My friend Zina Saunders' beautiful illustrations show a part of New York many people never see, in her wonderful website called Overlooked New York. There are brightly-rendered drawings of cricket players, urban astronomers, and rooftop pigeon keepers. But my favorite is one particular group of accomplished makers.
They are the Puerto Rican Bike Men. Zina explains who they are on her website:
"The Puerto Rican Bike Men .. .. have their own aesthetic, one that the mainstream culture knows nothing about. Their bicycles are their personal vision of beauty and art that they are always tinkering with, perfecting and adjusting and planning and applying, and then riding down the street for everyone to see."
This year, the DefCon badge wasn't the only electronic badge at the conference. Ninja Networks, which throws a popular party each year at the conference, produced an electronic badge of its own to gain access to its party.
Over 500 badges were made by hand. The badges featured ten segmented LED displays, four buttons and several microchips on the back. Once powered on, the LED's blinked random, scrambled letters that froze to form the words "NINJA PARTY" after 100 seconds. The badge was also programmed with a game of Simon-Says. Owners could alter random segments of the badge's memory through a keypad on the badge.
The badges were created by Amanda Wozniak, who designed the circuitry, and Brandon Creighton, who wrote the badge firmware.
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Thanks to Gareth and all my Maker Media associates for giving me this opportunity to author some articles online. My new book, Absinthe & Flamethrowers, contains a number of projects that I think most makers will find interesting. It's probably worth noting that there are sections on making and doing stuff that, well, may seem a little dangerous to some.
Note the adjective "little." There's a difference between interestingly dangerous and crazy dangerous. I believe the content of my book falls within bounds of the former. Part of the reason I wrote it was to explore the spirit of courageous discovery that filled the lives of people like Thomas Edison, Amelia Earhart, Francis Crick, and Gordon Moore.
Read their biographies and you'll find out that these people worked on the edge, and prospered by doing so. Sometimes making things involves a bit of risk and I think many of the best makers embrace that and know the boundaries between cool and crazy. So, I've included projects there such as making your own gunpowder, chemical rockets, and yes, even a flamethrower.
One of the sections is on the art and science of enjoying absinthe, the wormwood-based alcoholic beverage that was deemed too dangerous for regular people to consume and made illegal in most of the world for nearly a century. But now, it's back, and becoming very popular once again.
One way of enjoying absinthe is to drip water onto a sugar cube carefully positioned on a slotted spoon over a glass of absinthe. Hardcore absinthe devotees typically use a fountain that looks like this.
Being a frugal maker, I built the water dripper in the photo (it's called a "fountain" by absinthe connoisseurs.) It issues two precisely controlled drips of very cold water. The drops fall on a sugar cube which slowly dissolves into the absinthe. This is the approved method of tempering one's absinthe (most people won't want to drink the stuff straight - it's usually 120 proof or more.) As the sugar water falls into the absinthe, it undergoes the famous color change called the "louche," prized by absinthe imbibers, turning from clear green to a milky opalescence.
I made the fountain in a couple of hours from clear PVC, type L copper tube, and two small gate valves. I found the gate valves at the local hardware store for a couple of dollars each. The copper tube is sealed with epoxy into the PVC water chamber and the gate valves attach via compression fittings.
A votre sante!
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We're thrilled to have our buddy Bill Gurstelle as a guest author on Make: Online for the next month. I've had the profound pleasure of knowing some really delightful and brilliant eccentrics in my life, folks whose response to "think outside the box" is "what box?" This guy works beyond the box. One thing I love about Bill is his deep sense of child-like wonder and enthusiasm for the physical world and the magic it encodes. He can come up with the most outlandish ideas and pitch them to Dale with a straight face ("How about a MAKE "prison tech" issue?" "Can we do an article in MAKE about making your own fireworks?") And, of course, he's always at the ready to creatively and spectacularly blow stuff up. He's a mischievous kid with a valid ID and a grownup's bank account.
Bill has been involved with MAKE from the beginning. He serves on our Technical Advisory Board and is a Contributing Editor to the magazine. He was also a producer of Make: television and one of its on-air talents. Bill is the author of a number of best-selling books, including Backyard Ballistics and Whoosh-Boom-Splat: The Garage Warrior's Guide to Building Projectile Shooters. His most recent work, Absinthe & Flamethrowers, is a meditation on the art of living dangerously, with projects!
So, please give a round warm of applause to... Bill Gurstelle...
Hipster Logic has released an iPhone electronics reference app, called, well... Electrical Ref. From their iTunes description:
Have you ever wondered how many Ohms that resistor your holding is? Maybe wondered what the capacitance is of a ceramic disc capacitor with the code 103? Forgotten how to assemble a 555 timer circuit? Or wondered how to make your Arduino detect an EMF? Then Electrical Ref is the app for you. It features a resistor calculator, capacitor calculator, & circuit diagrams.
I built the Mechamo Crab kit a while ago and really enjoyed the experience. I finally got around to making my Mechamo Centipede kit, which has been sitting in my studio for many months! The entire build took a few hours, but I'll spare you all the details and speed it up a bit, well, a lot!
I thought it would be cool to make all the Mechamo kits 10% off for the next week, get 'em while you can, they are a lot of fun!
I love old-style manually-operated tools. They frequently feature in my survivalist fantasies: the zombies come, the power grid collapses, and I'm the only one left who can still build killdozers because all my tools are manually-operated. Then one day Alyson Hannigan runs screaming into my compound, in terrible distress and in dire need of my assistance. It kinda goes downhill from there.
Anyway, this manually-operated drill is designed so that the operator can apply the weight of his or her body to the drilling action by leaning against the rearward brace. It is, most regrettably, called a "breast drill," a name that obviously dates to ye gay days of old. They are still being manufactured, and are available through our pals at Garrett-Wade.
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Randy Sarafan needed some bright light for making (and documenting) projects, so he came up with this clamp-light-tastic curtain rod track lighting solution.
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On Noah Zerkin's blog, he has a round-up of augmented reality (AR) project videos that have been floating through the aetherweb in the last few months. In the above vid, Aaron Meyers and Jeff Crouse, both involved with Eyebeam, the OpenFrameworks community, and interactive art in general, explain to RocketBoom their "World Series of 'Tubing," an interactive AR social game played with YouTube videos.
Turned off by the unreliability of DVD players artist Tim Tate developed custom electronics for use in these glass bulb video memorials. See more examples and listen to an interview on NPR's All Tech Considered. [Thanks, Scott!]
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Zackaholic made this rather unique powered desktop speaker with some neat features -
It's a speaker... in a phone! The kind of cool thing is that the power switch is wired to the phone cradle switch so to turn it on you just take the phone off the hook. It doesn't run off power from the phone jack, but it could will a little extra effort. The jack in my room is dead, so this one's wired to a wall wort.
Here's a charming, inspiring little intro to the documentary about William Kamkwamba, the Malawian teen who got a book out of the library on windmills (which had pictures of the them, but no tech details) and figured out how to build his own to bring electrical power to his family.
William will be participating in Maker Faire Africa.
Whew! All of that soldering and kid-wrangling worked up a powerful thirst. So, you drag over the ol' Coleman and crack open a few cold ones. Sitting there drinking your beers (be they root or hops) with your newly-trained team of solder-droids, you all start contemplating that old faithful camping cooler. Maybe it needs some EL wire highlights around its edges, or an entertaining LED display, or how about some solar-powered, active cooling? Or heck, maybe some wheels and a motor so you can drive that sucker around the patio.
Okay, maybe that last idea is too silly, but you get the idea. It's summer, you've got the family itchin' to do something with their new-found geek cred, why not take our MAKEcation Cooler Hacking Challenge? Trick out any beverage cooler however you like -- the sky's the limit (hey, sending a cooler into space on a weather balloon -- now there's a challenge...), upload the images to the MAKE Flickr pool, and tag them "MAKEcation." As with the Soldering Challenge, you're eligible for a $100 Maker Shed Gift Certificate and some other cool prizes.
For the Soldering Challenge, we brought on Dave Hrynkiw from Solarbotics as our beloved Camp Counselor. He wasn't called out of his virtual cabin very often, but he was dutifully at the ready... and remains so. The Soldering Challenge will continue until the end of the month, so there's still plenty of time to submit your MAKEcation photos to Flickr.
For the Cooler Hacking Challenge, we want to introduce you to our latest author-addition to the site, Matt Mets. He'll be starting off his stint with us as your next Camp Counselor. Matt is an electrical engineer who loves creative repurposing of electronic junk, hacking open source software, and photography. Besides now working for MAKE, he's also currently an artist-in-residence at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. He's in the process of designing a ferrous wheel and an emotional typewriter. No, really. Matt will be here to help brainstorm cooler hacks, to answer any technical questions, consult on your hack ideas, and to help us judge the entries at the end of the month. If you have any questions for Matt (or for Dave), send them to: campcounselor@makezine.com.
We'd also love to get your help in brainstorming ideas for cooler hacks. Post your ideas in the comments. We'll pick our favorite one and you'll get a Maker's Notebook and your choice of The Best of MAKE or The Best of Instructables.
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Stuart Breidenstein of Go Robot! gave me a demo of his working stove necklace at Urban Craft Uprising this weekend in Seattle. It's a hand-crafted brass and copper alcohol burner with a fuel line and tank. Alcohol stoves are popular for light-traveling hikers, as the fuel is readily available at hardware stores and it burns clean and hot. I I was blown away by the craftsmanship and ingenuity of this piece of functional jewelry.
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PaperBack is a free application that allows you to back up your precious files on the ordinary paper in the form of the oversized bitmaps. If you have a good laser printer with the 600 dpi resolution, you can save up to 500,000 bytes of uncompressed data on the single A4/Letter sheet.
We're thrilled to have our buddy Bill Gurstelle as a guest author on Make: Online for the next month. I've had the profound pleasure of knowing some really delightful and brilliant eccentrics in my life, folks whose response to "think outside the box" is "what box?" This guy works beyond the box. One thing I love about Bill is his deep sense of child-like wonder and enthusiasm for the physical world and the magic it encodes. He can come up with the most outlandish ideas and pitch them to Dale with a straight face ("How about a MAKE "prison tech" issue?" "Can we do an article in MAKE about making your own fireworks?") And, of course, he's always at the ready to creatively and spectacularly blow stuff up. He's a mischievous kid with a valid ID and a grownup's bank account. 
For the Cooler Hacking Challenge, we want to introduce you to our latest author-addition to the site, 
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