My friend Tod Kurt and I finished building our laser tripwire art heist! (He did all the heavy lifting.) This is for the Machine Project Benefit this Saturday night. Here’s a sneak peek:

We’re using a hazer to make the laser beams visible, which works surprisingly well in this semi-open space. To increase the spectacle we installed a few extra lasers that are not being sensed for tripwires, but just look cool. The heisters won’t know which these are, however, so it adds to theSource: MAKE: Blog RSS Feed

If you walk into a Verizon store today and pick up a DROID, you’ll be out $300 (before tax) out of pocket, then you’ll twiddle your thumbs for a few weeks while you wait for some mysterious PO box in Texas to send you your $100 rebate on a debit card. Wouldn’t you rather just pay $200 upfront? Or better yet, $150? Sears — which, we have to admit, we didn’t know sold phones — is charging just $150 without a rebate for the DROID today, a full $50 less than Big Red proper with rebate. WeSource: Engadget RSS Feed

Get ready to tech up your driving experience, as Garmin has unveiled a new accessory for its nuvi line of GPS devices that lets you add a number of customizable gauges and monitoring utilities. The new ESP module tucks into the OBD-II diagnostics port on your car and communicates (via Bluetooth) all-important data like intake air temperatures and the fuel efficiency of your driving to the nuvi up top. Yea, it’s been done before, but Garmin is (for the time being) a major force in navigation Source: Engadget RSS Feed

Ready to make your escape in 2012 if the Mayan calendar holds true about all the natural disasters that year? Well the Galactic Suite will be ready to take your reservation to their hotel in space. That’s if you got the cash that is. Back in 2007 the Barcelona based architects claimed they would be ready in 2012 but they were all poo poohed and most expected the company to go down before ever coming to fruition or just not make their deadline at all. Well neither happened and they willSource: Chip Chick RSS Feed

Randy Sarafan writes:

The nice thing about IKEA furniture is that it is cheap and easy to hack. In other words, lets say that you were to buy two cheap $30 Gorm shelving units and assembled them to discover them that one was crooked. Well then, it would be really easy to spend an afternoon converting the crooked one into a solid, stylish and symmetric bookshelf bench. As you probably just guessed, this Instructable will show you how to convert a Gorm shelving unit into a bookshelfSource: MAKE: Blog RSS Feed

Speaking of HiRISE and Mars…

The Phoenix Mars Lander is sitting at the Martian north pole, its mission complete. Designed to study the history of water on Mars and investigate potential human habitability, it touched down in May 2008. It dug trenches and examined the surface soil of Mars for months, but the Martian winter was inexorable. Eventually, the intense cold forced engineers to shut Phoenix down (as planned), and there it still sits.

The HiRISE camera on the MarsSource: Bad Astronomy Blog RSS Feed

Over at our sister site GigaOM, Om takes a look at the rising trend of e-book sales on the iPhone/iPod touch platform. According to a survey by San Francisco mobile tech analytics firm Flurry, one in five apps launched during the month of October on the App Store was a book. Book releases for the device are surpassing game sales now, and the gap is widening.

Flurry compares the trend in books to that in gaming, which saw Apple take a strong branding direction with theSource: GigaOM Network RSS Feed

Today (as I write this), the Cassini spacecraft passed just a hair under 100 km (62 miles) from the surface of Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn. This little moon is scientifically incredibly interesting; there are geysers at the south pole that are spewing out water! The images are just now coming in, and have not been calibrated or processed yet, but they are still breathtaking. I particularly like this one:

[Click to embiggen, as usual.]

That, me droogs, is high art. EnceladusSource: Bad Astronomy Blog RSS Feed

After hearing about fuel cell’s being the future for the last few years we actually see that this might just be the case as Toshiba have launched their fuel cell over in Japan. Fuel cells allow instant power by topping up the battery with concentrated methanol. They are ideal for items such as laptops where you could simply top them up with fuel and work away without the need to recharge or plug in.

The new Toshiba fuel cell called the Toshiba Dynario acts as a battery charger with Source: Gadget Venue RSS Feed

A patent filed by Apple [AAPL] has revealed that the company might be working on a headset with iPod functionality built in. The patent shows a set of earphones with the lower one in the drawing housing an iPod shuffle type device. A small screen can be found on the side of the earphones and the opposite channel either goes around your head with a band, or a loose wire as shown in the diagram.

Features included in the patent show it has speakers, voice command and processor,Source: Gadget Venue RSS Feed