Steve Roberts, the "high-tech nomad," was one of my first hardware hacking heroes. I just started following him on Twitter, and via his feed, found this other nomadness site, Technomadia. It chronicles the technomadic lives of Cherie Ve Ard & Chris Dunphy. In this post, they talk about being on "Nomadic Standard Time," and about the concept of "nomadic serendipity."
The downside to living a life without a firm itinerary is that it's awfully difficult to convey arrival times and destinations. When we don't know where we'll be even tonight, how can I tell our next rendezvous or host when to expect us? At first, this caused me a great deal of stress. Either we were rushing to meet a plan we conveyed, or we were afraid of leaving friends and family in a state of limbo.
It actually once contributed to a pretty major highway scare for us because we were pushing too hard to make an arrival date. Spinning down the interstate jack-knifed while towing a trailer was a wake-up call. Never again.
And thus now when conveying potential plans I always prefaces all dates and times being on NST - or Nomadic Standard Time.
A nomad, like a wizard, always arrives precisely when they are meant to.
Looking at their site, I had a moment of true wanderlust and thought: Hey, maybe *I* should become a technomad. It could happen. Since all my work is online, I can do it from anywhere, with the right tech.
Das original! It's the German-made Messograf caliper pen from Cleo Skribent. Built into the retractable ballpoint pen is a 4″ Vernier caliper that measures in increments of both 0.1mm and 1/16″. The pen also functions as a metric screw thread scale and a tire tread depth scale. Garrett-Wade carries them.
We haven't heard much from Jared Bouck, of Invent Geek, recently. But he wrote in to tell us that he's released free downloadable plans for his paintball turret gun.They also now have a kit available.
I really like this simple accent lamp by designer Richard Lawson. It lights up when placed in the upright position. Consisting of just a couple of LEDs, a tilt switch, and a 9V battery clip encased in a block of tinted resin, it'd be an easy re-make.
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Sound can have some amazing effects on liquids - and some downright bizarre effects on non-newtonian fluids such as the conveniently simple mixture of cornstarch & water. I'd experimented a bit with cornstarch cymatics in the past, but never quite matched the writhing results I'd seen from others. Now, after bringing my own small puddle of goop to 'life', I feel pretty much satisfied =]
Some additional pics from the session -
From the pages of MAKE:
Chladni Plate
Volume 16, Page 122
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I never knew you could create a watertight cup by placing a ring of fresh cut wood around a base and letting it shrink as it dries. Instructables user morfmir shows us how.
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It's Lucas again, our poster child for the MAKEcation Family Soldering Challenge. Here he is (note: safety glasses this time!) working on his second soldering project, a Drawdio. Lucas (and family) get a free Maker's Notebook because they posted pics of their MAKEcation to the MAKE Flickr pool. The next four people who post their pics will also get a free notebook.
And don't forget, we're giving away a $100 gift certificate to the Maker Shed for our favorite family soldering photos/videos and five Best of MAKE or Best of Instructables books. Adafruit industries has also generously given us some of their awesome soldering merit badges to give out to winners. But you've gotta upload your pics!
Wow - feeling pretty lucky I don't share a workplace Flickr member zomie84 and his cubicle crossbow -
Designed to shoot marshmellows, pens, or just about anything you can fit in it to attack your cube mates. I can get about 25ft with a bic pen. The trigger is spring loaded making it easy to reset and aim.
Best keep those pens capped - lest ye risk losing employee of the month!
Bruno Mathez and Mike Blow's art installation, PHOTOPHONICS, presents an interesting relationship between light-controlled oscillators and video projection -
PHOTOPHONICS is the first result of Bruno's 3d video-projection mapping experiments. It is a 'dispersed instrument' with a number of electronic oscillators created by Mike, positioned on architectural elements of the dark performance space. Each one emits sound in direct response to light. A fascinating visual score is played, transforming the space into an hypnotic audiovisual experience.
Nice fresh approach to some familiar elements here - I can imagine further evolutions growing quite dense and complex. [via Synthtopia]
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Every year, Joe Grand, aka Kingpin, aka The Sultan of Solder, and hardware hacker extraordinaire, designs the badges for Defcon, the annual hacker convention in Vegas. The badges are more than just conference ID badges, they have electronics on-board that do something, and conferees have to figure out what that something is. There's also a Badge Hacking contest, to come up with some cool, outrageous, ingenious hack of the badge. Winner gets an Uber badge, which gets them into Defcons for life.
This year's badge uses the Freescale MC56f8006 DSC (Digital Signal Controller), has an on-board mic, and an RGB LED. Apparently the LED pulses out the morse code of a web address. At that address is a few goodies, like a sketchbook of designs for a badge (a page is seen above), an MP3 song, and most importantly, all of the badge tools, source code, CAD files, etc. According to the discussion on Hack a Day, it appears to do some pretty ingenious stuff (like physically network with other badges).
Aquariums can be a lot of work, especially the saltwater variety. Why not have an Arduino handle some of the routine tasks like temperature monitoring, pH, and water levels? I had an aquarium for many years, and I would have really appreciated a little Arduino automation.
"The Shack" re-branding RadioShack is in the process of re-branding[citation needed] the company as "The Shack" as well as re-building corporate culture. This will be kicked off by a launch celebration in both San Francisco and New York featuring "14 foot tall laptops" streaming the images from their webcams from one city to the other, live music in both locations, as well as television coverage of the event.[13] The event will take place in Times Square and Justin Herman Plaza on August 6-8, 2009, starting each morning at 6AM Eastern and lasting until Midnight. In addition, "The Shack" began a telemarketing campaign on July 31, 2009, in which they call post-paid customers in the morning to inform them about upgrade eligibility.
Post up your RadioShack stories and good times you had in the comments for googlemultivac to eternalize.
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[The video] from Toyota demonstrates the running capabilities of the new humanoid robot. The robot takes a step every 340ms and has no contact with the ground for 100ms of that. Notice in the video how the robot remains balanced even after pushed by the human
And don't forget, we're giving away a $100 gift certificate to the Maker Shed for our favorite family soldering photos/videos and five Best of MAKE or Best of Instructables books. 
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