometimes we need to recharge our energies for blogging power otherwise it would all deplete and we would not be able to find cool DIYs, gadgets, and other cool stuff floating on the internet.

Anyways, you can check out the Robosapien Coil Gun! (Yes, kids should not try this at home…)

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Here’s a DIY for all of your lovers including mine for valentines.

Here’s a cool little howto on transistors and LEDs if you are new to the eletronic circuits.

Also, here’s an LED calculator for single LEDs and multiple LEDs.

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Holy cow, make sure you make one of these on your backyard and
don’t blame us if your body falls off the slingshot… :p

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Here’s a cool laptop you can smack around to different screens which uses the computer’s internal accelerometer.

I usually keep two 20″ screens side by side on my desk, so I can code on one and test on the other. I find I can work much faster if I can just make a change in Eclipse, and by the time I turn my head to the other screen, the tests have already run. My new laptop, however, has a 15″ screen, which feels a bit cramped when I’m working away from the office. I’ve been using the fancy Desktop Manager by Richard Wareham, which is a very nice utility to let you keep several virtual desktops, and change between them easily.

No DIY here but cool looking LEDs…

urban_data on flickr has some good stuff…

Can’t play that DVD you bought in China last summer on your DVD Player?
Check out this site and see if there’s a hack for your DVD Player.

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Here’s a cool IM-bot, which let’s you know when your friends are online. This one is for Linux
but it shouldn’t be too hard to make it yourself using a PIC 16F628A or any other microcontroller.

To make the device, you first need a push puppet. A push puppet is a small articulated character composed of several body parts held together by several strings that run through them under tension. The strings are all connected to a large spring-loaded button under the base. When the button is pressed, the strings go slack and the puppet collapses. When the button is released, the strings pull the puppet back to its normal erect shape. More information on push puppets can be had at http://www.pushpuppets.com/. Push puppets are cheap toys for small children, and can be found at most serious toy stores. Mine is a wooden dog from the “farm animals” series, made by Toys Pure. I paid 2.77€ for it and I find it much cuter than the Availabot guy. What’s more, it doesn’t “drop dead” like the Availabot guy when the button is pushed, but instead drops its head and bows its knees, which I find nicer.