Calling all Lehigh Valley makers! MakeLehighValley, a group working to start up a hackerspace in the area, is having it's first meeting in a few weeks: MakeLehighValley is having it's first meeting at the Allentown EDC Bridgeworks facility on 11/16 at 6:30PM. Allentown AEDC is helping to setup a hackerspace in their facility that will be available to the group. We hope it will serve as a centralized location for makers in the Allentown, Bethlehem, Easton and surrounding communities. All are welcome to attend. We plan to discus the shared work space, what we have interests in, what everyone is working on and if we have some time left we can unpack some of the tools. If you have something neat you are working on feel free to bring it along and show it off. If you are interested in more information, we have a mailing list that you can join. MakeLehighValley: First Meeting
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Allentown EDC Bridgeworks
905 Harrison St - Allentown, PA 18103 Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » | Read more articles in Events | Digg this! 
 November 2nd was supposed to mark the end of our excellent Halloween contest, DIY Haunts. But we thought that might be too scary for some you, who could use some extra time to document your build and get it to us. So we're EXTENDED the deadline to 11:59pm PT, November 5th. So, now you have no excuse to get in your entry! And don't forget, ANY Halloween prop that uses motion, light, and sound in some way is eligible. It doesn't even have to be one you did this year. And what do you get for winning? Try one of these shiver-inducing prizes!
 - Grand Prize: The Grand Prize Winner will receive one Stingray Robot, one MAKE magazine Halloween Issue, $50 Gift Certificate redeemable at Maker Shed, and a Jameco Electronics T-shirt. Total estimated retail value of Grand Prize is $374.94.
- Second Prize: Second Prize Winner will receive one Lego Mindstorms kit, one MAKE Magazine Halloween issue, and a Jameco Electronics T-Shirt. Total estimated retail value of Second Prize is $304.94.
- Third Prize: Third Prize Winner will receive one MAKE Circuit Breaker Leatherman ES4, one MAKE Magazine Halloween Issue, and a Jameco Electronics T-shirt. Total estimated retail value of Third Prize is $60.99.
Okay, so there are fabu prizes. How do you win them? You must submit your entry by 11:59pm Pacific time, November 5th, 2010. Here's the online submission form. Good luck! Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » | Read more articles in Halloween | Digg this! 
SPAWAR Systems developed this sea water antenna that uses a jet of water and current probe instead of a metal pole as a transmitting element. I don't doubt that it works, howver I'm skeptical about how practical the idea is -- you'll need to have a beefy energy source to run a pump, and turbulent weather seems like it would be an issue. Still, the idea of a fluid-based antenna seems great, and might provide for lots of other interesting applications. How about a water fountain Theremin? [Thanks, Matt!] Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this! 
Artist Jamie O'Shea decided to embark on a wilderness experiment to see if he could build a telegraph from materials and tools he finds and makes in the woods. Armed only with modern information (from online, of course), watch as he makes rope, creates fire, and produces copper. He calls the project Immaculate Telegraphy. Some people have viewed this project through the lens of sustainability. While self-sufficiency and locally sourced material would certainly seem to be sustainable, my methods fail quite spectacularly in environmental analysis. For one, I used an estimated 20 kg of charcoal to produce perhaps 20 g of metal. Much of this was wasted in the learning curve, but it was used just the same. ... I had zero emissions control. While roasting my copper ores, I directly vented all the gases being produced. The noxious sulphur dioxide, chief precursor to acid rain, gagged me when I got too close. Moreover, I got sick twice after this phase of the process. At first I assumed this was from the sulphur, but after further reading, my symptoms more closely resembled mild arsenic poisoning. Arsenic is a heavy metal usually found in ores of copper that sublimates away during the roasting process. So I have to issue a "don't try this at home" warning. The only way I can see this process being described as sustainable is that I was distracted from more effective activities of consumption for 6 weeks. But this is easily canceled out by the 3 round-trip cross-continental voyages taken to complete the project. 
From the pages of MAKE Volume 23: 
Stone Age Telegraph by Jamie O'Shea. Read now in the digital edition or subscribe. Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this! 
David Ye's clever BB gun is the bane of apples and fairly easy to make, judging by his great video. I got bored and decided to make a BB gun using my air compressor. The secret sauce is a one way valve that blocks air from the firing chamber but allows air in the other direction to rapidly propel ammo into the gun. This allows me to tube fed BB's, even when the gun is inverted. It's also much faster than gravity feed versions. Watch the video for some action shots and how to make the valve. Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this! 
Last Friday an old friend sent me a link to this extremely amusing animated short called So you Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities, uploaded by YouTube user MinnieMouse1224. I assume that she or he is the author. Besides being hilarious (and in deference to doctors of humanities, I'd say most of the jibes equally apply to science Ph.D. experiences) the short is notable in that it was created entirely without sets, actors, voice-overs, or recording equipment of any kind. All that was involved was a very clever writer typing lines of dialogue into a browser window (OK, maybe a downloadable client, but whatevs) over at XtraNormal.com. Their software generates spoken dialogue using TTS algorithms and animates the characters' mouths to match. A simple scripting interface allows for a fairly broad selection of sets, camera angles, character models, voices, expressions, gestures, background sounds, and music. A limited set of these options is available to try for free; most of the interesting ones require payment using a dedicated currency kinda like "Microsoft Points" on the XBox 360. (To which, a resounding booooooo.) 
Those of you who were watching the Colbert Report last Monday night probably caught this Geico commercial that was reportedly made using XtraNormal. It's called Superheroes, and is also pretty dang funny. Both videos manage to make a Steven-Wright-style comedic virtue of the necessity for flat, utterly expressionless "performances" imposed by XtraNormal's nascent text-to-dialogue technology. My own, dramatically less successful attempt at a similar effect is here. The 56 seconds of my test video required about five hours of editing, over the course of the weekend, most of which was spent fiddling with details of punctuation, capitalization, and hyphenation to achieve even a minimal amount of natural inflection and expression in my virtual actor's lines. 
This is a screenshot of the web-based video scripting interface. Although the site is still slightly wonky (and their downloadable client State even moreso, in my experience), the editor really is remarkably powerful given its limited feature set. As an astute commenter in their forums has observed, XtraNormal's platform would greatly benefit by the adoption of a Microsoft-style markup language for TTS inflection and phrasing. My video cost 37 XP to produce, because the "Waterloo" set is not among the freely available scenes. 300 points was the minimum purchase, and set me back five bucks, which means I paid 62¢ to publish it. (That's assuming I find some use for my remaining 263 points, which are, of course, non-transferable.) And although it remains to be seen if XtraNormal's business model is going to survive the rising groundswell of interest in the technology, the advent of their ubiquitous text-to-movie software lifts the very last remaining entry barrier to indie movie-makers, which is itself a significant milestone. There can be little doubt we're going to see a huge explosion of these robo-cartoons in the near future, and correspondingly rapid improvements in the emotive abilities of the speech synthesizers. I'm curious, too, about what the new noun is going to be/already is. Has anybody heard it yet? [Thanks, Maya!] Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » | Read more articles in Video Making | Digg this! 
And we're back with our nineteenth installment of Your Comments. Here are our favorites from the past week, from Make: Online, our Facebook page, and Twitter. 
Inspired by the Whiteboards, blackboards, and brainstorming tools list, Jonathan-Peterson shared this excellent idea:
Marc Canter ended up using a picket fence in his backyard as a collaborative brainstorming space for digital id and similar things. Sitting in the backyard having cookouts and happy hour beers with colleagues with chalk, permanent markers and paint near at hand is pretty genius: http://blog.broadbandmechanics.com/2008/05/16/i-do-not-compromise/ Kenton doubted the authenticity of the handiwork featured in the How-To: Make a fake beard:
Those are FAKE beards??? Banana has a good use for the Homemade tiny BBQ:
would have loved to see that baby fired up to throw a couple shrimp on the barbi. Simon had an interesting observation about the Burr puzzle cutlery:
It's a cutlery Czech hedgehog! John Boxall shares his plan for the ultimate anti-TV combo, using the IR Jammer kit:
: John Park - using one of these and a TV-B-Gone is the ultimate in television denial. My favourite eatery has a few large TVs around the dining area, so I switch off the set closest to me, then buffer up the IR Jammer to get some peace and quite. Highly recommended. Wrote about it here: http://wp.me/pQmjR-PO And circuitnewb had some kinds words for Collin, about his LED Color Organ video:
Hey Collin, I'm a long time Make Blog reader. I have got to say that this type of post adds so much to the community. I'm still learning electronics and the detailed videos of putting circuits together is exactly what I need to advance my skills. Thanks for the Circuit Skills series, hope you keep it going for us circuit newbs. On Facebook, Misja van Laatum had a good analysis of the Grilled sausage scented iPhone soap:
It's a bit like gasoline flavored My Little Pony cake. Delightfully random :D Like these comments? Be sure to sound off in the comments! You could be in next week's column. Above photo by Flickr user funadium. Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » | Read more articles in Online | Digg this! 
I identify as a scientist, but I gotta admit: When I saw this video from Steve Spangler Science, my first impulse was to jump back from the computer, cross myself, and douse the screen with holy water. It reminded me of a line from John Carpenter's underappreciated 1987 horror movie, Prince of Darkness: And we assume time is an arrow because it is as a clock...Cause precedes effect - fruit rots, water flows downstream. We're born, we age, we die. The reverse NEVER happens... Unless, apparently, you're dealing with a system operating under conditions of laminar flow. Obviously, there is no real "violation" of the second law of thermodynamics, here, but because almost all of our intuitions about how liquids are going to behave are formed under conditions of turbulent flow, it sure does seem like it. [Thanks, Alan Dove!] More: Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » | Read more articles in Science | Digg this! 
What do you do with that little plastic axe once you've had your fill of Guitar Hero? Turn it into a real instrument, of course. Arizona maker Justin Bread added just enough components to convert his into a simple square wave synth: The oscillator is based on the LM386 amplifier I. C. and generates a square wave tone. The whammy bar on the controller is functional and alters the tone when handled. It's signal is sent to an output jack when the strum bar is triggered and runs on a 9 volt battery. Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » | Read more articles in Mods | Digg this! More Recent Articles | |
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