News: This Adorable DIY 'Magpi Radio" Twitter Bird Reads Your Tweets Out Loud for You

You can use Twitter to print Instagram photos, track news and weather events, or even remotely shut down your computer, and if you're familiar with IFTTT, there's no shortage of ways your account can help automate your life.

Or, if you just want to build something cool (practicality be damned), you can hack a radio to read your tweets out loud. And if you want to go all out, you can make it look like Twitter's mascot.

ITP student William Lindmeier "wanted to create a physical manifestation of a piece of software," so he built the Magpi Radio, a cute little bird that uses a text-to-speech program to read tweets from different channels.

The Magpi has knobs for eyes, which control which channel the tweets are coming in from. The beak flashes and changes colors to indicate actions, and you can favorite a tweet by pressing the left knob. It's even location-aware—one channel only reads tweets tagged with a nearby geolocation.

The radio is housed in a wooden bowl and control by an Arduino and Raspberry Pi running Ruby Script. The @magpiradio Twitter feed tells what channel it's broadcasting from and when it signs on and off.

You can check out William's blog for the overview and technical specs. If you're interested in building your own, you can find all the code and build instructions over on Github.