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Put away your ipod. These music players don’t hold thousands of songs, movies and audiobooks. Their features are limited, but you will get more of a “wow” reaction from them.

First up–the Foxhole Radio. These simple radios were built from scraps of wire, cardboard tubes, razor blades and safety pins by GIs in WWII. Instructions are here–the real challenge is to scrounge up the parts for one of these without spending a dime. Most of the components should be found in the layers of debris in any well-disorganized workbench, though finding a suitable earpiece might be a challenge. If your workbench is too clean to harbor such debris, a kit can be purchased for $23 here, though it seems a bit counter to the spirit of the thing to pay someone to send a piece of wood, nails, and some bits of wire.

How about making your own recordings instead? Think Edison meets the plastic cup–this kit available from the MAKE store is a beautifully-designed Thomas Edison-style device that replaces wax cylinders with common plastic cups that lets you record and play back your own (or someone else’s, I suppose) voice.

Finally, if you want to get really retro, get a music box. But I can never find one with the song I want–that’s where this DIY Music Box kit comes in. You punch out the tune you want on a strip of paper that is played by the mechanism as you wind the crank. Included on the site is a PDF for making the Super Mario Brothers theme! What could be cooler than that?

Posted in Audio/Video, Home Theater, Miscellaneous, Portable

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by Paul Miller, posted Apr 24th 2008 at 11:40PM
We’re surprised this hasn’t been though up before, which means it probably isn’t as simple as it sounds. MIRA’s got a new plug-in hybrid in the works that skips the whole plug aspect. Instead of plugging the whole car into an outlet, you can pull out any of the three battery packs in the trunk and hook ‘em into the wall. That means the car doesn’t have to have direct access to a plug to be able to juice up, you just take the batteries to where the power’s at and commence charging. They’re calling the system H4V, and are powering the unit on lithium ion phosphate batteries. MIRA expects the retrofit to an existing car to cost about £2000 (around $3950 US).

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Filed under: Transportation

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by Darren Murph, posted Apr 24th 2008 at 10:05PM
Besides being infuriated with leaving over a billion dollars on the table this past holiday season, Nintendo of America is also “passionately upset about the lack of product relative to demand.” Those words came straight from Mr. Reggie Fils-Aime himself, who noted that North America was the only Wii-serviced territory where supply and demand were still out of sync. Reportedly, some 40-percent of the 1.8 million Wii consoles manufactured each month are making their way over, but even after 17 months on the market, the average Wii sits around on retail shelves for “just an hour before [it is] purchased.” Unfortunately, we’re no closer to being able to clone the consoles in order to meet the insatiable appetite.

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Filed under: Gaming