One of the most common mishaps of having an iPhone is that sometimes they fall (klutz!) and the screen breaks. A lot of the time, it’s just the glass of the display screen that breaks. Which is why this article [PDF] over at Make Magazine will help you replace your screen yourself for about $30 bucks – assuming you have an iPhone 3G or 3GS. iPhone 4 users with cracked screens will have a much harder time, and still have to rely on Apple repair because the glass is glued to the LCD panel itself, rendering them pretty much inseparable.

Kipkay has been kind enough to put together this video walkthrough of Morten’s repair article if you don’t have the patience to read the tutorial.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

It’s a relatively easy process to complete, assuming you’ve got experience with DIY projects. Plus, it will cost you a lot less than $200 bucks.

[via Make:]

“LCD Bending” involves pressing ones fingers across a cracked LCD screen while it’s powered on, and the results are pretty wild. Watching the crystallized goo inside the display move around while electrified and illuminated creates some really cool fractal-like visuals. Check it out in the video below:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

While I’d certainly rather not have my LCD screen crack, at least I now know the first think I’m gonna try if it ever happens to me.

[via Switched]

Naturally, we went to the top, warnings from parents that we would fall and break an arm unheeded. My cousin promptly falls and broke his arm as soon as we climbed to the top. All he had after a trip to the ER was an ugly white cast and melted ice cream. What he needed was one of these cool Casttoos.

The things come in several pre-printed varieties with carious pictures of broken bones that look like cartoon drawings. The real coolness though is the custom cover with your own x-ray image on it. That way you can just point to the picture on your cast when someone asks what you did. A custom cover can set you back as much as $40, but just think of the time you would save not having to explain yourself to everyone you know.

[Via Boing Boing]

The Takumi CRASH Calculator apparently is designed to crash itself when it feels like it. Why, I don’t know.

Maybe the description from the product page will help shine some light on the manufacturer’s intentions:

Everybody has an impulse to CRASH! We seek for the excitement of crashing in this calculator. You will be driven to crashing with the unpredictable action it makes. Calculate to crash, get an answer to crash… Enjoy yourself by operating this uncontroll”

Now it all makes sense, doesn’t it? Idea Frames sells the CRASH Calculator in black, orange and light grey versions for the rather lofty price of $60 bucks a piece. And if you can believe it, they’re already so insanely popular that they’re currently sold out. I guess if you happen to have three Jacksons burning a hole in your pocket, you could buy one for the hell of it.

Just don’t try running the U.S. Treasury with one of these. I think that’s what Alan Greenspan did, and look where that got us.

After stefferroo’s brother dropped his iPod under his car and then proceeded to run it over, it was surely headed for the trash bin. But after some inspiration from an NES controller mouse mod, steff decided to make the defunct media player into a mouse too. The arrow buttons on the click wheel were even modded to act as the left and right buttons for the mouse.

Since the guts of the iPod were pretty much toast, stefferroo ripped them out and replaced them with the innards of an optical mouse. But what’s with that LCD screen you ask? Unfortunately, that got smashed in the accident, and has been replaced with a piece of paper with a screeenshot of the iPod’s original display.

I wonder if anyone could figure out a way build one of these while retaining the functionality of the iPod, or maybe even use the screen as a remote control for iTunes. Better yet, how about getting the iPod’s scroll wheel to work as a mouse scroll wheel? It’s doubtful that you could cram all the electronics needed inside, but it sure would be cool.

[via Craftster]

When in doubt, the simplest solution is usually the right one… simply smack the crap out of your hardware. Perhaps Microsoft will begin recommending this to their customers.

(Now is it just me, or does the guy in the video sound a bit like Greedo from Star Wars?)

[via digg]

I just cringed when I heard the sound of that controller hitting the wall. Personally, I’d never be so rough on my gear, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we start to hear about kids getting beaned by Wii-motes when they’re being too aggressive with them. Let the law suits begin.

[via Aeropause]