Phillip Torrone, the Associate Editor of Make Magazine, demoed some great Do-It-Yourself items and talked a bit about the recent resurge in the DIY movement. He showed how to replace the Japanese firmware on the Sony Libre with an English version — after that you can download tons of eBooks. He also passed it around and the resolution is amazing, even in direct light. Following that he showed how you can use homebrew games as well as a web browser (from the crappy Wipeout game) on a Sony PSP (as long as you haven’t upgraded the firmware to 2.0). After that he showed us his mouse bot (as seen in Make magazine) which gets him into trouble with the TSA each time he travels. Then he showed Linux on the iPod — it’s ability to record up to 96Khz quality audio and play back video. He also showed us what he did with this iPod box (made it into a cardboard/foam robot for kids). The penultimate demo was a powerful green laser which cooks/burns anything red (he demonstrated by popping red balloons). Finally, he demo’ed an old rotary phone which he hooked up to a cell phone (then folks made several phone calls to/from his franken-rotary phone). I highly recommend subscribing to Make — you won’t be disappointed.

Update from PDX’s Free WiFi: Phillip Torrone posted video from his “mini-MAKER” fair on Wednesday night at OSCON and I’m in the video! Well, part of me is, I’m standing to the right of (left of, from the camera’s perspective) and slightly behind the laser so you can see my khaki pants and red shirt.