This is so cool! The brainchild of Steve Hoefer, the “Secret Knock Detecting Door Lock” attaches to a doorknob and its corresponding lock with suction cups. Upon detecting the correct knock pattern (by default, the classic shave and a haircut), it unlocks the door to grant access.

Even better, the knock detector is completely programmable. Changing the secret knock cadence is a simple matter of holding the red button while executing a new lock pattern, with a max of 20 knocks. The system simply detects the pattern, and not the tempo, providing allowance for users who knock slower or faster than …read more

This is an old hack/mod, but it works pretty well. Here’s what you need:

An old desktop case fan
1 USB cable
A piece of stiff wire
Some electrical tape
A pair of pliers
Cutter

Here are the steps to take:

Cut of one end of the USB cable, and unsheathe the main cord it to reveal a red and black wires. These two wires pull power from a computer’s USB port.
The next step is really simple: Strip the red and black wires of the USB and the old desktop fan, then twist them together. Red to red and black to black of course
Get some electrical tape, and …read more

Who woulda thunk it?
The following:

Drill with 1/4-inch bit
Screwdriver
Wrench

Well… well, continue reading please…

Complex DIY Project: As DIY-er Tom Igoe writes: “I have a lot of anxiety about email. Every kilobyte in my Inbox destroys another minute of my life, but I can’t stop checking it. So I decided to embody my anxiety in a device that would worry about my incoming mail for me.” In short, this DIY Email Clock counts down the kilobytes of email you’ve received, putting an unorthodox counter on your procrastination.

Check it out: mimicking the classic wooden setup, but in the words of Boing Boing, “this one has a working safety and is far prettier. (And heavier!)”

Here’s some family-friendly tech that doesn’t come off as boring. Kudos to Verizon for finding a natural way to advertise their FiOS service—even if they sneaked in the hard-sell from time to time.

The concept is simple: hook up a computer to the internet. Hook up lots of monitors to said computer. Set-up Windows to display photos it pulls from whichever online photo feeds you specify. The kicker is that, as new photos are added to these online streams, they show up on the so-called “memory wall”.
Less simple is how to do this. The instructions are clear enough, but we imagine …read more

[Image removed upon request]
Perverts, check out this camera designed for surveillance purposes.
Now that’s out of the way, abstract photography connoisseurs may be interested in this strip camera DIY. It’s hard to see the appeal of distorted sports photography, but then again, artists are never understood in their own time!