Photo from Cnet.uk
Build the Ultimate Quiet PC has a number of suggestions, ranging from cheap to pricey. Not got enough cash for a new case? Then you can modify your existing chassis. Among the best sound-deadening materials is the Acousti AcoustiPack Deluxe (v2) SE acoustic material kit... It's essentially a pack of sticky-back foam used to line the panels of your case. It comes in pre-cut packs for a small number of cases, but you can easily cut custom shapes with a pair of scissors. Maximum PC has a decent article on quieting your computer. The CPU is usually the hottest component in today's PCs; as such, it typically requires the most extravagant--and often the noisiest--cooling apparatus. Reducing the amount of noise emanating from your CPU's cooling system is a huge step toward muting your machine, so let's examine this hotspot first. While stopping shy of a truly silent PC in the Maximum PC article, it does provide some handy ideas on how to get rid of that airport ambiance. Their cover story on 50 Things Every PC Geek Should know is also worth taking a look at. Silent PC Review also has a number of good resources for the sound weary computer operator. What are your tricks to mute your machine? Tell us about it in the comments.
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This week on the CRAFT blog we saw: Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Crafts | Digg this! 
Image from InsideNikeRunning
Did you know that your sneakers are probably the result of a vision of insight at the breakfast table? Maybe you recall wearing shoes that looked like these back in the day. Bill Bowerman, was a successful track coach when he appropriated his wife's waffle iron one day after breakfast. Bowerman and his wife often ate waffles for breakfast-not an unusual or special event for them. Yet one morning, while thinking about his shoe designs and eating waffles, Bowerman had a flash of inspiration. He ran into the garage with the waffle iron and poured rubber on it. With that one idea, Bill created Nike's now famous waffle sole. As it turned out, when placed on a lightweight shoe, the waffle sole gripped running tracks better than the established ripple sole. It soon became a major success story. But makers beware:
Unfortunately, Bowerman's desire for perfection cost him his health - the effects of exposure to toxic chemicals in the adhesives caused irreparable damage to his nervous system.
While reviewing a textbook last week, I saw a reference to the waffle inspiration attributed to Bowerman's Nike cofounder Phil Knight. I hadn't heard the story at all before, and both Bowerman and Knight were unfamiliar names. The inspiration moment is one that we should all be working towards as makers. We can nurture these flashes of insight, and do our best to capitalize on these glimmers of the future. Notebooks, blogs, Flickr collections, wikis and more are a great way to both explore and record our ideas. What are you doing to collect your greatest ideas? What can you do to develop your fantastic idea and bring it to market, or share it with the world? You might also want to check out Adam Savage's article on moldmaking in MAKE, Volume 08, page 160. Let us know what you mold up!
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` Catherine sends this in about Maya Pedal, which helps create and supply bicycles and pedal-powered machines to communities in Guatemala. Bicimáquinas (translates as "bicycle machines") are pedal-powered machines that act as an intermediate technology to assist the family economy in obtaining a higher production capacity in agriculture and in small business. Each bicimáquina is produced individually in our shop with a combination of old bikes, concrete, wood, and metal. So far we have developed several original designs that have proven to be both functional and economical. 
Maya Pedal is working with a number of sponsoring organizations, on projects in Guatemala to bring low tech solutions to rural people. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Bicycles | Digg this! 
Google Blogoscoped posted a chunk of Javascript last week that unlocks a few experimental features in Google Search. The features are being pushed to a trial group, but the Javascript will add a cookie that allows anyone to participate. I just got around to playing with the "Wonder Wheel" search view. It's a small graphical application that provides tangential, semi-related topics for any search term. Searching for "science fiction" provides a link to "science fiction authors," which links to "isaac asimov," which links to "carl sagan," for instance. Not shown in the photo above is that the complete search results are listed to the right. It's not the sort of thing that helps refine a search, but it could come in handy for browsing through related topics. Also worth checking out is a timeline view, which gives you an idea of the volume of published content for a particular search term over time. It's well suited for digging up an old article with a common search term, filtering through the results by date. Google's Wonder Wheel Experiment, and More Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in hacks | Digg this! 
From the MAKE Flickr pool
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Photo from Petmar0 on Flickr
Pete responded in the comments to the the call for designs in the Rural Celly Charger article on Saturday. How about connecting a joule-thief circuit (DC-DC upconverter) to a cap on one side and a small solar cell (like the ones in calculators) on the other? You pull off of the cap to the cell phone directly. If I remember correctly, most cell phones have internal Vregs between the battery and the rest of the circuitry, so that takes care of your OV protection. I'll see if I can build this, and then get back to you. Within a few hours on his busy Saturday, he had a rough build tested and posted up. His photos of the build have been added to the MAKE Flickr pool. Obviously, a few tests on some quickly assembled parts do not make a working solution, but they do demonstrate the concepts behind the circuit that could be worked up in a more detailed analysis and build. Ultimately, it would be ideal to come up with a design that can be replicated across cultures and great distances with minimal and less than ideal tools. 
Photo from petmar0 on Flickr
The original article on Women of Uganda Network, or WOUGNET, told of how a Ugandan woman built her own charger after an unscrupulous vendor nicked her good battery and replaced it with a nearly dead one. The design that she came up with uses five D cell batteries to pump some charge into her phone. That should be quite a bit more voltage than is really needed to fill up a cell battery. She and her neighbors could benefit from a buildable design that could be made from easily sourced supplies. The comments offered a number of perspectives on the problem and possible solutions. As is the case in many rural communities, she has access to a bicycle, some supplies, and maybe a bit of know-how about electricity. It is likely that her experiment was more 'seat of the pants engineering' than a studied formal solution based on book based research. Generally, DC motors are relatively plentiful in electrojunk. Old cassette players, CD drives, VCRs, and more are good sources for surplus motors, and it is possible that a design based on a motor would be easy to build in rural Africa. The resistor and transistor needed for the Joule Thief could be harvested from many old devices. A capacitor could be used to store the charge, and then we would need a fitting to connect it to the phone. It is likely that many of the phones in a given community are of similar design and a spare could be appropriated for a cell phone charger. How can you add to this idea? Could you design and build a cell charger only from junk? If you did not have access to a decent soldering iron, how would you get your connections consistent? If you have an idea to add to this conversation, bring it over to the comments. If you can, build up a sample circuit like Pete did and show it to us through a post on your blog, or you can add it to the MAKE Flickr pool. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Cellphones | Digg this! 
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