Not only do we teach you how to nerd-out your house, but we also show you how to nerd-out for the holidays.  Here is a pretty ingenious Christmas Tree ornament that you could put together in a matter of minutes.  This is a very cheap, easy, and fun way to add some tech to your Christmas Tree this holiday season.  A since today at sundown marks the beginning of Hannukah for our Jewish friends out there you should check out Evil Mad Scientist Deluxe LED Menorah Kit.  Happy Christmahanakwanzika to all, and to all….um see you tomorrow?

The tutorial does require soldering. Enjoy the tutorial below. If this project inspires you make your own LED ornaments, please share it with us! I’d love to see them!

Materials:
— 3″ Head Pins {6} Any conductive wire can be used—brass, nickel and copper jewelry wire works great.
— Beads (with a large center-hole to fit head pin AND wire wrap wire)
— Crimp Beads {6} *optional
— 3 or 5mm LED
— Wire Wrap Wire {12″} You can substitute wire wrap for any other thin insulated wire
— Metallic Magnetic Jewelry Clasp
— 3V Coin Cell Battery
— Solder

Tools
— Needle-nose pliers
— Wire cutter and stripper
— Soldering Iron
— Glue Gun

Step One:

String the beads on the head pin, leaving at least 1/4″ of the pin free on opposite end. If you have crimp beads handy, add a crimp bead at each end to prevent the beads from moving. Repeat four times, creating a total of 5 beaded pins.

Step Two:

Cut the wire into one 8″ and 4″ piece. Strip 1″ of wire off both ends.

For the 6th pin, string the beads along the 8″ wire AND pin. (If the center hole of a bead is too small to fit both the wire and pin, string the bead on the pin only.)

Step Three:

Using wire cutters, trim the LED leads to about 1/2″.

Step Four:

Insert the LED in between two beaded pins, one with the wire and one without the wire.

If the LED lead fits, secure the lead inside the last bead of each pin, making sure the LED lead and pin overlap.

Solder the LED lead to the beaded pin with the wire, making sure that you do NOT solder the wire accidentally. You will be soldering the wire to the opposite pin.

Wrap the stripped end of the wire around the LED lead and pin (without wire). Solder, creating a nice solder joint.

To see the rest of the tutorial by Syuzi please visit [Fashioning Technology]

Casey an engineer in Houston with a love for video games came up with a simple cheap and awesome IKEA hack using off the shelf parts…no pun intended.  Let’s just get this out of the way right now, your shelves suck compared to this awesome feat of nerdiness.

“Here’s a little project I came up with using some Lack shelves to add some flair to my game room. Using some tape, paint, and a lazy afternoon I put together a Donkey Kong homage to keep my old systems on. The ladders were made from 1/4″ square wood and the barrels are beer cans painted…Turns out having shelves at a dramatic angle causes things to slide off, I vaguely remember something about that in physics.”

Take a look at the actually shelves below.  Simply awesome, good job Casey.

[via Alcohol and Nightswimming by way of IKEAHacker]

Feel like you are missing something in your life? It’s probably because you don’t have your own batsignal. Fortunately, thanks to Philipp Tiefenbacher, you can build your own with these plans to make a batlamp. Designed around a high brightness RGB LED and an Arduino, it’s actually a general purpose projector that you can use to program your own lightshow. Now, where did I put that laser cutter?

[Thingiverse via Make]

Help an old dresser take a walk on the wild side. Free that furniture from a life of simply holding folded cardigans and T-shirts. Turn it into a homemade bar with this customizable tutorial.

Ubernerkle and his wife were having friends over for Thanksgiving. To facilitate and be frugal, they turned a closet into a dry bar with the addition of some shelving units. Inspired by the simple dry bar, they followed up on the project by turning an old IKEA dresser into an actual bar, and some more shelving units into storage behind their new dresser-bar. Check out the video below to watch the transformation process:

If you have a tale of re-purposing or flat out rebuilding furniture to give it new life, let’s hear about it in the comments.

The Stimmmopped is an electronic guitar tuner made to be used as a guitar pick. This uses two LEDs synchronized to blink at the exact frequency of the string you are tuning. Pluck the string with the corner of the PCB and then shine the light on the string you are tuning. As the vibrating string moves back and forth it will only pick up the spot of light when the frequency matches that of the blinking LED. Once in tune, both red lights will appear to be constantly illuminated and immobile on the string.

An Atmel ATmega8 is used to control the device, interfacing with two buttons and a seven-segment display to choose the pitch currently being tuned. Gibson has a robotic guitar that features an auto-tuning mode, but if you don’t want to shell that much this low cost and simple build is for you.

[via Stimmmopped]

I hope everyone enjoyed your thanksgiving weekend and for the rest of the world I hope your weekend was just as pleasurable.  Usually on holiday weekends I like visit my local movie theater and check out the latest holiday movie.  This year I had the pleasure of some idiot that just had to answer his cell phone while we are all trying to enjoy the movie.  After people told him to be quiet multiple times he finally walked out, talking the entire way out of the theater.  So I got to thinking, why doesn’t the theater block cell phone calls, hospitals do!  Probably a safety concern and since you are already at the hospital it doesn’t matter.

After doing a little research when I got home I found this little treasure.  A DIY Cell Phone Jammer that I can fit right in my pocket.  Now I can block cell phones around me and if there is an emergency I will just turn it off and no one will be none the wiser.

The Cell Phone Jammer is really just a RF jammer that can be built as a DIY project from Adafruit’s Wave Bubble. The Wave Bubble calls itself a self-tuning, wide-bandwidth portable RF jammer.

Self tuning is via dual phase lock loops which nullify the need for a spectrum analyzer. Multiple programmable frequency bands make it work across a range of RFs. Tuned antennas give it a range of 20 feet. Output power is .1W (in high bands) and .3W (in low bands). Two hours of jamming work over dual frequency bands (as used by some cell phones) with a rechargeable internal lithium-ion battery should be enough for your dirty deeds. Or you can get more hours over a single band as used by cordless phones, GPS, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. All this can be crammed in a palm sized cigarette pack. That’s about 7″ x 4″ x 3.2″.

The Wave Bubble site backs-up the project with details under Share-Alike so go ahead and make yourself one.  As the site warns, this is advanced stuff asking for lots of circuitry savvy.

Note: Using a RF Jammers to block communication by disrupting the signal is an exclusive right of the authorities. Among other things they are extensively used to prevent remote activation of explosive devices by terrorists. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules apply and they take a dim view against illegal use of RF jamming devices.

[ Cell Phone Jammer via HacknMod and Wave Bubble ]

So I’ve been looking to awesome out my car with a decent dock that’ll integrate my iPhone into my car. I’m not looking for anything special, just something to hold my phone and keep it within arms reach. I also want to charge my phone when it’s juice is low and stream some tunes. I bought a griffin TuneFlex for around $35. It worked great. It has an integrated 3.5mm audio out and charger. The CLA (cigarette lighter adapter) has an attached goose neck extender that swivels and stays in position. The dock portion (let’s call it the seat for the sake of this article) is mounted on a connector which rotates 360 degrees and ratchets/locks into 9 preselected positions. This solution was perfect, I used a cassette adapter plugged into the 3.5mm connector of the TuneFlex to stream music from my music library and Pandora.  After a few months of awesome, the ratchet mechanism stopped doing what it’s supposed to… ratchet and lock. The techy nerd in me wouldn’t accept such desecration to the finest technological advancement of modern history… yea, that’s right, the Iphone.

I set out to find a replacement with little success and honestly I didn’t want to shell out another $30-$40 on something that wouldn’t last. This is when I decided to take matters into my own hands… I set out to build a dock that will last longer than a couple months. There are a few requirements that this dock needs to satisfy:
1) Must provide mechanical stability
2) Charge the phone
3) Allow me to stream music from the phone to the car stereo
4) Not cost an arm and a leg
To satisfy the first design requirement, I needed something that fits the phone and is somewhat aesthetically pleasing. The seat of the FlexTune is very well design and could possibly be the best thing about the TuneFlex, so I decided that it’ll be the heart of the dock.
The simplest and cheapest way to charge the phone and stream music is by utilizing a cable that has a 30pin ipod/iphone connector at one end and USB A & stereo 3.5mm connectors at the other. A quick google search led me to the site of Rad Tech and they had what I needed for around 20 bucks. This took care of requirements 2, 3 and 4.
Now for the assembly… I used two screws to secure the seat to two button caps on my dash. I ran the 30pin cable through the holes for the button caps and down the side of the center console. I snaked the cable around and pulled it out by the bottom of the center console. The 30pin connector of the cable fit perfectly in the seat without any dremeling. A 3.5mm male to male adapter and a couple of tie wraps later I had an awesome car dock for the finest technological advancement of modern history.
Check out the pictures!

First off, if you are the owner of one of these theaters I LOATH YOU. Honestly, it is just because of an overwhelming and uncontrollable feeling of jealousy.  Especially you mister Batcave, COME ON!  You probably have some cool bookcase that swings out of the way when you tilt the statue’s head back to reveal a fireman’s pole that leads to your homemade tumbler. But at least now I get to use the Batcave tag for this article.  F U Sir, I say good day sir…I SAID GOOD DAY!

Okay sorry about that, for those of you still reading check out these amazing home theaters below.  On a side note, I am not sure how many of these setups were say “DIY,” as much as they were “I’m rich, so I’ll just pay someone to do it for me.”  The last picture in the gallery is by far the most amazing setup, one day I will have this setup…

[via Electronic House]

Do you have a home theater that you would like to showcase or talk about?  Post about it in the comments or email us pics to tips@diynerds.com. Let us know which one of these setups cost over $25,000 to build.

I guarantee that you will have a love affair with Boxee the same way I do.  I really can’t quit you Boxee (if you start charging it will be a messy divorce) BUT FOR NOW you’re free and together we will live happily ever after together. What other free program out there allows you to access thousands of free video content from all the major networks on Hulu, play music from Pandora, connect to social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, and lets not forget Flickr. Boxee makes use of all those content providers, to your advantage, and piles all that content into one simple and clean design.  Then they take that awesome GUI (Graphic User Interface) and stream it straight to your living room television.  Boxee is an essential ingredient for any DIY Nerds out there.

The most important feature that Boxee offers me is the ability to not have to pay for cable television each month.  “Boxee has allowed me to replace cable with no remorse.  Most people my age would like to just pay for the channels they want, but cable refuses to give up that option.  Services like Boxee, that allow users choice, are the future of television,” said Jef Holbrook (Stone, Brad. “Boxee, Used to View Web on TV, Generates Buzz.” New York Times 16 January 2009)

Quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.

Boxee is a free download available at www.boxee.tv.  Boxee works on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, and on Apple’s set-top box, Apple TV.  With Boxee you are given a central access point to your entire catalog of photos, videos, and music on your local network plus access to a wide range of television shows, movies and songs from sites like Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, and much more.

Boxee has recently announced a new box-top the Boxee Box.  Boxee’s post on the box has nothing in the way of details yet, so we will all have to stay tuned to the coming weeks.

Check out some of these screenshots

DOWNLOAD BOXEE

How to install Boxee?

Boxee is currently available for Ubuntu Linux (Intrepid and Jaunty), Mac OS X (Intel-based Leopard and Tiger), Apple TV and Microsoft Windows (XP, Vista and 7). Check out the minimum requirements for Boxee.

To download the Boxee application you will need to register at the Boxee website and download the relevant version during the registration process. If you have already registered to Boxee in the past, just login to the website using your username and password, and click on the Download option in the menu to go to the download page.

Installing Boxee on Windows and Mac is quite a straightforward process, accompanied by instructions on screen. Just follow each and every step as requested, and the installation should complete just fine.

Installing Boxee on AppleTV

In order to install Boxee on the AppleTV you need to do the following:

1. Download the ATVUSB-Creator from http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator/
2. Download the disk image of AppleTV 2.4 from http://mesu.apple.com/data/OS/061-6242.20090624.Aq20P/2Z694-5660-02…
3. Insert a “bootable” USB drive into your Pc/Mac
4. Run the ATVUSB-Creator
5. Click on Choose a DMG and point it to the downloaded disk image
   
6. Click on Create Patchstick
   
7. Remove the USB drive and plug it into your Apple TV
8. Power on your Apple TV and the patchstick will run the ATV bootloader
9. After the bootloader finishes, remove it and restart your Apple TV
10. It now has options for Boxee / XBMC on the main menu
11. Click on Boxee, then select update launcher and  then update Boxee alpha
12. Once boxee is done installing, restart your Apple TV
13. Click “Boxee”

Installing Boxee on Ubuntu Linux

1. Go to System > Administration > Software Sources.
2. In Sources Software dialogue, select Third-Party Software tab, click Add, and enter:
   for Intrepid: deb http://apt.boxee.tv intrepid main
   for Jaunty: deb http://apt.boxee.tv jaunty main
3. After closing this dialogue you can either use Synaptics and select Boxee for download, or use a terminal window, and enter sudo apt-get install boxee.

Program Features (via Wikipedia)

Audio/Video playback and handling

Boxee can play multimedia files from CD/DVD media using the system’s DVD-ROM drive, local hard disk drive, or stream them over SMB/SAMBA/CIFS shares (Windows File-Sharing), or eventually UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) shares (not available in v0.9.14). Boxee is designed to take advantage of the system’s network port if a broadband Internet connection is available, using the IMDb to obtain metadata information, thumbnails, and reviews on movies, TheTVDB for TV show thumbnails and metadata, CDDB (via Freedb) for Audio-CD track-listings, and album-cover thumbnails via AMG. Boxee can stream Internet-video-streams, and play Internet-radio-stations (such as SHOUTcast). Boxee also includes the option to submit music usage statistics to Last.fm and a weather-forecast (via weather.com). It also has music/video-playlist features, picture/image-slideshow functions, an MP3+CDG karaoke function and many audio-visualizations and screensavers. Boxee can in addition upscale/upconvert all 480p/576p standard-resolution videos and output them to 720p, 1080i, or 1080p HDTV-resolutions.

Music Library

The Music Library is one of the Boxee metadata databases and another key feature of Boxee. It automatically organizes your music collection by information stored in your music files ID meta tags, such as title, artist, album, genre and popularity.

Digital picture/image display in detail

Boxee handles all common digital picture/image formats with the options of panning/zooming and slideshow with “Ken Burns Effect”, with the use of CxImage open source library code. Boxee can also handle CBZ (ZIP) and CBR (RAR) comic book archive files; this feature lets you view/read, browse and zoom the pictures of comics pages these contain without uncompressing them first.

Add-on plugins (widgets/gadgets) python scripts

Boxee features a Python Scripts Engine and WindowXML application framework (a XML-based widget toolkit for creating a GUI for widgets) in a similar fashion to Apple Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets and Microsoft Gadgets in Windows Sidebar. Python widget scripts allow non-developers to themselves create new add-ons functionality to Boxee, (using the easy to learn Python programming language), without knowledge of the complex C/C++ programming language that the rest of the Boxee software is written in. Current plugin scripts add-ons include functions like Internet-TV and movie-trailer browsers, cinema guides, Internet-radio-station browsers (example SHOUTcast), and much more.

BitTorrent client, interface, and torrent trackers

Boxee also includes a built-in BitTorrent client, with a frontend for it integrated into the Boxee interface, and there are also Torrent links to legal BitTorrent trackers download sites available incorporated by default. Through Boxee’s Python plugin system it is also possible for the end-users to make themselves or add unofficial plugins made by third-party persons for other BitTorrent trackers.

Skins, skinning, and the skinning-engine

Boxee GUI source code is based on XBMC Media Center which is noted for having a very flexible GUI toolkit and robust framework for its GUI, using a standard XML base, making theme-skinning and personal customization very accessible. Users can create their own skin (or simply modify an existing skin) and share it with others via public websites dedicated for XBMC (and Xbox) skins trading.