Zara Baxter toured the Computer History Museum in California, and took these fascinating photos, including a giant 27Kg hard drive, a Star Trek-like SAGE Air defense system, and other intriguing artifacts.
The Cycologists are quite possibly the first guerrilla bicycle band. They show up unannounced, perform seven-minute long performances using instruments made out of functional parts of their bicycles, then ride off with no explanation. How amazing it must be to see their show! From their website:
The musicians include three wind players (Linsey Pollak, Ric Halstead, Brendan Hook). All the music is made with the bicycles, especially featuring: three clarinets made from the bicycle seat stems plus bicycle pump panpipes, tuned bicycle bells and a handlebar flute.
The folks over at AfricaNews put together a nice compilation video about Maker Faire Africa, including a chair made from plastic bottles, electric cream used for food preservation, and many other fine projects!
Did you miss the Faire this year? Don't fret, an even bigger version is being planned for next year! In the meantime, be sure to check out some of the other coverage of this year's Faire.
A number of interesting assembly puzzles can be made from pieces consisting of simply joined cubes in various numbers and arrangements. Piet Hein's Soma Cube is a notable example, consisting of all the simply joined non-convex polycubes having four or fewer units. Generally, a polyomino or polycube puzzle is presented as an outline or volume to be filled in with a certain set of pieces. It is up to the solver to figure out how to pack the pieces to fill the specified form.
Among the more interesting of the polycube puzzles are the solid pentominoes. The flat pentominoes are commonly used in early elementary education programs, so many readers will doubtless be familiar with them. Extruding the flat pentominoes by one unit in the Z-dimension gives the set of what are traditionally called "solid pentominoes." They can be used to solve any flat pentomino puzzle, but also to create various 3D shapes. The 3D puzzles are considerably more challenging.
To make a satisfying polycube puzzle requires that the pieces be dimensioned very accurately, so they will always pack closely regardless of their arrangement. To achieve this accuracy with common hand tools is very difficult. However, blank dice provide a convenient and inexpensive source of accurate, precise unit cubes which may be joined to create the various pieces. The use of translucent dice is recommended, both because they look cool and because they're gauranteed to be acrylic and hence strongly bondable with standard acrylic cements. All the opaque dice I've tried to glue have proven highly resistant to adhesives of all types; I suspect they're made out of polyethylene.
Tools:
Combination square or other accurate inside right angle
Steel cookie sheet or other magnetic surface
About a dozen 1/4" cylindrical supermagnets
Small paintbrush, e.g. #0
Materials:
60 blank translucent dice (I used 16mm dice, 20 of each in red, green, and blue)
I recently came into a nice bottle of absinthe (OK, it was a very strange Father's Day gift, if you must know). The classic way to drink the green stuff is an Absinthe Drip, which is composed of a couple of ounces of absinthe, and a few ounces of ice water dripped over a sugar cube into the drink.
You can do the sugar and water bit through any strainer, but the stylish way is on a dedicated piece of gear called an absinthe spoon. I don't make this drink with great enough frequency to warrant buying one, so I joked with a friend about laser cutting one instead. Why just joke about it? This here is for you, Tod.
I traced a photo of a Toulouse Lautrec-designed spoon in CorelDraw. I modified the design a bit, and added my initials at the top. I then used this vector file to cut a piece of 1/8" acrylic on an Epilog Zing laser cutter. I'm very pleased with the results! However, I would warn against setting your sugar cube on fire over an acrylic absinthe spoon.
Go back to school with the support of makers in education! Make: Education is a Ning social network for teachers interested in connecting around hands-on projects. Connect with like-minded teachers and get ideas and support for your classroom! We hope you'll pop on by and sign up.
Learn to build your own Arduino-compatible board at this introductory class being offered by DorkbotPDX. The class fee includes a kit of parts to make the Dorkboard, a USB programmer, and help with putting it all together.
WHAT: Arduino Cult Induction -- Rev 7 -- Build a Dorkboard WHERE: Pacific Northwest College of Art (NW 12th and Johnson room 101) 1241 NW Johnson St., Portland, OR 97209 WHEN: Sunday August 30th from 1 to 5pm HOW MUCH: $35, including parts.
Looking for some cool local events to attend, or organizing one that you want to share? Be sure to check out the event calendar!
The Moleskine version of my Thermochromic Maker's Notebook was recently exhibited in Hong Kong at the headquarters of Moleskine Asia. Apparently they think Texas is part of Mexico. Oh well.
Currently, the practical applications of this project include commercial and industrial part modeling, and construction for the ice-tourism industry. For instance, small-scale ice models represent economical alternatives to intricate 3D models of architectural objects, be they scale models of buildings, site models, or building details. Presently, casting techniques are being investigated in order to produce high-quality metal copies from ice originals. In the long term, inhabitable, environmentally-friendly structures will be built at the architectural scale using computer-assisted techniques, thus increasing the level of automation in an industry that is currently very labour intensive.
Introducing Make's Fascination series: Adam Summers' Fascination with Sharks! Editor and Publisher Dale Dougherty writes:
What fascinates you about science and technology? Do you remember something that caught your interest as a kid and fascinated you? What fascinates you today in the work you do? These are basic questions that get at how we're personally motivated to explore, learn and ultimately create new ideas. I wanted to ask a group of scientists and technologists these questions and present their answers in this Fascination video series. I hope you find them and their stories as fascinating as I do.
This summer, O'Reilly organized an event with Google and Nature called SciFoo where scientists from around the world are invited to a open-ended, unstructured event on the Google Campus in Mountain View, California. At SciFoo, I interviewed a dozen or so scientists and/or technologists across a range of disciplines and interests. I wanted to know what fascinated them as a child and how that might be connected to work they do today. Each one of them demonstrates the truth of Emerson's maxim: "Nothing great is achieved without enthusiasm."
The first interview in the series is Adam Summers who works in the field of Comparative Biomechanics, a field he didn't know existed when he graduated from college. He didn't even graduate in biology. It wasn't until he found himself collecting fish on the Great Barrier Reef as a self-proclaimed "bum" that he discovered that he wanted to become a biologist. Now, "I'm interested in how sharks swim fast." Sharks don't have a rigid skeletal structure like bony fishes. "Comparative Biomechanics is one of those fields at the interface" between disciplines, says Adam.
Irving, Texas, is the home of this clever sculptural fountain by Robert Glen. A fountain jet beneath each hoof gives the illusion, particularly in still photographs, that the bronze horses are splashing through the water.
This, my friends, is one of the most innovative (and cute) multimedia artist of our time - Videohuahua. He travels the world as apprentice & sidekick to video artist Fernando Llanos, performing with a variety 'onboard' projection & camera gear. I'm guessing we'll see some pretty edgy guerilla-art from the duo down the line. [via Create Digital Music]
Save money while helping the environment with this rustic, wine barrel water collector. Thanks go to Chris & Michri Barnes for the original article in MAKE, Volume 18. View the PDF of this project. and then subscribe to MAKE Magazine for other great projects you can do over the weekend.
Sam Brown points out this video visit to the workshop of high-end knifemaker Joel Bukiewicz. It's a nice little documentary that avoids rushing through the topic, covering a bunch of excellent details from an otherwise private, happily-obsessive process. Plus Joel gives his take on some aspects of the craft few know about. Some more info over @ CHOW.
This is a really nice instructable about using a PIC to read the direction of rotation from a digital rotary switch. I like the idea of dialing in a variable, instead of using button.
The objective for this Instructable is to illustrate how to interface a digital (quadrature coded) rotary switch with a microcontroller. Don't worry, I'll explain what quadrature coded means for us. This interface and the accompanying software will allow the microcontroller to recognize the direction of rotation for each move from one detent to another.
They Might Be Giants is one of my favorite bands of all time, and over the past few years they've made some really top-notch kids' albums, each of which I make sure to buy for my nephew. The newest one is called Here Comes Science, and the song above is called "Electric Car." I love the recycled papercraft animation style. [via BBG]
When I wrote the first version of this article six years ago, I called it "Why Free Software usability tends to suck". The best open source applications and operating systems are more usable now than they were then. But this is largely from slow incremental improvements, and low-level competition between projects and distributors. Major problems with the design process itself remain largely unfixed.
Many of these problems are with volunteer software in general, not Free Software in particular. Hobbyist proprietary programs are often hard to use for many of the same reasons. But the easiest way of getting volunteers to contribute to a program is to make it open source. And while thousands of people are now employed in developing Free Software, most of its developers are volunteers. So it's in Free Software that we see volunteer software's usability problems most often.
That gives us a clue to our first two problems...
I hear this a lot, one example that a maker was struggling with the other day was Inkscape, folks love it but many complain about usability. It's a valuable tool for any maker, but many that I talk to end up using CorelDraw or Adobe Illustrator for their laser cut designs, etc.
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