DIY - page 3

Let’s face it. Deep in our hearts, we all know some colored M&M’s taste better than others. For me, it’s the red and green ones; for my wife, it’s the brown and orange ones. And Van Halen famously stipulated in all its contracts that the band should never be served any brown M&M’s, requiring some lowly stagehand to pick them all out by hand from a bowl before every show.

These days, things would be easier. Case in point: This simple machine, which was custom-rigged out of just an iPhone and an Arduino to individually sort M&M’s by color, no human intervention required.

Jewelry maker Mat Brown is getting married, and the romantic in him is hard at work creating wedding rings out of an alloy of silver and gold called electrum.

But on the practical side of sharing a life, Brown recently created space in his kitchen with shelves as unique as his jewelry: Brown used a glow-in-the-dark resin to fill in cracks in the wooden shelves, and happily shared the luminescent process and result on his blog.

Tired of looking at the world from the same old perspective? Need a fresh take on things? A new point of view?

Well, you have less than two weeks to get your hands on an EYEteleporter, an outlandish, periscope-style device that will give you a unique perspective on the world.

Have you switched over to an iPhone full-time for your photography, and yet you desperately miss your Lensbaby or other tilt-shift lens setup? Then take a look at this great DIY project from Maciej Pietuszynski that turns an old CCTV lens into a grungifying lens for any smartphone.

Adding textured filters to your photos: RAD!
Adding pre-made textured filters to your photos? Lame.

That’s why you need to make your own filters right now, and Geri Centonze from iPhoneLife is here to tell you how.

Ever used your iPhone to take a photo through the viewfinder of your camera? Or tried to line up the iPhone’s lens with one half of a pair of binoculars? Then you’ll know how hard it is to get a good result. But if you’re willing to sacrifice an old iPhone case and pony up a few dollars for an SLR eyepiece, then you can make an adapter that’ll get you great Instagrammatical pictures every time.

There’s one great feature of the Lightning cable that I didn’t notice until just now: Its thinness compared to the old 30-pin plug means that it’s a lot easier to squeeze through small holes. And that in turn makes custom docks a simple, Dremel-free experience.

Take a look around you and see if there’s anything that could be improved by running a little cable through a hole in the top. That’s just what the folks at Photojojo did, and — almost inevitably — their eyes rested on a vintage film camera.

Talking of taking your iPhone to the beach, here’s another way to keep it safe from harm: don’t take it at all. Instead of Instagramming the topless ladies down at your local sea’n’sand pit, you could roll your own analog Instagram. No, not a Polaroid, but disposable cameras, dicked with to make them take even worse photos than they already do.

I wouldn’t tell anyone else this, but I’m going to admit it to you: I spend far too many brain cycles pondering better ways to carry my camera and other essentials. Worse, I have a box full of bags and straps leftover from my efforts. So i’m not sure whether this tutorial for making a DIY harness is a great idea of the beginning of another foolhardy adventure. I suspect it might be both.

There are several truths about cables:

1. Despite having a rats nest of cables in the back of your closet, you can never find the one you actually want.
2. All cables – ALL OF THEM – are self-tangling. And “tangle-free” cables are the worst.
3. Try as you might, you have never managed to come up with a good way to organize cables and have them look good.

This is one reason I like the look of Brit Morin’s cool DIY project. The other reason is that it’s not just for cables but for several other things I have too many of: sunglasses, neckties, straps (just kidding about the neckties).

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, which is clearly nonsense. My mother’s family photos, for instance, are worth three (Flash. Too. Bright). But this simple photo, from LifeProTips on Twitter, really does explain everything…

Lifehacker’s Adam ”never seen without a beanie" Dachis has come up with an ingenious solution for the gadget-laden traveler. Instead of messing around with travel chargers or any other gadget-by-gadget solution, he built a mobile charging station out of a giant portable battery and a USB hub.

I always thought the handiest thing I could do with a pizza box was to toss it in the trash and use the little three-legged plastic widget (the one that stops the lid from touching your cheese) as a milking stool for my Barbies [1] .

But I was wrong. Assuming that you can keep the cheesy grease off the box, then a few cuts and folds will turn it into this awesome MacBook stand.

You could easily make your own iPhone amplifier dock from a shoebox. Or better, an old wooden wine case. Or best of all, you could get out your clamps, drills, router and hot glue and go medieval on some pile of wood’s ass. If you choose the latter route, then you should download the plans (totally SFW) from Renee at Red Bird Blue – her amazing creation is what you see in the picture above.

Our fearless commander-in-chief Leander Kahney is a strange cuckoo. He is, of course, a dashing and famous technology journalist par example, while his family is inexplicably a bunch of Luddites.

So check out what happened when Leander tried to coach someone in his family how to set up an extra Airport Extreme base station over the phone. No matter how many times he explained how to do it, it wouldn’t work… so Leander drove over to see what the problem was. This is what he saw.

What’s the most ridiculous tech support problem you’ve had to solve for a family member? Let us know in the comments.

You know those cool old waxed canvas bags which used to keep things dry before miners discovered nylon in a cave in Papua New Guinea¹? Now you can make your own! Well, technically you could always make your own. But now Photojojo has provided a guide for you. Spoiler: it’s dead easy.

Just a few weeks back we brought you the then-cheap $100 ring-light for the iPhone, a cheap way to shoot flat fashion photos and videos with your favorite camera. Now, though, you can achieve the same thing for just $10.

Bonus: It’s a DIY project, so you have a great excuse to ignore your family this Christmas.

Regular readers will know that I now do all my work using an iPad. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go over the technical details again.

But I will tell you about this excellent new lap desk I have. Better than that, I made it myself, so follow along to see how you can make your own.

After boarding a plane to Melbourne, Australia to be one of the first in the whole world to get their hands on an iPhone 5, the folks at iFixit have torn it apart and found that — surprise — the new iPhone seems to actually have been designed with easy repair in mind. Partially, at least.

Here are two things that are probably true: you don’t smoke, and you own an old, disused iPhone dock. Here are some things which are almost guaranteed to be true: You own a dock connector cable and a 3.5 mm jack cable

And if you live in the U.S, and you haven’t yet achieved enlightenment and switched to a bike, then you almost certainly have a car. Put these things together and what do you get? Jalopnik’s neat DIY in-car iPhone dock.

I like the Apple Store as much as any Apple fan, but I wouldn’t want to live and work there.

You can’t say the same thing for David Wu, though. “Call me mad. Call me crazy. But I woke up one day around three months or more ago and decided to completely renovate my home study.”

So what’d he do? He made his home office a virtual recreation of an Apple Store, not only including a replica of Apple’s distinctive Fetzer Wooden Maple desks (with working drawers), a replica Apple Store sign with built-in, Apple TV-driven LED display and even a couple shelves full of boxed Apple products.

I’ll go ahead and call David Wu crazy. Here’s to the crazy ones. Read more about how he did it at his blog. More pictures of David’s sick set-up below, but make sure to go to Wu’s personal site for the rest.

Street View is fantastic. You can check out a hotel’s façade before you even book a room, you can walk down a street where you remember there was this awesome store, only you can’t remember its name, or you can wander through far-off cities.

Now, you can make your own Street Views, with this camera and software kit from DIY Streetview.

Oh man, this is awesome. Check out this killer iPad stand that Reddit user cwtfozzy built for himself out of the base of a lampy old iMac G4. Wish I still had one bunging around so I could get Ive’s Lamp back in my office. That thing just had such panache.

Damn cool work, Foz! How about posting a step-by-step DIY?

Source: Reddit

As a writer, I need to know the number of words in my textual musings on a fairly regular basis. I’m sure many of you might have the same need, if even to count the characters in those funny Tweets you’ve been thinking about for weeks. Today’s tip should help you out, in a super cool DIY style.

BlackRapid’s new LensBling is a product that could be emulated with 100% efficacy in just seconds, using nothing but a whiteout marker. However, thanks to the biases of customers who look down upon anything appearing even vaguely home made, pro photographers can instead spend $8.50 per lens.