DIYLife.com has a great feature all about film rigs for scrappy independent filmmakers. DIY Film School consists of links to instructions on building tons of great film tools for a fraction of the price of buying things new. I have made some of these and of course they take a lot of time and the quality is a little low. But hey, you get what you paid for but just don’t expect Hollywood results from this stuff.
The list of things you can build includes:

• $14 Steadycam
• Body Brace Steadycam
• $60 Camera Jib
• Backseat View Car Mount
• Exterior Car Mount
• Bike Mount
• PVC Pipe Fig Rig
• and an Underwater Camera Housing

If you’re itching for more of this kind of stuff then check out Home Built Stabilizers for tons of homemade movie-tool goodness. So much for your free time this weekend

Browsing New Egg I stumbled on two quad core HP desktop PC’s for under $1,500 which left me in a state of shock. This HP Pavilion m8150n comes with a quad core 2.4ghz CPU, 3GB of RAM, 2x 320GB hard drives, a HD-DVD Rom drive, and a tuner card for recording TV signals.

I occasionally eye PC’s checking out specs and pricing. One day I will replace my 17″ desktop-replacement laptop with a true desktop that I can gradually upgrade. I don’t know when I will take the plunge and plunk down a couple thousand dollars on a new system but since I spend most of my time at work, it seems rather trivial to get a big honking system with all the trimmings.

Still, this system on New Egg sounds like a great deal. I would need to upgrade the graphics card so I can run dual-monitors and the case looks too small for adding extra hard drives. Even with these upgrades, the price is still lower than custom building your own.

Alas, this deal is too good to be true since it is currently out of stock. I guess I’ll keep looking.

This guy took his already busted iPod and did a little experimentation. Cutting the frame in half, leaving the screen, headphone, and lock module intact, he managed to create a new iPod form. Meet the iTop, a propped up iPod that would be perfect for watching videos on. Why didn’t Apple think of something like this?

Wouldn’t it be cool if they came out with a flexible iPod?

Ok maybe it isn’t that great…

Oh those wacky Japanesse, coming up with the weirdest things. This USB keyboard bra actually might be a good idea to get computer nerds to spend more time with their not-so-techie significant others. Kitty costume not included.

Who is Randall Bennet? Why my fellow DV Guru blogger and this weekend he was on MSNBC to talk about the iPhone. It’s weird seeing a friend on a national news channel especially since we use to do a semi-regular podcast together. Oh well, I’m glad to see Randall hitting it big and still blogging for a living. Keep it up buddy!

The release of the iPhone brought out a high supply of morons including this lady from Texas.

If you devised a plan to buy out the entire supply, let alone forking over $500 for just one iPhone, you would think investigating the details of the launch prior to arriving would be a given. How could you miss it? The entire Internet was regurgitating iPhone deets.

And selling them all on eBay? Ha! Too bad Apple was loaded with iPhones in all of their locations killing any eBay plundering that might have occurred. If there was a large supply of iPhones, then looking back at all of the suckers standing in line now seems like a complete waste of time. Apple wanted all the buzz it could get for its first foray into the phone business and creating a false sense of supply is the perfect way to lure consumers in. Of course having every media outlet in the world buzzing about the launch for the past six months doesn’t hurt either.

Another thing, why would you even think of buying an iPhone at an AT&T store? Apple is all about user experience and unlike the cell phone store, isn’t trying to shove a sales pitch down your throat or force you to buy accessories with your purchase.

I hope all of the iPhone maniacs out there are enjoying their shiny new device. Apparently there are quite a few shortfalls about the device that people are discovering after actually using the thing. If Apple’s number one strength is user experience design their number two strength, without a doubt, must be marketing. How else can you explain the throngs of giddy people who were more than willing to give up their hard earned moola for a device that can only tout that it is more “sexy” than anything else out there.

At least the idiot lady above probably didn’t drop her single iPhone right out of the box.

Here is a thumbdrive that really represents what it is by it’s shape; A physical folder for all of your digital files. This stylish creation comes from the same guy who thought up the Optimus Maximus keyboard, Art Lebedev.

Check out more cool products from Art at his online store.