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• Class up your next party with the Drink Making Unit 2.0
  The crew over at [Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories] has been hard at work preparing for the Barbot 2011 cocktail robotic exhibition. This year, they are packing some serious drinking fun with the Drink Making Unit 2.0. The predictably named follow-up to last year’s wildly popular Drink Making Unit doubles the mixing capability with six, rather [...]
• Kinect hack makes April Fools’ prank a reality
  Unless you have been hiding out in a cave for the last week or so, you have heard about this year’s April Fools’ joke from Google. Gmail Motion was purported to be an action-driven interface for Gmail, complete with goofy poses and gestures for completing everyday email tasks. Unfortunately it was all an elaborate joke [...]
• RFID drink system eliminates the need for change
  [Avatar-X] snagged a drink vending machine online a few years back, and has been selling drinks to his neighbors ever since. People are always asking him for change, and just the other day he was thirsty and out of change himself.  He considered adding an override key so that he could snag free drinks whenever [...]
• Power-sipping MSP430 mini alarm clock
  [Markus] had a TI MSP430 sitting around from the LaunchPad kit he bought a while back. He didn’t know what to do with it, but eventually decided that it would make a great miniature alarm clock. He added a shift register to the mix in order to drive his 7-segment LCD display, using two of [...]

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• Gun turret built into a cake box
  Couch potatoes have a new line of defense thanks to this remote-controlled turret. The gun itself is a hacked down airsoft model. The mount started with a servo motor in the center of a plastic cake box. A thin strip of plywood was added, along with a couple of sliding furniture feet to stabilize the platform as [...]
• Kapton tape aids in drag soldering surface mount parts
  Drag soldering works exactly as its name implies, by dragging a bead of solder across fine-pitch pins you can quickly solder an entire row. The method relies on clean joints, so liquid solder flux is often used to make sure there is good flow. But if you’re drag soldering on boards that you’ve etched yourself [...]
• Aftermarket Visor-mounted GPS better than OEM
  When [Roberto] bought his Mini Cooper, he opted to forgo the factory GPS system as it was over priced and didn’t have the best of reputations. He decided that he still needed GPS in his car, so he committed himself to install a TomTom unit in a way that would not detract from the car’s [...]
• Adjustable prank box growls and screams
  [Brett] over at FightCube was tossing around ideas to build a screaming prank circuit that fits inside an Altoids tin. Sound familiar? We featured a story just a few days back about the construction of a very similar item by [Dino Segovis]. It seems that great minds think alike after all! [Brett’s] version is a [...]

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• Macro lens and image stacking
  [Samuel Sargent] built his own lens for making stacked macro images.This project, which was completed as part of his senior thesis, utilizes a Zeiss enlarger lens. The aperture ring was broken, making it difficult to tell how much light was being let into the camera. Instead of scrapping the whole thing he turned it around, [...]
• 3D printed gun fires Nerf darts
  [Vik Olliver] adds a bit more power to what has traditionally been a store-bought toy by designing this printable dart gun. His design prints the follower in the track where it belongs, which means it’s not going to come loose unless the material itself fails. After printing you’ll need to clean up that track just a [...]
• Robotic berimbau plays itself
  If you have ever seen capoeira, you have undoubtedly heard the music of a berimbau. If you are not familiar, Capoeira is a Brazilian art form that melds martial arts, acrobatics, and music. This graceful fighting form is often accompanied by the sounds of a berimbau, a single-stringed musical instrument comprised of a gourd, a [...]
• Manage your rechargeables at a glance
  If you enjoy photography, radio controlled vehicles, or any other activity that requires you to keep multiple sets of rechargeable batteries on hand you know how much of a pain it can be if you get a dead battery mixed in with your charged batteries. This easy approach to managing your batteries while on location [...]

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• Awesome portable N64 keeps your games in hand, out of sight
  [David] recently wrote us to share the portable Nintendo 64 he constructed with the help of the friendly people over at the ModdedbyBacteria forums. We are no strangers to N64 portables, as you may have noticed, but this one was just too good to pass up. Sheathed in a metallic blue case, this console is [...]
• Bluetooth bot constructed from thrift store rejects
  [John] wrote in to share his latest creation, an Arduino-controlled Bluetooth robot. You might remember him from one of his previous hacks, the Lawnbot 400. This time around, he has decided to scale things down a bit and focus his hacking on small R/C toys. His Bluetooth bot was constructed using a cheap R/C tank [...]
• SPARKFUNS HAS DA KEWT KITTY PARADES OF STUF
  HAY GUISE! SPARKFUN ADDED AWESUM NEW STUF 2DAY. DA PICTURZ WERE SUPER BORING NERD STUF SO I ADDED SUM AWESOME KITTEHS TO THEM. THA WUN ABUV IZ AN ADORUBLE RED HAIRED KITTEH OVER DA SPARKFUN SOLDERING IRON KIT! IT’S SUPER KEWLS FOR SURE. HAH, I DUNNO WHAT THIS DOES BUT LOOK AT DAT KEWT KITTEH [...]
• Whistle to make the art flow
  A new project from [James] targets the iPhone with this wild generative art in an Augmented Reality environment (free) app for 3GS and 4 running running iOS 4+. Powered by the String augmented reality library, and written in C + OpenGL the combo present a power AR platform offering over 100,000 polygons on screen with [...]

apt-get

Firefox 4.0 is a very nice improvement to the older versions. Apparently, it is 6x faster than version 3.6! Of course, it may not feel that way, but that’s what they say. This version brings some big interface changes to the table along with the improvement in speed. One thing it does NOT bring, however, is the ability to save your opened tabs when closing or exiting Firefox. Yep, that’s right. The message simply does not pop up asking if you want to save the tabs or not! You’ll be warned about having multiple tabs opened, but that’s it. That’s a beloved feature! Most people would want to be able to have Firefox 4.0 Save Multiple Tabs On Close after all.

Firefox will address this for sure in an update, but until then you must tweak Firefox yourself! This solution does not involve having to install a plugin / extension either, so do not worry! No downloads at all.

Check out the guide on How to Save Tabs When Exiting in Firefox 4.0 for help on how to do it! You literally just have to alter one setting in about:config. The message will then popup afterwards and you’ll be able to save your tabs when you exit Firefox or have them auto / automatically save on close.

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• DIY camera stabilizer keeps your video shake free on the cheap
  Commercial vest-based camera stabilizer systems are quite expensive, sometimes bearing price tags in the $700-$800 dollar range. Photographer [Miguel Vicente] has a pretty well-stocked workshop and decided there was no way he would shell out that much cash for a rig, so he simply built his own. “Simply” is a bit of a misstatement, to [...]
• R/C car controlled by an iPad or Kinect
  R/C cars can be tons of fun, but sometimes the fun runs out after awhile. [Gaurav] got bored of steering around his R/C car with its remote, so he built an interface that lets him control the car using two different motion-detecting devices. He built an HTML5 application for his iPad, which allows him to [...]
• Screaming Altoids tin just in time for April Fool’s
  Maker [Dino Segovis] has started on a project he calls “Hack a week” where he will be putting together one hack or project per week, for a full year. The first installment of his video series was finished just two days before April Fool’s, and appropriately enough covers the construction of a circuit you can [...]
• Think Geeks wants you to have broken stuff
  Think Geek has a growing pile of returns and damaged product that they’re trying to get rid of. The purveyors of technological oddities, like any other large retailer, sometimes have stuff that doesn’t work right, or has been damaged somewhere between factory and consumer. The broken bits find their way back to the distribution center [...]

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• Oscilloscope thinks it’s a video monitor
  There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. Where would we be if we listened to advice like that? [Eric] writes that with a fairly simple circuit, he’s able to split a composite video signal into its constituent X and Y ramp signals for display on his trusty [...]
• “Stupid expert” builds a machete slingshot for the impending zombie apocalypse
  Sometimes people build things for the simple challenge of building. This is one of those cases. The gentleman you see in the image above is [Jörg Sprave] of The Slingshot Channel. He is a self-proclaimed “Supid Expert” on the subject of slingshots and has taken his love of flinging things at absurd velocities to a [...]
• Jacob’s Ladder makes itself at home in a floppy disk box
  [Plasanator] adds a bit of safety to his Jacob’s Ladder by housing it in a familiar enclosure. It doesn’t take very many components to make one of these, but to get the high voltage you’ll need some type of coil. He’s using one from the electrical system of an old car, then building around it [...]
• Converting the BlinkM into the world’s tiniest Arduino
  The BlinkM “Smart LED” is a great little device on its own accord. It allows for complete control of its RGB LED using a built-in microcontroller, enabling the user to do a wide array of things that normally require PWM to accomplish. At just over half an inch square, this little device might also be [...]

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• CFL Breakdown
  Reader [Jay] was inspired by one of our earlier articles and started digging around the web for some more information, and found a handy web page with tear downs and schematics of popular compact florescent lamps. Schematics are provided to 15 fairly common models including bigluz, isotronic, luxtek, maway, maxilux, polaris, brownie, Phillips, Ikea, Osram, [...]
• Quadcopter pair plays table tennis without the table
  This pair of quad-rotor helicopters does a better job of keeping a ping-pong ball in the air than we could. The two flying drones are performing inside of the flying machine arena, a 1000 cubic meter indoor space surrounded by nets with a foam-padded floor. This makes for a prototype-friendly space, protecting the copters from [...]
• Printable gripping rover is wristwatch controlled
  [Lars Kristian Roland] is using a wristwatch to control this rover. The bot itself is a utilitarian build with a gripper based on this Thingiverse project. As you can see in the video after the break, it’s got variable speed control based on accelerometer data from a TI ez430 Chronos wristwatch. The watch connects to [...]
• Propeller proto board has you flying in no time
  [Parker] was in need of a Propeller development board to make working on his projects easier. More often than not, when he needed to prototype something, he would pull the only one he had on hand from his home made pinball machine, and replace it when finished. This was time consuming and cumbersome, so he [...]

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• Your robot stand-in has arrived
  Meet TIPI, the Telepresence Interface by Pendulum Inversion. TIPI is something of a surrogate, giving physical presence to telecommuters by balancing an LCD screen and camera atop its six foot frame. The user has full control of the robot’s movement, with their own camera image shown on the display so that others interacting with the [...]
• Nano Sumo robot takes on all comers
  While most Sumo-style robots are fairly sizable, there is a subsection of the Sumo robot movement that focuses on making small robots. Really small robots. [Patrick] wrote in to share his latest creation, a Nano Sumo robot measuring a scant 1 in. x 1 in. The Nano Sumo is operated by an ATMega 328 micro controller [...]
• Nintendo hacked to fit inside an NES cartridge
  Instructables user [dany32412] recently built what is arguably one of the smallest NES consoles we have seen to date. Using a Nintendo on a Chip (NOAC) board, he has fabricated an NES system that fits inside a hollowed out NES cartridge. He purchased a NOAC system at a local resale shop and got to work [...]
• Breathing new life into a broken iPod
  [Craig] had a busted 2nd Gen iPod Nano that was well out of warranty. The play/pause button no longer worked, leaving him unable to play or pause music, nor power off the device. He didn’t want to scrap the iPod, so he figured out a way to add an external play/pause button instead. He ordered [...]

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• Function generator built and mounted inside electronics bench
  A function generator is a handy piece of test equipment to have on-site. [Kammenos] designed and built his own function generator, using the bench itself as the enclosure. You can see above that the control panel presents a clean finished look. To achieve it, [Kammenos] designed and printed the panel labels on a sheet of paper, [...]
• Multi-Function Bench Power Supply
  Concerned with your project’s power consumption but don’t want to constantly leave an ammeter wired in series with your power supply? [Rajendra] feels your pain and has recently documented his solution to the problem: a variable-output bench top power supply that clearly displays load current consumption among other things! Everything is wired up in a [...]