We have at least a hundred LEGO sets from various of the "unimaginative" series from Harry Potter to Star Wars to the underwater things. They get built once according to the book, then they gradually get taken apart and mixed in with the giant bins of random LEGO parts. All these strangely shaped and colored parts mix together quite well, and my children have had no trouble whatsoever in creating weird fan-fic style mashup vehicles and action sets.

The guy states in his article that the battery pack hack was not something that he'd be comfortable with other people duplicating. That's why I brought it up.

I, too, applaud his doing of the thing. I make things too, but I try to use parts that are available to the general public when I post how-to articles about the things that I build.

Indeed. But how many of the readers have their own laptop repair shops? A general source of such batteries is a requirement to get this project in the hands of the average tinkerer.

The author could have done some research on battery packs instead of hacking up a laptop pack as he did. There is a company called batteryspace.com that sells multi-cell Li-ion packs with a protection circuit built in. They're not cheap, but they are reasonably safe.

Apple is doing enough of that to get the job done all by themselves. No need for the rest of us to pile on.

Movies are stored on 1/2" wide tape. Music is stored on flat, black plastic discs. What is this business about storing movies and music on computers?

That's the thing about storage - since it doubles in capacity every 1.5 years or so, the app writers happily double their app sizes at that rate.

The last I heard, there was a $1 billion damage award. Has that been overturned while I wasn't looking?

Given that my first disk drive held 72 kilobytes, I find your comment a bit funny.

There's a large, smoking hole in the ground where the price fell through the Earth's crust.

The TVs were made that way on purpose, to allow the TV police to easily sniff the sets' internal oscillators to track them down for taxes, right? (I'm American.)

Internal layers? What, do you think they used a 4-layer board on a $59 computer in 1980?

...and some of us have the drive to create stuff. I have been making electronic stuff since I was 8 years old. I'm over 50 and show no signs of letting up. I started a home business to sell the stuff I make, and one of my designs has recently been successful enough to pay more than my part-time day job (which is creating stuff for a university). Not so surprisingly, I grow tired of the work needed to make the same thing over and over, although it pays fabulously well.

There are also plenty of people with degrees, working at hell desks.

I'm one of those college dropouts that has made a successful career, although I am by no means rich. I have a part-time job at the university that I dropped out from 30 year ago. I'd quit that job entirely and concentrate on my money-making sideline (Nixie watches, which are marketed for me, for free, by a very rich college dropout), except that my family needs the health insurance provided by the cushy government job.

The older programmable logic chips of the seventies and eighties, such as bipolar PROMs and PALs, had a metal fuse for every programmed bit. Those fuses would be melted to program the chip. However, those days featured external programmers to do the melting.