Oh yes. We like shiny. This is one shiny tree. It’s the kind of project that you take on when you find yourself with 70 defunct SCSI hard drives and a whole lotta free time on your hands. If that sounds like you this Christmas season, you can make one too, just like the builder of this tower of joy. It was built by a man with a horse name(trigger).

He took the drives from RAID arrays that were destined for the scrap heap. Instead of performing the DoD wipe that would have otherwise been needed, he built this geek tree from the shiny discs within. The tree is made entirely from the drive pieces, with one exception. A single nut.

The Rockterscale is an advanced scientific instrument that measures exactly how hard a crowd is rocking out. The Hat of Rock measures the amount of head thrashing going on, while the dance floor mat pictured above measures the amount of dancing and foot movement happening. Note the crash barrier in front which uses a force sensor to determine how hard the crowd is pushing against it.

There’s also a webcam on the ceiling to measure the movement of the crowd as well as audio monitors to get a sound level reading. Basically, it determines if you are rocking or sucking. Rocking is complicated business after all. It’s not all just panties on the stage and ten minute guitar solos.Check out a video of the Rockterscale in action below.

These paper toys are cute and they aren’t afraid to do battle with paper villains. But paper cuts can be deadly to them. You can download them at harlancore for free, print them out and start folding one. After that, just play with them on your desk. There’s Spiderman, Cyclops, Wolverine, Magneto and Professor X. And they are all sticking their tongues out at you. There are more characters available as well, like Storm, Beast etc. Nerd toys don’t get much cuter.

Gameboys are cheap these days. You remember Gameboy. That monochrome handheld with the sort of greenish urine colored background. You can get one for about $20. But why not make your own? Some guy named Matt decided to build an “open source Gameboy” called Gamepack, using off-the-shelf parts, including an Arduino microprocessor. The Arduino providse the brains, while the 128×128 TouchShield Stealth color OLED touchscreen takes care of the rest. An Inputshield board provides a tiny joystick that even sports rumble, with control buttons and a flat Lithium battery pack.

Lucky for you the Gamepack system is available in kit form so you can build one yourself. Thing is, at the moment, the Gamepack only runs some rudimentary homebrew demo code, but the idea is that others will contribute more advanced games, or maybe even a Nintendo emulator. It’s steep at $249, but a pretty cool project.

It used to be that all you could do with your bike spokes was insert a baseball card or sport a generic reflector. My favorite was always the aluminum can on the back tire. But I digress. Now it’s all about LEDs. This moving endorsement of Obama comes from a Flickr user that used six SpokePOV kits to turn his bike wheel into an awesome, illuminated Obama sign. Now he can campaign for his candidate just by riding his bike. If you want to make your own, all of the .dat files necessary to reproduce the effect are available on Aneel’s Flickr site. You can customize it to endorse whichever candidate you want. Pretty neat.