elephantstaircase.com

This looks pretty fun. Out here in Seattle they call moss the state flower of Washington – plenty of it to go around…

RealLOL: Your source of daily updated funny pictures and gifs. – StumbleUpon.

We’re looking to bring internet memes to the offline world with Internet Meme Playing Cards. Pre-order them today on Kickstarter!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/raymondhthomas/internet-meme-playing-cards

It sounds gross but it’s pretty clever, good for a quick rinse after playing sports outside.

gx1mY.jpg 728×4672.

XBee grows up, delivers WiFi to DIYers and Arduino enthusiasts — Engadget.

If you do anything with wireless or Arduino you should definitely check this out!

We originally started Elephant Staircase in college as a way to fund our hobby of diy projects, robotics, circuits, tinkering with electronics, and just building stuff. When we graduated, we sold out and got grown-up full time jobs. As a result, we haven’t spent nearly as much time as we did before on our DIY projects or this site.

SO…. we’re using the money we’ve made so far to invest in “DIY Internships”

How It Will Work

• WE are putting up $1,000 and hoping to split it into 10 projects
• YOU submit a youtube video explaining why we should pick you. Please:
  • Keep it under 2 minutes
  • Tell us what your idea is
  • Tell us why you’re qualified (skills, previous projects, areas of study, etc.)
• WE will pick up to 10 winners

What’s In It For You:

• Cash money to cover the costs of your project
• Prestige – you can put it on you resumé and it’s a cool story
• Free PR for your project
• 50% of the ad revenue from the week we post your project
• The potential to join us full time at elephantstaircase.com

What We’re Interested in Seeing

• New, innovative DIY projects that haven’t been done before
• If it has been done before, a clear reason why yours is better
• Projects involving microcontrollers like Arduino
• Robotics or something involving Kinect
• Cool conversion interfaces (like our VGA over CAT5 project)

Suggested Qualifications

• Engineering student
• Free time
• Any ability to program/code
• Used a soldering iron or breadboard before

Other Thoughts

• We might be interested in 1-2 big projects with concrete milestones
• If you want to shoot for all 10, go for it
• Our goal is to get more traffic to our site and keep this on-going
• If you have experience as a webmaster or on blog monetization (OpenX) please contact us – we could use your help to make the site more profitable and we’re willing to give you a cut of the profits

Questions? email us at internship@elephantstaircase.com

Microsoft has made their official SDK for Kinect available as a free download. Hear that? It’s the sound of robotics enthusiasts around the world rejoicing.

Download here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/default.aspx

Here’s a great article from Wired

A DIY iPad Audio Dock, with Instructions, from Father of Circuit Bending Reed Ghazala.

Ever since the release of Garage Band for iPad, i’ve been waiting for someone to built a DIY audio in for the iPad. Here’s one that looks amazing.

via Engadget

If you haven’t heard of Johnny Lee, he’s somewhat famous on the internet for things like the $14 camera stabilizer or hacking wii-motes to do cool things like you’d see in Minority Report.  Some interesting thoughts on DIY:

Johnny Chung Lee on “The re-emergence of DIY vs Big Organizations”

Give Your Web Cam a Gorgeous Retro Shell.