I remember the days when I would buy a BB-Gun kit and build myself lots of guns and shoot them at my friends. (Well they were plastic BBs…)

Here’s a cool DIY on how to make your own BB machine gun powered by 40 PSI air. That’s a lot of fire power if you ask me. This machine gun is probably more dangerous than real guns at the speed which it can fire the BBs. (I wonder if you can use pellets…)

This item is unusual to be featured at Burnt Latke as it is pneumatic ‘launcher’. The original was created by Piper’s Precision and can be found at www.pipersprecisionproducts.com. A similar design was developed by the experienced builder; ’spudsonfire’, and posted in the forums at www.spudtech.com. The spudsonfire design uses a ‘vortex block’ to guide the BB’s into the barrel by means of the venturi effect. A continuous and plentiful supply of air at 40 PSI of higher is required and the rate of air consumption is quite high.
This BB gun is dangerous if used improperly.
Adult supervision is required during construction and operation.
Wear eye protection when shooting.

via burntlatke

This isn’t the BB Machine gun mentioned here but still cool videos of some other BB Machine guns people have made in the past:

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Step 1

First, you will need a green laser. I recommend anything 125mW and above.

For this DIY, Frank from DragonLasers.com sponsored me a Spartan 250mW green laser. (Thanks Frank!)

You also need a diffractive glass that will distribute the green laser beams. I was lucky that the Spartan comes with it. You could probably use those cheap diffractive glasses from 3D glasses too.

Second, you will need a plastic epoxy. (In the video, I say you need two but you just really need the plastic epoxy as it works really good for everything.)

Third, you need bunch of pipes. I went to home depot and got bunch of cheap galvanized pipes for about $10 total.

Step 2

You need to drill a hole in the center of the diffractive glass, then epoxy it to the motor. Now, I accidently broke the glass and had to epoxy everything. Just make sure to use a real thin drill and go slow so you don’t make the same mistakes that I did.

Then, also epoxy the bottom end of the motor to the 90 degree pipe arm. (Make sure to solder on 2 wires to the motor!)

(Sorry, I forgot to take pictures while doing that…)

Step 3

Build your green laser projector using the pipes and pipe parts sorta like below.

Put all the wires through the pipes so it comes out the other end. (Sorry again, I forgot to take pictures of this step…) Then assemble everything. You can fit the green laser through the T-pipe piece. (For the T-pipe piece, I used a bigger size then used electrical tape around the pipes to stabilize it.)

Step 4

Now you have two wires coming out the other side of pipe. Simply connect that to a 1.5V battery OR you can use a DC adaptor.

Step 5

Once you get the motor running, simply align your green laser and there you go, a simple green laser projector.

You should get nice set of two whirpools of green laser beams.

Now, you could probably add another axis and another motor to get even better animated effects.

I plan to add a microcontroller like CUBLOC or Basic Stamp in the future so stay tuned and subscribe to Zedomax.com.

This DIY was made to experiment with the green laser, so don’t shoot me if it’s not super high tech. It’s supposed to be simple enough so any regular joe can make one. But I promise next time it will be more high tech…

My friend Deimos over at AhKong.Net posted an interesting post today about how to utilize the file cache of Firefox. By use of more cache, you will be able to browse the web faster, especially if you check out many of the same sites daily.

You can read about his full DIY on Firefox Cache HOWTO here.

Today, we will cover several ways that can help you to reduce cost of your printing, whether you are running a home business or a company with 1000 employees.

Make sure to Preview your documents before printing:

A lot of people might think this is something they do all the time but the truth is that most people waste a lot of paper printing out the wrong portion of their content, including myself.

Use that “Preview” button to preview what you are printing. Almost all applications including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Photoshop, and MS Word have this feature.

At least think about how many million trees would be saved if “everyone” used the Preview button?

Here’s an example of print preview on Firefox: (Yes, it’s so simple, isn’t it? Your actions can save a tree.)

Use Draft mode and Black and White mode for Drafts:

You can save additional time and ink if you are still working on your draft versions by using the draft mode.

Simply click on “Properties” and you should be able to set your printer to “Draft” or “Fast Draft” mode as shown here:

Save even more ink by printing in Grayscale:

Scan all documents “digitally” into CD or DVDs

Have you thought about all the stuff that could be digitized into a Jpeg or PDF file into a single CD or a DVD?

A lot of times, people will ask you to fax some important documents in order to verify your information when doing business.

By having all documents “digitized” and accessible from a single CD or DVD (or even your G-mail), you no longer have to remember where you left that Social Security card, passport, Business License, etc…etc… Although it is good idea to keep the original copies, I find it easier to e-mail my digital copies straight from G-mail.

I could be anywhere in the world and have access to all my important documents with just 1 CD or DVD instead of lugging all your documents everywhere with you, especially going over-seas.

Best ways to digitize your documents?

Get a good office scanner. I use an HP Deskjet F380, which cost me about $70 to do printing, scanning, and copying all-in-one. Although it’s slower than a laserjet, I can do most office work using it and it scans reasonably fast. I use it to scan all my invoices, receipts, and anything that can be scanned.

If you can afford it, there are some really nice laser version of the Deskjet, LaserJet M5025, which can scan hundreds of documents at a time and send them to your e-mail when its done via a single PDF file. This can prove to be very handy for all those POs and Invoices you have stacked up in huge boxes. I remember on one of my first jobs, I digitized about 20 boxes of POs (around 100,000 letter sized papers) from Wal-mart. (Think of how many trees I saved for their future POs!)

Nowdays, that company can simply access every one of their POs via a DVD-ROM.

Buy ink cartridges online from 3rd party suppliers

Buy cheap ink cartridges from 3rd party suppliers like DataBazaar.com. I find that their prices are much cheaper even if you are buying an OEM brand.

CD and DVD Labels

Now, just make sure to label them right using good CD labels, especially if you do have a lot of data to digitize. You can download free CD templates over here. These templates are great if you actually want to organize your digitized documents. You can even get some really good discounts on CD/DVD labels here.

Label Printers

If you like to spend more money, you can always get a label printer too. I have tried Dymo label printers before and these work really good with address labels or CD/DVD labels.

Print Labels and get your mail delivered faster!

Instead of spending time writing the addresses, I use my printer to print out labels so I save time on my frequent mailings and my mail gets there faster.
(Did you know that US Postal Service actually uses a scanner to process mail? If you have handwritten addresses, your mail will could actually take 1-2 days more due to manual scan by human workers. I did learn this through an executive manager I talked to at Pitney Bowes.)

By using labels instead of handwriting, you will save yourself hassle of writing and your mail will get to your destination faster. (You can even print out the US Postal Service address bar code on the envelope itself to ensure super fast delivery.)

You can also save some money by ordering labels from online label shops such as WorldLabel.com, which I have used before and found 40-50% cheaper than retailers. They even have popular “size-compatible” Avery labels, much cheaper than buying the branded ones.

Now, if you think this blog post will “change” printing behaviors of our readers, please leave a comment on how many trees you think we saved today.

Warning, please read Part I of How to make your own Firefox extension from scratch before trying this DIY.

In this Part II of How to make your own Firefox extension, we will change the icon button to something we like instead of the dumb looking blue default button.

Now, you will want to open up the overlay.css file under the skin directory of where you unzipped your extension files.

The default should look somewhat like this:

/* This is just an example. You shouldn’t do this. */
#shtoolbar-hello
{
color: red ! important;
}
#shtoolbar-toolbar-button
{
list-style-image: url(”chrome://shtoolbar/skin/toolbar-button.png”);
-moz-image-region: rect(0px 24px 24px 0px);
}
#shtoolbar-toolbar-button:hover
{
-moz-image-region: rect(24px 24px 48px 0px);
}
[iconsize="small"] #shtoolbar-toolbar-button
{
-moz-image-region: rect( 0px 40px 16px 24px);
}
[iconsize="small"] #shtoolbar-toolbar-button:hover
{
-moz-image-region: rect(24px 40px 40px 24px);
}

Now, you can change the button’s image by editing the toolbar-button.png. I actually simply replaced with another file name.

So first, I made my own logo. You will need one with height of 24 pixels and the other with 16 pixels.

I also made a “hovering” graphic so the logo will change and have the kangaroo holding a beer when you hover the mouse over it.

Here’s an example Png file I made using Photoshop:

As you can see, you the can use just 1 file to store all the logo images you need.

In my case, I made a 165×24 pixel icon button and 100×16 pixel icon button.

The 100×16 pixel icon button is actually used for the toolbar and the 165×24 pixel icon button is used when you tried to customize your toolbar.

So in total, the size of my file was 265×48 pixels.

Now comes the fun part. You simply need to mess with the -moz-image-region values so you grab the right parts of your customized PNG file.

So after all that, here’s the file I have for overlay.css:

/* This is just an example. You shouldn’t do this. */
#shtoolbar-hello
{
color: black ! important;
}
#shtoolbar-toolbar-button
{
list-style-image: url(”chrome://shtoolbar/skin/shtoolbar.png“);
-moz-image-region: rect(0px 165px 24px 0px);
}
#shtoolbar-toolbar-button:hover
{
-moz-image-region: rect(24px 165px 48px 0px);
}
[iconsize="small"] #shtoolbar-toolbar-button
{
-moz-image-region: rect( 0px 275px 16px 165px);
}
[iconsize="small"] #shtoolbar-toolbar-button:hover
{
-moz-image-region: rect(24px 275px 40px 165px);
}

I’ve highlighted the changes I made in BOLD.

You simply need to remember 4 things when editing the -moz-image-region:

TOP RIGHT BOTTOM LEFT

That’s right, for the first line:

-moz-image-region: rect(0px 165px 24px 0px);

I am simply telling the CSS file to grab the portion of the image from 0 to 24px from TOP to BOTTOM, and from 0 to 165px from LEFT to RIGHT.

Now you do the same for the hovering and the smaller image.

After you made those changes, Save and then restart the browser.

Your default blue button should now look like this:

Looks great doesn’t it?

And when you hover the mouse, you get a nice beer bottle for the sober kangaroo.

Next time, we will mess with more Javascripts that can be used for the icon button to actually do something…

Have fun and have a greeeeat weekend!

Wow, this has to be one of the cooler DIY robots I’ve seen in a long time. Basically, it plays drums. Not real drums, but it plays your household stuff like vases as drums. Beautifully done, we give it an A+ for the creators. (Btw, we are not selling the blog for $1000, our readers say it’s too cheap! How much should we sell it for? j/k April FOOLS!)

Notice how the robot first plays on the object it finds (or is forced to find by the angry cameraman), plays a small beat, and records the beat it plays on it. Then this recorded beat is played again, and it starts to play on the object (an belt tracks and everything else it has),and also playing this sampled beat

[via] letsmakerobots

Click to enjoy the video

Continue reading ‘DIY - Robotic Yellow Drum Machine plays Drums!’