MAKEZINE.COM

Makezine.com is the companion website for MAKE magazine. Gadgeteer and hacker Phil Torrone blogs daily on the site, pointing out DIY projects as well as showcasing his own how-to solutions. Torrone also produces lively podcasts and video how-to segments. You can find blogs, podcasts, and images from the home page of makezine.com.

Blog Highlights

A jet-powered backpack! A contestant on a Japanese game show gets shot over a lake with pressurized water bottles strapped to his back. It looks like they’re all pressurized with bicycle pumps and then released at the same time. He goes really far and high.

Run homebrew apps on your PSP. Learn how to run emulators, games, and homebrew applications on your U.S. PlayStation Portable PSP. I cooked up a quick how-to, pictures, and screenshots as well as a video to watch on how to do all this. We’re going to be able to play thousands of games and run hundreds of cool applications — all for free and all from the community of tinkerers out there looking to do more with their PSPs.

Upgrade and Unlock a Cingular GSM Treo. Here is a step-by-step guide to unlocking your Cingular Treo and making it unbranded. This will also give you the option of choosing another GSM provider.

See

The MAKE Flickr photo pool has hundreds of members, and you can see what we’re reviewing, hacking, and tweaking. Anyone can join and post their photos, too. To join the MAKE Flickr photo pool, visit flickr.com/groups/make. If you don’t have a free Flickr account, sign up and join the group. Usually, it’s a good idea to “tag” your photos with the project you’re building, and then add them to the group pool from your photo page.

“Part of the social goo that holds all our online efforts comes from the magic of tagging,” writes Torrone. “When I uploaded a photo to our Flickr group pool of a new biodiesel pump in Seattle, Wash., I tagged it ‘biodiesel.’ Little did I know that Rob Elam, the cofounder of the company that distributes the fuel, would discover my photos on Flickr and ping me. Within a day, we had scheduled a conversation and recorded it via Skype.”

Be sure to check out makezine.com; we’ll have multimedia content along with extras that compliment the magazine.

An image uploaded to MAKE’s Flickr group

Hear

MAKE: Audio is a weekly interview and audio series, available as podcasts. Download them or subscribe with a podcast fetcher. Recent guests included Josh Paul, author of Digital Video Hacks, and Christian Einfeldt from DIYParts.org, who talks about keeping computer hardware out of landfills. Torrone also talks with his wife, Beth Goza, about the Lexus RX400, a hybrid SUV, which gets 600 miles a tank.