Category: DIY + Hacks

I love walking through neighborhoods around the country and seeing those Little Free Library boxes popping up. They’re a great way to share books that you’re done reading, and to discover new ones. But most Little Free Library boxes are just that – LITTLE.

One of my all-time favorite movies from when I was a kid was Short Circuit. For you Millennials who weren’t even around in 1986, Short Circuit is a movie about a laser wielding military robot that gets struck by lightning and becomes a cute sentient robot that I’m pretty sure Wall-E was based on.

Like Crocodile Dundee once said, “That’s not a knife. This is a knife.” When they’re not building giant fighting robots, the guys behind Megabots like to smash and slice stuff with giant knives. They decided to use a 500-pound knife they custom built to stab a scrapyard Toyota. Watching this knife piercing the car is very satisfying for some reason.

I learned a few things the hard way when my son was born. For instance, I knew you had to keep a hand on the baby while they were on the changing table lest he roll off.

Another fidget spinner. I promised myself I wouldn’t post another article about them. Because they suck. And I keep getting sucked back in because people are actually doing some interesting things with these idiotic toys. So the boss is like, write it, and I write it, but I am so done with these things.

Fidget spinners. Why did it have to be a fidget spinner? I promised myself I wouldn’t post an article about another one, but here comes  the world’s largest fidget spinner. So here I am telling you about another one.

Some dads are truly awesome. Like Minnesota Savvysherpa, Inc research scientist Paul Boswell. He is a truly cool dad, having built a working hovercraft for his son, Oliver. You can watch the video below and see the kid put it through its paces.

Man, I hate fidget spinners. They are so stupid. In fact, I’m only sharing this one to illustrate how stupid this whole thing is. Then I hope to never do a fidget spinner article again. Anyway, at least this guy did something creative with them, aside from just fidgeting like a moron. This is a fidget spinner made from other fidget spinners, which now becomes some kind of Transformer-evolution-mutant fidget spinner.

There’s nothing more boring than waiting around for your meal to cook. Well, Colin Furze has a solution. The Play-A-Wave, a game console for bored chefs (no, not board chefs.) Furze built an LCD screen is built into the door, which had to be modified with added shielding to prevent the screen from going all wonky when the microwave is on.

A guitar and amp? Pffft! Real men play their electric guitar using Tesla coils. Musician and engineer Nabzim decided to attach his electric guitar to a handmade solid state Tesla coil using an audio interrupter schematic. I have no idea what that means, but it’s very cool.

Forget your fancy skateboard tricks. This board can actually shoot flames. Ok, it’s more of a flamedropper than a flamethrower, but the effect is super neat, sort of like the flame trails left behind by the DeLorean in Back to the Future.

The Dark Knight takes one look at your dinky little fidget spinner and laughs. As always, his toys are much cooler. But you don’t have to be a billionaire to have one. PressTube shows you how to make one for yourself – assuming you’re comfortable working with molten brass. This huge Bat-spinner was cast with melted bullet casings.

If you want a place to keep your money or favorite snacks safe from theives, but you want one made of something supremely strong like thin top-grade plywood you are in luck. ThinkGeek has a DIY kit from UGears that lets you build a small combination safe from pre-cut plywood parts. Once complete, you get a safe with a 3-number combination lock.

Microsoft wants to make their Cortana personal assistant a serious Alexa competitor, obviously, so they should take note of this what Jarem Archer aka untitled network has done here, with the creation of a Halo-inspired holographic Cortana appliance. He got the idea by imagining what Microsoft’s version of Alexa or Google Home would be like if they designed it to look like the holographic AI sidekick from Halo. 

Few things in this life are as terrifying as a xenomorph or a facehugger. So creep out your friends and family by building your very own version of the creepy face-loving creature and its cryo-stasis tube from the Alien movies. Prop maker Odin Abbott first shows how to make a fully-poseable facehugger using coat hangers and a couple of types of foam.

You better get your magnifying glass and some tweezers to solve this Rubik’s Cube. Puzzle maker Tony Fisher had previously built the world’s largest Rubik’s Cube, and now it looks like he’s built the world’s smallest Rubik’s Cube.