DIY

A few months ago, we brought you the "You Built What?!" feature about Charles Guan's Electric Death Trap Shopping Cart Contraption. More recently, he released an excellent Instructable about making your own miniature electric hub motor.

Reading a clock is one thing; really knowing the time is quite another. For everyday timekeeping needs, we use a standard known as Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, which is derived from International Atomic Time, a consensus of more than 200 clocks that keep precise time based on the movement of electrons.

Earlier today, I came upon the site of a man who is building his own jet-powered motorcycle. That's right. He's converting turbochargers into jet engines and building a motorcycle around them. But that's not all; there are apparently a lot of these crazies out there. Here's a look at some.

The photograph of floating banana slices published today on DIY Photography presents the kernel of a great idea for makers. While craftily creating the illusion of levitating sliced fruit may not be your thing, this technique translates almost directly to the creation of "exploded parts diagrams" of your creations.

Since we launched our archive viewer last week, it's been a thrill to read emails with everyone's kind words and impressions. Particularly great was reader Michael Dixon's story involving salvaged scrap wood from ships arriving at the Port of Houston, a suburban backyard and the October 1969 issue of Popular Science.

Nintendo's Mario has long been beloved by geeks and scientists everywhere, as evidenced by a fluorescent bacterial version (seizure warning!) and a Mario "multiverse" that acts as a better guide to parallel universes than "Lost." Now a Carnegie Mellon University student has concocted a playable pixel tribute on an 8x8 LED matrix.

DIY tool build projects are one of my favorite topics. Recently, I Heart Robotics posted documentation of a DIY cleanroom build to further particle sensitive schemes like hacking a Hokuyo Laser Rangefinder. The essential elements are a sealed box, some workspace, and a supply of filtered air for positive pressure inside the box.

Our own John Carnett's jet-powered ATV is not the first four wheeled vehicle to sport a turbine. The wheel-scorchingly awesome history of this idea goes back significantly further, to at least the Turbonique hot-rod hop up parts of the middle sixties. BangShift has uncovered videos of Turbonique turbine dragsters (Beetles, go-karts, you name it) in action.

Electronics geeks hacking oscilloscopes fall, for me, into the same category as support truck racing at Dakar: Technicians having fun with their tools. Following in the proud tradition of Oscilloscope Tennis, Oscilloscope Pong, and Oscilloscope Clocks, Matthew Sarnoff has built a VT100 serial terminal - from an oscilloscope.

Examining clever mechanisms often provides ideas and inspiration for our own designs. This week's mystery tool was in fact a look at a partially disassembled adding machine. Here's the rest of that dissection.

All right, smarty pantses, give this one a go. Lately, you brilliant DIYers have been making short work of our Guess This Tool contest, so we're going to mix it up a little and see if we can't stump you for more than 10 minutes. This is a tool of sorts, but it's in the early stages of a PopSci Dissection. As usual, the first and most precise answer in the comments will win something from our friends at Stanley: a FatMax 24-inch level. Good luck.

As the Northeast and South brace for yet another day of record snow fall, thousands of Americans are struggling with ways to deal with treacherous road conditions. Thankfully, some intrepid Russian DIYers have a plan: convert your car to use tank treads.

One of the biggest drawcards for a new camera is how many lenses you can get for it. After being a photographer for practically all my life, I can tell you that everyone seems to think this is the part that shows how good you are. I stand out from the crowd because I carry equipment no one has ever seen before. I stand out because I make my own lenses.

Lifehacker today has a nice guide that answers one of the questions I get asked most often by tech-advice-seeking friends: How do I get around my work's web site blocker? Lifehacker's answer is to set up a proxy server running on a machine at your home, through which you can access all the fun sites your IT department doesn't want you to use.