Every second Tues­day, Al deserts me and goes of to play with wires and things — or some­thing. I sort of glaze over when the only way things can be explained involves dia­grams — at Dork­bot Alba. For what seems like the last hun­dred years, they’ve been work­ing on a pro­ject that, to be hon­est, made the tooth­brush robot things (no, really) seem sane. Still, against all odds, it actu­ally seems to be fin­ished, and is turn­ing them into inter­net super­stars (Make: blog, Hacked Gad­gets). You can’t impress me by show­ing me 100 solen­oids and try­ing to explain how they work, but you can totally impress me by hav­ing the same solen­oids ref­er­enced by Make!

Of course, much of the inter­net super­star­dom is just because they’re piggy­back­ing on the suc­cess of another Edinburgh-based inter­net super­star and doing duets with him.

The peti­tion for the cre­ation of a Christ­mas mega­mix began, ooh, at least five minutes ago.

(Should you be inter­est­ing in play­ing about with wires and mul­ti­meters, would like to desert your girlfriend/boyfriend/flatmate/mundane exist­ence every second Tues­day, and live within trav­el­ling dis­tance of Edin­burgh, you too could join Dork­bot Alba! More inform­a­tion is avail­able here.)