do it yourself

Chris Knight's avatar

A few weeks ago I found my Game Boy Advance.  Still in pristine condition after being in a really nice case all this time.  Vintage game consoles seem to be enjoying a renaissance lately, like systems that play Atari and Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges on high-def television sets.  And this particular Game Boy Advance holds a special place in my heart, it having been a gift for Christmas eighteen years ago.

I still had a bunch of cartridges on hand: Game Boy Advance ones as well as for the classic Game Boy and the Game Boy Color.  They all still work great!  Except for one small problem…

The cartridges that utilize battery backup have almost all run dry.

Battery backup in game cartridges goes back at least as far as the original The Legend of Zelda for the NES.  After choosing to save a game it would use the built-in ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

This man is hardcore. HARD-CORE, no two ways about it. MacGuyver ain’t got nuthin’ on this dude…

Hu Songwen was diagnosed with early kidney failure in 1993. A college student at the time, Hu went to a regular hospital for the next six years on a routine basis to have dialysis scrub his blood of the waste material that a healthy metabolism has no problem with passing out of the body.

But then the money ran out. And Hu could no longer afford those hospital visits.

So left with what he deemed no choice, Hu put together a homemade dialysis machine.

And his self-crafted dialysis has kept him alive for the past thirteen years!

Mail Online has plenty on the story of Hu Songwen, including a bunch more pictures and the technical details of how his machine works.

Gotta love ingenuity and initiative like that. Whenever I find ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

My eyes, ears and brains are frazzled after this weekend… but in a good way!

Some readers will remember five years ago, when I attended Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9 in Austin, Texas. What the heck is a “Butt-Numb-A-Thon”? It’s an annual 24-hour long “film festival” in Austin, Texas, hosted by founder/grand poobah of AintItCool.com Harry Knowles. A full day of movies (some vintage, some new) and all kinds of ingenius insanity interspersed throughout! Definitely something that one would be grateful to experience even once in a lifetime. Five years later and I’m still very fond of the memories of Butt-Numb-A-Thon. As well as still haunted and horrified by Feels So Good and Farewell Uncle Tom, but I digress…

Anyhoo, Kristen and I applied for this year’s Butt-Numb-A-Thon, and we each made a video for the optional “extra credit”. We were quite proud of our respective applications… but Alas! We didn’t ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

It’s not likely that anyone will clone-up a velociraptor, but the Associated Press reports about the growing trend of “do it yourself genetic engineering” that a lot of people are experimenting with in the spare rooms and garages of their homes. Using equipment found on Craigslist and eBay, these burgeoning biotechnologists are involved with everything from working on melamine-sensitive bacteria, to implementing squid genes for phosphorescence to create glow-in-the-dark tattoos. Some say that these folks could eventually hit on a cure for cancer. Others are afraid that they’ll cook up something like “Captain Trips” a’la The Stand.

Hey, this blog has already reported on folks experimenting with their own nuclear reactors. Gene splicing was the obvious next step, yah? 🙂...

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BBC News has an uplifting story about Dr. Malcolm Coulthard, a British kidney specialist. A few years ago he was given a patient: a baby girl who was born with a life-threatening condition that demanded dialysis treatment. Unfortunately the normal dialysis machines were way too big to be used on someone with such small weight.

So Dr. Coulthard built a dialysis machine that would do the job, using scrounged-up parts and literally working out of his garage.

Hit the link above for the rest of this neat story. Although as at least one smart-alec has remarked on Slashdot, unless Coulthard used chewing gum he’s still got nothing on MacGyver 😛...

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As clever as Erwin Rommel was, I can’t remember him ever pulling off what Will Foster of Flint, Michigan has done: build a working Panzer tank (albeit one-half sized) from scratch…

The Kettering University engineering student’s mini-Panzer can go up to 20 miles per hour with its three-cylinder diesel engine, is quite maneuverable and the turret can rotate 360 degrees to fire empty Red Bull cans from its air-compressed cannon powered by a SCUBA tank. Foster said that he built the tank to use in paintball competitions, after seeing some people drive “tanks” that were really golf carts.

Aim your targeting reticle here to read more about Foster’s creation. And here’s a YouTube video of the tank in action…

...

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Chris Knight's avatar

While going through some older videotapes I found this, made during the first Christmas that Lisa and I were married. This was at her parents’ place in Calhoun, Georgia and is a chronicle of the third turkey that I’d ever fried. Since then I’ve done many more (and have become much better at it, I think). Lisa was running the camera and the guy you see sitting in the chair with the University of Georgia cap is her dad:

I might make another video about turkey-frying as we get closer to Thanksgiving, this one doing a step-by-step from marinading the bird, to actually frying it. But this one gives a pretty good idea about the process and the extreme danger involved 🙂

EDIT 11-18-2007 10:25 a.m. EST: I’ve decided to stop publicly showing this video, because I’m taking a lot of heat for how “burnt” the turkey looks. And in ...

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