Those wacky Ladyada hardware hackers (Adafruit Industries) and Phil Torrone from MAKE Magazine, trawled the net and found the patent from the outside consulting firm that built the device for the government.

They discovered it flashes green LEDs at about 10Hz to induce its effects, and modified a Sears flashlight to build their own version called the BEDAZZLER. And true to form, they've put the schematics, source code, and circuit board layouts online so you can make one yourself. Watch it in action below. Fun! [Ladyada]

Our very good buddies at Make magazine are launching their long-awaited TV show this weekend; called simply Make:, the show will bring all of the wonderful projects, maker profiles, and general DIY cheer that can be found in such quality in the magazine. And best of all, it's on public TV, so episodes will hit the web in HD for your torrenting and streaming pleasures as they are aired, along with PDF guides for the featured projects.

As you can see from the preview above, there's some great stuff in store—from the folks at Graffiti Research Labs, one of my favorite Makers Charles Benton's beautiful Kite Aerial Photography, the aforementioned Burrito Blaster tutorial, and much more. They'll also be featuring submitted videos from their YouTube channel in a special segment in each episode.

The fun starts on the web and on public TV across the country on January 3. Each station can broadcast the show whenever they want though, so here is a list of times and networks. If your city's not on the list, put in a call!

Market(s) / Station or Network / Premiere Date Day Time
New York Thirteen/WNET airing on sister station WLIW
New York WLIW 1/7/2009 Wed 11:30 PM
New York + Philadelphia, (NJ statewide) New Jersey Network 1/3/2009 Sat 5:30 PM
Los Angeles KCET Orange or KCET Desert Cities (digital)
Los Angeles (San Bernardino) KVCR
Los Angeles (Huntington Beach) KOCE-HD (digital) 1/6/2009 Tue 6:30 PM; KOCE-HD 1/7/09 Wed 7:30PM
Chicago WTTW
Philadelphia + Salisbury DE WHYY Wider Horizons (Digital) 1/10/2009 Sat 5:00 PM
Dallas-Ft.Worth KERA 1/4/2009 Sun 10:00 AM
San Francisco KQED 1/10/2009 Sat 8:00 AM; KQED WORLD (Digital 9.3 & Comcast Cable 190) Sat 2pm & 7:30pm
San Francisco (San Jose) KTEH 2/4/2009 Wed 12AM-1AM
San Francisco (San Mateo) KCSM
Boston WGBH 2/HD
Boston + Burlington-Plattsburgh (NH statewide) New Hampshire Public Television
Atlanta + Savannah, Augusta, Macon, Columbus, Albany, Jacksonville, Chattanooga (GA statewide) Georgia Public Broadcasting
Washington, DC WETA 1/10/2009 Sat 5:30 PM
Houston HoustonPBS 1/8/2009 Thu 11:00 PM
Phoenix KAET
Tampa-St. Pete WEDU 1/9/2009 Fri 3:00 PM
Tampa-St. Pete WUSF
Seattle-Tacoma KCTS
Minneapolis-St. Paul Twin Cities Public Television (tpt2) 1/10/2009 Sat 5:00 PM; Sat 1/17 8:30AM;
Also two stunts: 1/6/09 7-8pm (#105 & 106); 2/1/09 3-5pm (#102, 104, 107, 110)
Minneapolis-St. Paul (Bemidji, Brainerd) Lakeland Public Television 1/24/2009 Sat 2:30 PM
Miami-Ft.Lauderdale WPBT 1/4/2009 Sun 11:30 AM
Cleveland WVIZ
Denver + Colorado Springs, Grand Junction, (CO statewide) Rocky Mountain PBS
Orlando WMFE
Orlando (Daytona Beach) WCEU
Sacramento KVIE
Baltimore + Washington, Salisbury, Pittsburgh (MD statewide) MPT Digital
Charlotte +Â Raleigh-Durham, Greenville, Greensboro, Wilmington, (NC statewide) UNC-TV
Indianapolis WFYI
Indianapolis (Bloomington) WTIU
Nashville Nashville Public Television 1/31/2009 Sat 11:30PM (NPT2 in Feb)
Grand Rapids (Kalamazoo) WGVU 1/4/2009 Sun 7PM-8PM
Albuquerque New Mexico PBS
Oklahoma City + Tulsa, (OK statewide) Oklahoma Educational Television 2/23/2009 Mon 10:00 PM
Louisville + Charleston-Huntington, Lexington, Paducah, Bowling Green, (KY statewide) Kentucky ETV Network
Austin KLRU-2 (cable) 1/4/2009 Sun 11:30 AM
Tulsa RSU Public Television 1/9/2009 Fri 1:00 PM
Flint-Saginaw + Alpena, (Manistee, Cadillac) CMU Public Broadcasting
Syracuse WCNY 1/10/2009 Sat 6:30 AM
Topeka

Much more at: [Makezine.tv]

MAKE Magazine is pleased to be the only retailer in North America selling these educational and collectible kits. Our team personally selected the kits while visiting the Gakken headquarters in Japan. The attention to detail in these products is so incredible you won't believe it. From vacuum tube amp kits to mechanized metal centipedes to Stirling engines, the Maker Shed store has the best of the best from Japan

Select an image or link below to learn more:
Vacuum tube amp kit - Build your own retro, vacuum tube based amp for your iPod or portable music player. You can also experiment with sound by inserting normal straws of different lengths in the rear of the speakers
Edison-Style Cup Phonograph kit - This replica kit uses the same technology that Thomas Edison used, replacing Edison's waxed pipe and stylus with a plastic cup and a needle, but the end results are the same! You record your own voice on a plastic cup — and play it back!
Stirling Engine Kit - The Stirling Engine kit is as majestic as a piece of art, and is used to understand the basics of thermodynamics. You can try three different experiments: the generator, the fan, and the car.
Gravity clock kit - Build your own beautiful gravity clock, customize it using own counter weight!

Select an image or link to view more:

I-Sobot - The worlds smallest humanoid robot!
Herbie the Mousebot kit is a quick, easy-to-build, light-chasing robot kit, perfect for beginners.
Twitchie is Arduino powered and comes pre-programmed, making it an excellent kit for beginners in robotics.
Blubber Bots are do-it-yourself robotic inflatables that navigate a space autonomously.

Select an image or link to view more:
Arduino Starter Kit, everything you need to learn electronics and more with Arduino!
Arduino Duemilanove - Open source physical computing.
Getting Started with Arduino, the handy pocket guide to Arduino!
Making Things Talk, learn how to make advanced Arduino projects.

Select an image or link to view more:
SX-150 Analog Synthesizer Kit
Arduino Pocket Piano Synth Kit
Vacuum Tube Amp Kit
Loud Objects Noise Toy Kit

As a parent, a friend, big brother or sister, a mentor or just someone who is giving a gift this holiday season - instead of a plastic toy or nik-nak MAKE Magazine asks that you consider giving something that might just spark the attention of a young mind that will be called to solve the challenges for our energy needs. Read on for solar kits, fuel cells, biodiesel projects and more...

Solarspeeder Kit
Power House Kit
Fuel Cell Car & Experiment Kit
MAKE: Volume 3

Here are things to get your started in electronics for $20 or less - A kit to learn about electronics - something to hack and mod: A DIY iPhone charger that fits in an Altoids tin, magically spell words in the air, a singing pencil kit (Picture Pages!), hack your phone's SIM card, learn all about micro-controllers and much much more.... All at the Maker Shed!

Select an image or link to view more:
MintyBoost USB Charger Kit v2.0
MiniPOV- An Inexpensive Persistence of Vision
SIM Card Reader/Writer Kit
Drawdio Kit

We invite proposals for Maker workbench exhibits, workshops, presentations and performances for the Maker Faire. We are interested in proposals from individuals as well as from groups such as hobbyist clubs and schools.

Maker Faire Auditions [Machine Project, via boing boing]

This week at Lifehacker: Convince your boss you'll be 30% more productive if you could only have a second monitor. Save yourself 70 bucks and replace your iPod Mini's battery yourself. It's a bunch of nerds in a grassy field with circuit boards, LED's, homemade Segways and more! Check our special report from Geeks Gone Wild the first annual Maker Faire. Headed off to Circuit City determined to come home with an HDTV? Print out the short and sweet HDTV buying guide and stick it in your pocket before you go. Finally, when your hard drive starts growling at you in the midst of writing your final paper, automatically email yourself file backups to keep your work safe even if your disk platters go south.

One Possible End of the End User

As we spend more time communicating, playing, and working in the digital world, our expectations and ways of acting will transfer to the physical world. Digital objects are, above all, plentiful, easily copied and easily shared. And they are beautifully malleable. We transform them, recombine them, share them some more. Photos are Photoshopped, music is remixed, code is developed co-operatively, web applications with open APIs are mashed together.

The digital world is, in part by its nature and in part by thoughtful design, flexible. But the physical world not so much; by comparison it seems frustrating in its intractable and resolute thinginess. Physical things don t duplicate with the right keystrokes, can t be instantaneously shot around the world, and command + Z never fixes them.

We want to treat physical objects like digital objects. And designers should oblige. But how?

Part of the answer lies in one of the more troubling aspects of our consumer-driven culture: more and more things appear everyday. Like the digital objects, physical objects are becoming almost absurdly plentiful. But they don t delete into nothingness. Things stay around. Jay Samit of Sony Mobile Connect has estimated that four-hundred million cell phones will be thrown out this year.

It s as if the plenitude of things, which should make it less likely that we need to make anything ourselves, is instead inspiring people to do just that. Physical things, like digital objects, are being remixed, recombined, collaboratively re-invented. It s as if the science-fiction post-apocalyptic hacked and re-wired world of Road Warrior arrived a little early.

The first signs of this thinking might be found in the new popularity of the crafting DIY movements. Make Magazine, which provides instructions for building and modifying everything from kites to cars, has been immediately successful. But more interesting, and more promising, are the labs that bring people together with different areas and levels of expertise. Of course, we aren t all engineers, we don t all have complete toolsets, some of us don t even have much space to work in. So it seems as if DIY not every end user can become a mid-point user.

But places like Squid Labs</>, Eyebeam, Sparqs , and the PIE Network all rely on shared knowledge and space: collaboration and cooperation are essential. In fact, Squid Labs recently launched instructables.com, a site meant to document the how-to of projects and let those projects be freely shared (even if some of them require currently expensive fabrication tools).

It s possible that these places suggest an interesting model for a future type of space and interaction—the neighborhood lab, a place to drop off old products, assemble custom tools, create one-off devices, and educate children who, because of the influence of the digital world, are more likely to think: I am going to change this.

Designers should pay attention to what is written in Make magazine and what comes out of places like Eyebeam. Products may be developed with an eye to these secondary markets and with new questions in mind: what potential life does this have outside of its intended and immediate use? What essential functionality does it encapsulate? What can be salvaged and used elsewhere?

The real icon of this sort of age might be the ubiquitous and simple Altoids mint tin, which has seen its range of re-use extend from holding rubber bands to housing iPod rechargers, serving as an emergency stove, and taking pinhole photographs. Of course it s flexible because it has a simplicity that few consumer products can achieve, but it remains an admirable product in its possibilities and a clear lesson that re-use adds value for the both the users and producers.

Clay Wiedemann is a senior analyst in the frog design NY studio.

The frog Design Mind column appears every Monday on Gizmodo. Read more frog Design Mind.