An Instructables’ user who’s known as dimovi, has figured out a way to turn an old LCD into a privacy monitor with content visible only to the person wearing a pair of special glasses (which he also made). Old LCDs are fairly easy to come by these days. By following a his (apparently) simple steps, your screen will become “for your eyes only”. Anyone else will only see a white screen.  Click here for video.

According to dimovi, all you need for this hack is paint thinner (or some other solvent), 3D glasses, as well as an X-Acto knife. The key is polarized film, which is normally used to filter backlight from what’s actually visible on the screen.

iBuiltit is a wave where we find clever people that identify a hole in the market. They want something that doesn’t exist yet, or is out of their price range. These DIY’ers strive, in often ingenious ways, to build what they desire. The Human Truth is: “If you won’t find a way, I/we will.” There have been some instances of hacks that have gone on to make millions because it’s an idea that takes the marketplace by storm. The “why didn’t I think of that” syndrome.  However, many people who embody the iBuiltit wave are simply happy to have something that fulfills their needs.

He’s a tall guy and had a few simple questions about the sizing, especially since it had body armor and that might change the dimensions. Sounds fair enough right?

Well this is when it gets nuts.

He’s on the phone with the actual business owner and suit maker, and without provocation, was really nasty to my friend. Answering questions with snark and condescension and just generally rude and ungrateful that someone is really keen about his very expensive suit. Suffice to say this took all the wind out of my friends sail. Or maybe I should say sale, because he decided he didn’t want to give this guy his money.

After talking with his artistic and design savvy Mom & Dad… they decided to make it a family project. Next thing you know they are measuring for custom gloves, buying a vacuum former, polystyrene for molding and workshopping ideas. It’s bringing them together as family, and he so excited that he will have his own outfit that’s unique to his body that he can barely sleep!

So this story has a happy ending but it’s interesting to see what bad customer service can do to a sale. It’s also worth noting an article I found about Gen Y’s being really into DIY:

“This struggle to be unique has reinvigorated the do-it-yourself (DIY) trend, currently more popular among females than males. Subramanyam met a girl who would buy designer jeans only to cut them up to make them her own. She advises marketers to look at how consumers are interacting not just with brands, but with the products themselves, and to provide the tools and materials to facilitate it—perhaps by cross-selling consumers a prepackaged kit of jewels or design patterns.”

iBuiltit wave is about people adapting through need or desire. The Human Truth is: “If you wont find a way, I/we will.” And that’s exactly what happened with my friend this Halloween. Being rude to a customer just because you think your product is so irreplaceable is not only arrogant but stupid, because there’s a lot of creative people out there who might end up doing a better job themselves.

Apparently people responded to the mercifully short speeches and plain ol’ quality entertainment.  There was back-to-back showstoppers, appearances by music’s icons and colorful “water cooler fodder” ie:  The Egg & Nikki Minaj’s hair.

I want to focus on the Album on the Year winner’s: Arcade Fire.  Yeah, ok, I’m a fan and I’m kinda psyched but it really does fit into our iBuiltit™ wave.

The wave essence™ is “Personal adaption through need or desire”.  Arcade Fire is the first music group not signed to a major label to win Album of the Year.  An indie band won!?! Twitter has been ablaze with “WTF? WHO??” tweets… so much so, that someone has made a hilarious blog of them.

I’m sure it was the band’s desire for creative freedom and disinterest in record company bullsh*t that kept them from signing dotted lines all these years, so they “built it” themselves.  Sometimes iBuiltit™ is about finding a solution that meets your needs, making it work on your terms and nobody elses.

As the Human Truth™ says: “If you wont find a way I/we will”.  Going the path least travelled can have many rewards, one of which is the satisfaction of knowing you did it your way.

Open source textbooks, information and programming have been floating around for years, as well as many other forms of open source products and services. However, just because they’re there doesn’t mean we use or encourage people to use them. Open source still gets confused with software piracy, in fact I don’t think a clean line ever gets drawn for people who travel shaky waters on the internet and don’t really do much beyond email, genealogy websites, scrabble and photos (yes, I do know people who use the internet for this purpose only.)

But as the aftermath of a long recession continues to boom, the D.I.Y. movement grows, progresses and becomes a staple instead of a niche for many people. Open source is just a more formal version of D.I.Y. and I think people are finally starting to see this concept and the benefits it can have. It also relies a lot on transparency and willingness to be public.

Look at sites like Slideshare, or B2B social networking sites that show behind the scenes of their company. There’s some openness out there, and there’s a lot of D.I.Y. All we need to do is find the happy medium between the two. Maybe we all just need to walk out of our cubicles a little and say hello to what’s around us and ask if they have anything they’d like to share.

“New Mexico State University chile pepper breeding program has bred a wholly new, extra large, medium-hot jalapeno pepper precisely optimized for jalapeno poppers-jalapenos stuffed with cheese and deep fried. Named “NuMex Jalmundo” (a contraction of “jalapeno” and “mundo,” Spanish for “world”), the plus-sized peppers were created from a routine hybridization of a bell pepper and a jalapeno with help from NMSU’s non-profit Chile Pepper Institute.”

Yes, apparently there is a non-profit Chile Pepper Institute bahahahaha .. America I love you.

“When we picked a release date, we tried to aim for a day far from other major book releases,” the authors explain on their blog. In that, they failed spectacularly: A number of potential best-sellers came out that day, including Keith Richards’s autobiography, a new Barefoot Contessa cookbook, and Glenn Beck’s latest book, Broke. Nonetheless, the power of the internet is such that Machine of Death took the No. 1 spot on Amazon for that day.

(Glenn Beck was not amused.)

It was cool watching this happen as I’m a fan of Wonder Mark (one of the author’s websites) and have been watching this come together. It’s worth noting that the creators passed the book around to a number of publishers, all of whom said it was unmarketable.

Behold, the power of the internet.

A BioWeather map (Flash mobs meet consumer-generated science!)

The Pearl Gel box (A built-in transilluminator and casting box for $199! Think of it as a Genome home hacking kit)

1centbp (Is the price of DNA synthesis going the way of Moore’s Law? Let’s find out by tracking the prices we pay for synthesis!).

Now, whether or not you understood what any of that meant is beside the point- what does matter is that they’re trying-and succeeding- in their garages at applied sciences that normally cost governments millions of dollars in research. They’re taking the DiY movement to new, exciting places very quickly-while at the same time building a smart, strong global community to ensure it stays alive.

Here’s a video of the DiYBio Community being presented at Ignite Boston 5, in 2009.

Enjoy.

The DIYbio Community - Presented at Ignite Boston 5 (2009) from mac cowell on Vimeo.

What makes this interesting is that it’s further proof that companies are slowly gaining more trust in what the consumer has to say. The ideas behind iBuiltit, the self proclaims “I can do it better!” and “I’ll make it how I want to.” fanbase keeps growing. Although iBuiltit has only been part of our behavior tracking for a year, the amount of growth the Wave has had is incredible. We’ve gone from gamers combining Playstation 3′s and XBOX 360′s in a single console to this. Where we go from here could potentially be an even more open source society. Since Coke allowed fans to manage its online presence and Nintendo built a game thats completely player created, the future for DIY looks richer than ever.