What can you build with a ballpoint pen and some extra parts? [gzip] found himself with a bonus box of right angle switches and other miscellaneous parts and set out to build a joystick. Simple arcade joysticks use switches that are actuated by the movement of the stick and this design embraces the concept. The four tactile switches are mounted on protoboard facing each other with part of a ballpoint pen in the middle. When the pen is moved it presses against one or more switches to close, completing a circuit. For good measure he even incorporated a fire…

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Mexican state power company CFE has postponed, not cancelled, construction of the 900MW La Parota hydroelectric dam in Guerrero state, the company said. The decision to delay the plant’s construction was based primarily on the country’s sufficient generation margin, the difference between capacity and peak demand. CFE made the announcement to media outlets to counter an article published by local paper El Universal that said the company was cancelling the project entirely. “It is not cancelled. It is delayed,” a CFE spokesperson told BNamericas, adding that the company’s position remains in line with the federal program for energy works and…

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Artist [Ariel Schlesinger] has managed to replace an air horn’s compressed air tank with butane fuel. This hack manages to change the pitch of the horn slightly, as well as making one very noisy flamethrower. While not as impressive as other flamethrowers, this would probably take the cake for most achievable. Currently the site containing the how-to is down, but we would have to recommend not doing this at home anyway. Video after the jump.

[via todayandtomorrow]

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Can a Blog earn you a prison sentence? Ask Mojtaba Saminejad. Heis an Iranian whose Blog, published in the Farsi language,earned him a two-year prison sentence in June . The online community is fast waking up to the power of blogswhich have spread across the internet like wild fire. If you arestill grappling with the word BLOG, these are online websiteswhich are diary-like in approach and people are free to publishnews or their ideas and thoughts. Blogs are very popular as theyare simple to use and in most cases, free. However, professional bloggers people who have a decent no. ofhours…

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The Serpent Mother is certainly an appropriate name for this 168foot long snake fire art installation filled with enough goodies to impress anyone who is into flame effects. [The Flaming Lotus Girls] were allocated $60,000 in May of 2006 to bring this art project to Burning Man. A team of nearly 100 people worked together at a furious pace to pull it off. The collaboration of skill-sets is unfathomable between the metal art, firmware, software, LEDs, and propane design. The primary flames consist of  41 “poofers” along the spine of the serpent each one capable of delivering a 8′…

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There’s been a bunch of coverage of the iLike acquisition deal over the past 24 hours including those that call this a massive blow Facebook. The primary “losers” in this supposed $20 million MySpace acquisition is iLike, who has been struggling to find a breakthrough business model. There’s also an underlying story about how the Partovi brothers and Mark Zuckerberg grew apart since the early launch of the platform.

Kara Swisher sums it up beautifully:

The Partovis–who once were close with execs at Facebook (see my party video below), particularly founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg–placed great faith in its growth…

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Regular submitter [Jared Bouck] from Inventgeek.com has sent us this cool project. He wanted to make a fireball cannon, but didn’t want to settle for plain old fireballs.Instead of using a common  propane system, he built an alcohol based one so he had a “blank slate” to start with. He then applied some copper chloride to get the desired greens and blues. With all of the fire displays we see, how come we don’t see more colored flames? Check out the overview video after the break.

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What is web hosting anyway? What do I get when I buy a web hosting solution?
To make thing clear from start let’s just say how it all works.
 
Web Hosting – Made Simple
Web pages basically consist of text and images. Generically, the information contained by these files is called content. The look of the web page is called design.
In order to be accessible to online users, all these files must be stored on a web server. You can think of web servers as computers storing the files of tens or hundreds of web sites. These…