The original article located here has been removed due to issues with the design. As someone pointed out in the comments, the 7805 regulator regulates voltage by dissipating the rest of the energy as heat, which means that if used for extened periods of time the regulator will get very hot. This doesn't happen right away, and it will charge your device, which is why I didn't notice it when I first did the tutorial. Running a ~600mA external hard drive off the system however made the regulator hot to the touch after about 10 minutes. Therefor I wouldn't suggest anyone using this I've left the original technical explenation comment for anyone who wants to check out the technical reasons themselves.

Portable speakers can be very nice little accessories to carry around, but the "little" part often extends to the sound as well. Forum member Dobson did his own thing and instead put speakers in a backpack.

Dubbed the "sound bag" by its creator, this thing is quite impressive with 2 large speakers powered by a 50W amplifier that runs off a 7000mAh battery, which gives the rig a battery life of about 15-20 hours. This will definitely play louder than anything even an army of normal portable speakers can spit out and might not be too bus-friendly, but it definitely has style. Great work! Hit the jump for more pictures.

[ABi>> Forums]

Since the dawn of man (or at least since the release of the player) P2 users have been craving for a dock for their device. Our forum have been cramped with such threads and although some docks do exist they aren't available everywhere and are more or less Asia only.

Our forum member dirtmonkey took matters into his own hands and went the DIY route to get his dock. His design is simple yet very functional and so far he's made two of these docks and created awe on our forum. Hit the jump for a pictures galore and the creator's own word on the creation process.

A few of us in the forums have been hacking together our own custom cables for the sport of it, but additionally we don’t want to pay monster prices for cables. David Randolph, a 12 year video broadcast engineer is joined by Diggnation co-host Kevin Rose to discuss the hype of overpriced cables (I know the video is wicked old, but still very relevant). Most of the episode is a great how to on making your own high end reference cables for a fraction of the price of those expensive cables your find at Best Buy. Not only will you get a great quality cable you also stand to gain in sound quality by not having excess cable wound up on the floor.

This is an absolute must watch for the AV enthusiast that values their hard earned dollar looking to squeeze out every bit of performance with just a little more effort than driving to the local big box retailer. Also, a quick note that if you decide not to roll your own cables, please check out MonoPrice for the same quality cables you would find in the store.

[Systm]

One of our forum moderators, Captain Ødegård, is quite crafty when it comes to woodworking. He claims he has more wood tools than I have MP3 players, but one of these days we will have to settle the score.

Honed out of pine and burned with a hot knife-- his latest creation is a giant Creative Zen Stone measures 8.25 x 5.5 x 2 inches. The internal components aren’t the real Zen components since the Stone is relatively expensive in Norway. However, this wooded Stone still does pack in 4 times the memory with 4GB of memory stored on an SD memory card.

Photos and video of the wooded Stone in action below…