This is just freaking cool; From Hack A Day

[Enigma-penguin] built a tablet computer out of a Core2Duo Macbook circa 2007. The battery exploded, damaging the case and a few components inside. But there was hope for a new life as a tablet computer. He removed the screen and tested to make sure the computer would still function without it by using the video out port.

Putting the whole thing back together as a tablet proved to have some headaches. He worked through problems caused by the addition of a touchscreen between the LCD and the bezel and made the connections work with the screen flipped. The finished product looks so good because the bezel has not been turned around like on other tablet builds. Instead, a viewing window was cut in what would have been the case behind the screen.

There’s a little more to be done yet. The black USB cable seen above is the connector for the touchscreen which he plans to internalize. The magnetic sleep sensor has been relocated to the headphone jack. Inserting a plug (no cord necessary) puts it to sleep for transport. There’s also an on screen keyboard and the ability to change the screen orientation from landscape to portrait. After the break we’ve embedded one of [Enigma-penguin's] demonstrations.

Link

Point Contact PNP

This is from Tube Time Its a point contact PNP Transistor made form a diode. 
"My friend Jeri Ellsworth recently figured out how to make a point contact transistor by cracking open a germanium diode. It looked pretty straightforward so (deviating from this blog’s usual content) I took a crack at it myself:"



"The original diode contact serves as the emitter connection. The base is the chip of germanium that is visible in the bottom part of the diode (with the stripe). The collector is a piece of phosphor bronze wire I pulled off the end of a guitar string. I sharpened it to a point with a Dremel sanding wheel and soldered it to a piece of bare wire to make it easier to handle.


The fine-pitched screws are used to maneuver the wires into contact with the block of germanium.
The germanium base is actually n-doped. To create the collector junction, you have to create p-doped regions. One crude way to do this is to apply a burst of current across the reverse-biased junction (positive voltage to base, negative voltage to collector). I don’t know if the mechanism is thermal or electrical, but phosphorus from the phosphor bronze wire gets carried into the germanium, creating the p-type region. For this experiment I used about 200V on a 10uF capacitor, and I discharged it into the junction through a 1K resistor. Jeri originally used something like 20V but I read in a paper several hundred volts were usually used for this purpose.


Jeri used an oscillator circuit to test her transistor, but I got lazy and just put it in a simple inverting amplifier circuit. At first the transistor didn’t work (output was in phase with the input) but after some tweaking of the wires, the output finally went 180 degrees out of phase. This is an absolutely terrible transistor, and the gain is really too low to consider this a transistor."



Check out the site for more cool stuff!

16 Step Up/Down Sequencer

This is by Dr. Offset

"At some point in every DIY Synth enthusiast's journey they realize that they need some sort of structured way to control all the madness they've created. You want to build a sequencer. Often the first type of sequencer you build is something like the Baby 10, a ten step machine based off the 4017 decade counter chip. That's fine, and a lot of people do great music with it."



More info on this really cool sequencer can be found here

Fender Bender

Came across this on Ghost Effects. I this this is totally sweet. A 'weird sound generator' built into a Fender guitar by danwagoner! more pics here.

Scientists poke holes in NASA’s arsenic-eating microbe discovery

When NASA announced the discovery of an arsenic-eating microbe in a California lake last week, the agency hailed it as a suggestion that life as we know it, well, isn't life as we know it.

"We have cracked open the door to what is possible for life elsewhere in the universe," Felisa Wolfe-Simon of the NASA Astrobiology Instituteand U.S. Geological Survey, who led the study, said at a news conference.

NASA's team of astrobiologists had taken samples of the bacteria from mineral-dense Lake Mono -- in a volcanic region of Northern California near the Nevada border -- and starved them of phosphate, the meal of choice for most DNA-based organisms. Instead, the scientists force-fed the bacteria a form of arsenic, and, much to the researchers' surprise, the bacteria continued to grow and flourish on their new diet of poison.

But then other scientists began digging into the paper outlining NASA's research and findings, and they're now charging that the research behind it is flawed.

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Railroad Gin Episode 2:Bob Dylan's "Shooting Star"

Broke 2000

Thanks everyone for stoping by.

Faces of Fuzz

Big Muff Triangle

This is a EHX Big Muff Triangle that I have been working on today; Its based on the layout by IvIark 

 

T.L.B.

Just another update of the Tube Loop Boost; Its all wired up and works properly but not perfectly, Ill need to do some tweaking to get it working 100%. Well enough chit chat here are some pictures.