posted Aug 25th 2011 9:38PM 
Audiophiles wanting to wirelessly liberate their music from desktop speakers have a tough choice -- buy a $99 Airport Express, which uses a less-than-ideal 3.5mm line-out jack, or spend big on a Sonos. Bicom's playGo USB is the new cord cutting kid on the block, and it's aiming for the middle slice of that market. For $450 you get a transmission unit which connects via microUSB to your computer and a receiver that connects to your HiFi with RCA or Optical cables. Song streaming couldn't be easier, the two have a range of 75 feet and pair up automatically over the 2.4 GHz band to send 24-bit sound to your beloved home audio kit. To stand out from the crowd, the playGo is hewn from Corian (yes, the stuff used for kitchen counter tops) and has a layer of LEDs to add some color to your musical experience. It's currently on sale for $400, but let's be honest -- you can't put a price on freedom from wires, can you? Update: The Airport Express' line-out port is a hybrid -- capable of using analog or optical cables.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
posted Aug 22nd 2011 7:04PM 
Looking for a DIY project with a bit more danger than an Arduino-powered TV muter, but don't have the resources to start building a fusion reactor in your garage? Well, challenge yourself with this electron accelerator project that requires little more than a wine bottle, a vacuum pump, a neon sign transformer and a diode from a microwave oven. OK, so that's not exactly a list of components you're likely to have laying around, but they're not terribly difficult to come by and at the end of the day you'll have your very own, home-made cathode ray tube. That's right, just like the one inside that TV you finally junked last week. You won't be able to create your own old-school display with it, but you will be able to observe interesting effects like sputtering (a ring of metal ion deposits) and magnetic deflection. Check out the instructions at the source and the video after the break.