Animation historian Jerry Beck says:
I've just posted about my new book project on CARTOON BREW.The concept is similar to my long out-of-print book, The 50 Greatest Cartoons (1994), only this time its all Warner Bros. Cartoons and we will highlight the top one hundred. In 1994, for my previous book, we didn't have the Internet to do the poll (nor did I have a blog). It should be exciting to see what the consensus of the online world is.
I'll cull the final one hundred out of what titles we receive by January 9th - and I'll credit all online contributors with an acknowledgment in the book.
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Arduino is well suited for the task of sequencing an analog synth - even a sweet-sounding Buchla, as seen above. (Oh, and cats like it too!) [via Matrixsynth]
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Over at Boing Boing Gadgets, Brownlee posts about a well-curated Flickr stream of vintage Apple ads and ephemera.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Using a mixture of titanium dioxide, drywall plaster, aluminium powder and ground fluorite, Theo Grey of PopSci.com was able to smelt his own titanium, via a thermite reaction. The results are not pretty, and you probably don't want to try this at home, but hey, DIY titanium!
Yet I was able to make titanium using equipment I had lying around. I did it with thermite reduction, a process commonly used to weld train tracks. In an iron thermite reaction, iron oxide reacts with aluminum and comes out as liquid iron. I just swapped in titanium dioxide instead. But that reaction, in which titanium dioxide transfers its oxygen atoms to aluminum, doesn't release enough heat to melt the materials.So I mixed in drywall plaster (calcium sulfate) and more aluminum powder. They react to create huge amounts of extra heat, enough to melt the titanium and allow it to pool at the bottom of the container. Adding ground fluorite powder makes the molten metals more fluid and protects the titanium from air as it cools.
The process used was developed by Gert Meyer. You can find more details here.
More:
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Evil Mad Scientist Labs shares this handy Linux/Mac/Win application for snowflake design -
A new application to draw your own snowflakes and save them in PDF format. Clean, cross-platform, open-source, and able to generate closed-polygon vector shape output. Oh yeah.Perfect for your CNC/laser cutter/etc holiday decorative needs. Thanks for the early present EMSL! - Vector Snowflake Application[...]
So while there are some nice snowflake program out there, we didn't actually come across any that were both (1) cross platform (2) open-source, and (3) able to export a vector drawing with a closed path. While many of the programs do let you save an image of snowflake design, that's actually of limited utility. What you really want is a vector drawing so that the design has infinite resolution and is suitable for importing and editing in Inkscape, Corel, Illustrator, and so forth.
Digital Foundations is IN PRINT!, Digital Foundations on Amazon (Thanks, Michael!)Digital Foundations takes the formal principles and exercises of the Bauhaus and uses them to teach hands on design software exercises. These are supplemented with historical visual examples from the public domain and contemporary creative commons licensed work. As Media Arts professors my co-author xtine burrough and I were tired of design software books that left out aesthetics, and history. Or worse: gave terrible examples complete with author's vacation photographs, drop shadows, and the watercolor filter!
We are thrilled to have the book in print... with a Creative Commons license! This is a first for AIGA Design Press, New Riders, and Peachpit, and the result of 9 months of negotiation. The whole book was written on a wiki and that is all available for use under a CC license.
We are reaping the fruit of that license already: February 6-8 Adam Hyde and his FLOSSmanuals.net crew are going to come to Eyebeam in NYC to translate the book from Adobe to FLOSS applications.
CRAFT, the sibling publication to MAKE, has a discounted subscription rate from now till the end of December.
$24.95 US
$29.95 Canada
$39.95 other international
If you're looking for a last minute gift for a crafty pal, this is a great deal, because the cover price for a single copy is $14.95.
Here's the link to the discounted subscription.
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Fortified with electronic combination lock, motion-sensing alarm and motorized lock/door mechanisms - this LEGO safe will keep that marble collection nice and secure (well relatively, anyway). Nice piece of work from mostly LEGO NXT parts! Check out the video to see it in action - LEGO safe
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Each year there is more interest in locksports, or hobby lock picking, until recently, the hobby of lock picking in much of the world has been a solitary pursuit with enthusiasts practicing their skills alone - but that's changing. At technology events, hacker conferences and with groups like locksport more folks are taking up this challenging sport and hobby.
This year MAKE has put together the only lock picking gift guide that we know, we hope you enjoy it - Special thanks to Austin Appel and Doug Farre (The president of Locksport International) who helped put this lockingpicking gift guide together!
Tonight in San Francisco, Creative Commons is celebrating its sixth birthday with a party at 111 Minna Gallery.dublab DJs announced for CC’s SF Birthday Party! (Thanks, Eric!)There will be a special live performance by Jimmy Tamborello (of The Postal Service), frosty, Professor Cataloupe, and matthewdavid - who will be representing LA radio/art collective Dublab with an improv session based on the hundreds of 8-second sound loops that are part of the remixable CC-licensed art and music exhibition Into Infinity (http://intoinfinity.org). The very awesome Kid Kameleon and DJ Ripley will be playing music throughout the night.
The event is 21+. There's a hosted bar from 9pm-11pm, and a cash bar from 11pm-2am. Tickets will be sold at the door, but please RSVP to rsvp@creativecommons.org so we know you're coming.
1.) NetflixFirst LINK Bounties (Thanks, Joe!)$2500 to get it working, connecting directly with the Netflix service
$500 to get it working using PC software as an intermediary (ala MediaMall PlayOn but preferably something open source)Conditions:
1.Working. Can still have plenty of rough edges and doesn't have to demonstrate all the features, but we need to be able to play movies on a LINK in our office with it.
2. Have to beat Boxee to the functionality, which is planned for early '09. Once Boxee works on Ubuntu, the problem will have already been solved.
3. Have to beat Netflix to the functionality. It has been stated that Ubuntu will be a supported operating system, and once that client comes out this bounty is null and void.
3. Documentation to replicate or a downloadable package for the LINK.
Michael Leddy says: It's a blog post about making a functional equivalent of Glenn Gould's famous chair. The maker, whom I know only as MPR, left a comment on a post of mine that has much of the chair's history.Chair as good as GouldThis project is especially awesome as a European company sells a licensed replica for 990 euros. MPR's project (not a replica, but a chair that functions in the same way) uses a $35 chair from Costco. This sort of homemade ingenuity and beauty made me think of Make.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
(Photo: España, from Mariquita's scrapbook.)
This story is by farmer/blogger Andy Griffin, of Mariquita Farms, who co-owns the CSA veggie-box scheme I belong to. He writes a weekly Ladybug Letter, that our members read religiously!
The Christmas miracle on the road to Oaxaca
By Andy Griffin
Until the Aswan Dam plugged her up, the Nile River flooded every year, spreading her chocolate waters across the land of Egypt, depositing the rich sediment of eroded topsoil from the heart of Africa to fuel another year's productivity in the fields.
As regular as the Nile's rising waters, a seasonal flow of migrant Mexican farm workers heads south from the States, going home for the Christmas holidays. Like the Nile, they carry with them a load of riches to deposit from one end of Mexico to the other. Pick-up trucks and TV sets, kitchen appliances and talking baby dolls, chainsaws, mattresses and blow driers -- anything that is more expensive to obtain in Mexico than here, will end up riding the river of people back home.
This yearly tide of travelers has spawned a parasite class of thieves, extortionists, and pick-pockets, who line the highways home. Crooks are crooks the world over, but among the various rateros who afflict the homecoming Mexican farm workers, the most reprehensible element is the corrupted law enforcement officers of their own government.
Crooked cops and customs police invent a multitude of spontaneous impuestos, multas and cuotas to put an official seal on their bribery and highway robbery. For migrant farm workers, the border between Mexico and the U.S., where they pass the under the scrutiny of their own customs officials, may be the highest hurdle to cross on the race home, but it is hardly the last. Any fly-speck village can be the scene of a crude hold-up, and any innocent action on the road may be a pretext for detention, if some cop thinks he needs more money or a new toaster.
Our tractor driver España discussed his upcoming trip before he loaded up his two pick-up trucks with his sisters and his accumulated wealth of household items and tools.
At lunch break, underneath the shade of the elderberry trees, everyone had stories to trade about the trips home they'd made in years past. I heard the joy of homecoming, mixed with trepidation for what may be lost. Everybody on the crew had a war story about a trip home, but maybe because he was the one going home next, España's tale of a previous return was the best.
Eight years ago, when he'd last returned to Oaxaca, España had a little Datsun pickup truck.
"Oh yes," everybody remembered. "Small, brown, a little beat-up, but with a decent motor."
Eight years ago he was returning without much money, because it had cost him so much to live back when he was migrant, always moving from ranch to ranch.
"Oh yes," murmured the other guys like a Greek chorus, as they ate their tacos, and drank their soup. "Not much money, but still more than if you'd stayed in Oaxaca..."
España was on his way home, still in Sonora crossing the desert, just south of San Luis Rio Colorado, when a highway patrolman pulled him over.
At this point there was a general rumble, heads nodded, and someone stopped chewing long enough to pronounce the verdict: "Pinche parasito."
The officer approached the pickup truck, eyeing the vehicle's California license plates from behind his insect-eye, aviator sunglasses. He bent over to speak through the window. "Señor Indio," he announced, "You have been driving in a manner threatening to the safety of the Republic. "The fine will be $200 dollars."
The taco eaters scoffed with contempt.
"...in twenties."
There was a roar of outrage. José passed around a paper plate of pickled jalepenos
España waited for a minute before resuming his narrative. "So I told the patrolman. 'Señor Policeman, I don't have $200. I have barely enough cash to buy the gasoline to get me to Oaxaca City.'" The officer listened with a stone face. He straightened up, pulled a wallet from his pants pocket -- a wallet gorged with money -- and pulled out a crisp twenty dollar bill.
"Señor Oaxaquito," said the officer, "Better that I give you some money," and handed España the bank note.
Everybody cried out in disbelief, "Impossible! Incredible! A miracle!"
"Ho-ho-ho," Don Gerardo, our field driver, said. "España must have met the Mexican Santa Claus."
(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)
In this Thing video, Steve Reeder of Motmot Shop in Vienna, demonstrates how to make pinback buttons. Buttons were one of the things I first got serious about making as a tween. I saved up my allowance money and bought a hand-held button-making machine. I even had something of a cottage industry for a time, making my own band and slogan buttons and selling them at school.
Things - Make a Pinback Button with Steve of Motmot
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In China, a skillful truck driver prevents a police car from passing it on the freeway. (via A Welsh View)
This year we're pleased to have the first ever Kite aerial photography gift guide (KAP) on the web by Charles Benton, author of "Kite Aerial Photography Puts Your Eye in the Sky" from MAKE volume 01. Charles Benton is an inveterate tinkerer from Berkeley, Calif., where he serves as a Professor of Architecture for the University of California, Berkeley. Benton's research in Building Science often involves the design and construction of prototype devices.
If you ever wanted to take photos from high in the sky, this is the guide for you!
Timothy Leary’s New Book On DrugsJD: [W]hat I really enjoyed was the stories. Some of those are pretty wild and pretty intense. The political section is almost scary. Can you say a bit about that?
HIS: Yeah, well some of the trip stories are pretty intense too. But you're probably referring to the story involving Mary Pinchot, who was one of President Kennedy's lovers. And it seems pretty clear that she involved Leary in a successful conspiracy to turn JFK on to LSD. The material, in this case, is from his autobiography, Flashbacks. But in Flashbacks, this particular narrative was sprinkled throughout the book as you go through his life chronologically. When you actually isolate the sections about Pinchot and then stitch them together as an entry, it makes a stronger impression. The other thing you may be referring to is the conversation at the end of the book that Leary had with a hardball Swiss political operative with various intelligence connections while he was in exile from the U.S. government in Switzerland. The entry is almost painful in its sophistication and leaves the book on a solemn note — we are still all prisoners of men who lust for power, from Leary's point of view.
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Greta Christina is the editor of Best Erotic Comics 2008, and the author of "Deprogramming," an erotic short story from my new anthology. The plot is about physical and sexual abuse in a religious cult... and a couple who escapes from the "pod" and begins to consensually re-enact some of the same rituals.
I've known Greta since we both worked at On Our Backs in our babyhood, but at that time, oddly, I had no idea she could write.
Now, I'm trying to make up for lost time...
Greta, has any of your writing been produced in popular movies?
Well, I wrote the narration for a video how-to guide on electrical sex toys, titled "Our Friend the Volt."
You were raised as an atheist, but when do you remember being fascinated with the "cult" experience?
I wouldn't describe myself as fascinated by cults, although I do find religion to be a compelling subject.
It sounds like you want to know is what inspired me to write this piece. It's not a very nice story, but it is a true one, so I'll tell it.
I was watching a documentary about Jim Jones (of Jonestown fame) and his People's Temple. At the point in the story where things were starting to go wrong in the church, it said that members who disobeyed the rules were punished by being spanked.
It's a terrible story. They described the incidents -- and what they called "spanked," I would call "badly beaten." But there's a deeply ingrained part of my mind and my libido that inevitably gets turned on when I hear the word "spank," that starts to conjure erotic images and stories. So I found myself having sexual fantasies about this scenario... while at the same time being horrified by it and ashamed for being turned on by it.
My story isn't specifically about the People's Temple. It's about a fictional religious cult that I made up. But it's definitely influenced by real cults that I've read about...
Does your family know about your erotic writing? Have they read it?
I've asked my family not to, actually. My porn is like a window into my libido, and it crosses a boundary for me to have my family looking through that window. I don't want my family to know what I think about when I jerk off. Call me old-fashioned.
Have you written any Manifestos?
Definitely. Many times. In my blog. Probably the best known and widest read is "Atheists and Anger" -- an attempt to answer, in detail, the question, "Why are you atheists so angry?"
Has your work ever been "made an example of"?
Oh, yes.
The best example: I wrote a piece a few years back for The Skeptical Inquirer, called "Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do With God."
I started ego-Googling my name and the title of the piece... and found that several Christian ministers were quoting from the piece out of context, as an example of how even atheists admit that life without the promise of life after death is bleak and hopeless.
They would quote a part at the beginning, where I talk about how atheism seems to offer no comfort in the face of death. And they would completely ignore the entire point of the piece... which is that, while that might seem on the surface to be the case, it most emphatically is not.
When I find this happening, I write to these ministers; I point out that they're quoting me as saying the exact opposite of what I'm actually saying. I remind them about the commandment, "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour." (Exodus 20:16).
More of Susie's interviews -- dozens of them -- with erotic writers here.
(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)
Windell has created a new free snowflake drawing program. He writes:
A new application to draw your own snowflakes and save them in PDF format. Clean, cross-platform, open-source, and able to generate closed-polygon vector shape output. Oh yeah.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Science | Digg this!
...while there are some nice snowflake program out there, we didn't actually come across any that were both (1) cross platform (2) open-source, and (3) able to export a vector drawing with a closed path. While many of the programs do let you save an image of snowflake design, that's actually of limited utility. What you really want is a vector drawing so that the design has infinite resolution and is suitable for importing and editing in Inkscape, Corel, Illustrator, and so forth.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Boston.com's "The Big Picture" has an amazing portfolio of photos from the riots in Greece, which erupted after Special Guards of the Greek police shot a 15-year-old boy. Shown here: "Youths vandalize the inside of a bank branch during a night of riots in Athens on December 08, 2008." (Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images)
The "first quantitative, scientific evaluation of the proposed, major, energy-related solutions" came out this month. Via Worldchanging:
Here is how Jacobson ranks the renewables, from best to worst:1. Wind power
2. concentrated solar power (CSP)
3. geothermal power
4. tidal power
5. solar photovoltaics (PV)
6. wave power
7. hydroelectric power
8. a tie between nuclear power and coal with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS)
How would this ranking change for DIY-ability? In other words, if you assume no link to any electric grid, which power sources look best and in what order?
For argument's sake, assume you're in a magical location on the coast with consistently strong winds and lots of sunlight:)
I was on GOOD's video show today, a more positive spin on all the "depression talk"....
So, we're in a recession: now what? Consumer spending is down and the common (wo)man has been forced to cut back. But there's no reason to go without. Phillip Torone, senior editor at Make, visits the GOOD News studio with tips for fashioning holiday gifts from outmoded computer equipment, in-case-of-emergency eyeglasses, and ways to drown out the groans of roving bands of zombies (what?)...
Real estate accounts for a lot of it, including mortgage, maintenance fees, rent or other costs for a Park Avenue apartment, a Hamptons residence and several properties in Sweden.Wife Of UTC's George David Has Expenses Of $53,000 A WeekBut travel ($8,000), clothing ($4,500), hair and skin care ($1,000), dry cleaning ($650) and flowers ($600), among many other items, contribute to the total.
Dry cleaning does not include fur storage and cleaning ($45).
And that's when Douglas-David is cutting back.
"While recognizing that many of these expenses may seem high, most are lower than prior to the commencement of this case in August 2007," a footnote in her financial affidavit says.
Whisper Jars by Kacie Kinzer and Michael Rosenthal is one of the first things I checked out at the ITP Winter Show 2008 in NYC. It allows the user to leave a secret, which in turn can be heard by the next user. It's a great combination of art and electronics that works perfectly.
A whisper jar is a magical container in which people can whisper a story or secret. When someone opens the jar later on, the secret escapes for them to hear. Whoever hears the secret can then respond to what they have just heard, or come up with something new to whisper, and the cycle begins again.
More about Whisper Jars
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John White wasn't the most exacting painter that 16th-century England had to offer, or so his watercolors of the New World suggest. His diamondback terrapin has six toes instead of five; one of his native women, the wife of a powerful chief, has two right feet; his study of a scorpion looks cramped and rushed. In historical context, though, these quibbles seem unimportant: no Englishman had ever painted America before. White was burdened with unveiling a whole new realm."Sketching the Earliest Views of the New World"
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A pediatric brain surgeon Colorado Springs, Colorado was operating on a 3-day-old baby and found a foot growing in his brain.
"The foot literally popped out of the brain," Grabb told TheDenverChannel Wednesday.Colorado doctor finds foot in newborn's brain (via Arbroath)The appendage threatened the newborn's life.
When [Dr. Paul] Grabb performed the life-saving surgery at Memorial Hospital for Children in Colorado Springs, he was in for another surprise: he also found what appeared to be parts of an intestine in the folds of the infant's tiny brain, in addition to another developing foot, hand and thigh.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apparently there’s a market for battery-adorned garments! Our Charge Tee (released earlier this month) was a hit, and the first batch sold out quickly. We’re expecting a new shipment tomorrow, and will be shipping any remaining orders as fast as possible. We’ve also opened up ordering for all sizes again — we just can’t guarantee a pre-Christmas delivery on new orders from today forward. Then again, a battery-adorned t-shirt really makes a great New Year’s gift, doesn’t it?
Also, it seems our initial batch is starting to make its way into the wild. Check out the Charged Up pool over at Flickr for photos of the t-shirt being worn by cool people like you.
The cool kidz at the Webby Awards launched a simple Tumblr blog where they're posting fun promotional videos and highlarious classics from Webby Awards ceremonies past, including new and old work by The Onion, Tim & Eric, You Suck at Photoshop, and Jake and Amir. "You Suck At You Suck At Photoshop" is one of my faves.
(Public Works administrator Al) Olson says the city mixed the garlic salt with regular road salt and it works fine. He says some road workers say it makes them hungry, but Olson doesn't recommend it to spice up lunch or dinner."Iowa town' roads well seasoned" (Thanks, Carlo Longino!)
As man moves to colonize the cosmos, the realities of sexual relationships and reproduction need to be addressed. Probe the physiological, psychological and cultural challenges of sex in space. From the sex act through birth, look at how the extreme environments of space exploration might effect copulation, conception and developing human tissues, as well as how issues around sex might impact the emotional lives of astronauts. Get to the bottom of the rumors to find out if space sex has already happened, and look at how the burgeoning space tourism business may soon lead to a boom in space sex."Sex In Space" (History.com), "History Channel to air special on 'sex in space'" (New Scientist)
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Back in 2004 I was living in Seattle and one day I was hanging out at Microsoft, and Jeff Sandquist showed me a computer that changed my life, a small netbook-size Sony Vaio. It was an instantly charming computer, it spoke to me -- it said, no it screamed -- YOU WANT ME. It was like meeting the most beautiful woman in the world, an experience I have had, btw. When that happens the only thing the alpha male psyche knows to do is GO GET IT.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Last year I gave MAKE and CRAFT gift subscriptions to my son's school - I was in the school library the other day and saw the latest editions on the magazine rack, looking well-thumbed already! The librarian often sends me emails telling me about kids and teachers discovering the magazines in the library and getting really excited, and I know several teachers are starting to use them in their curriculum development. It makes me remember the first time I saw Make on the newsstand and how thrilled I was to find it existed - I love that I can pass that excitement and inspiration on to teachers and kids. If you have a tradition of teacher gifts, or would like to support your local schools, I'm sure MAKE and CRAFT subscriptions would be very welcome. Check out the awesome giftcards our design folks cooked up, too!
More:
Dan Woods - The Value of a Good Hands-On Project
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?This hack shows how to pitch-modify a Casio electronic keyboard using the LTC1799 Precision Oscillator kit. Read more about this interesting build at the link below.
via GetLoFi
Mics + motorized motion can create some very unique recording sessions -
This Instructable describes how I made a rotating microphone using just a few basic electronics and some common household items. You can use a rotating microphone to simulate the doppler effect like that of a leslie speaker cabinet. The rotating microphone is the inverse of the rotating leslie speaker. My design is a microphone installed at the center of a lightweight wooden "turntable." The microphones capsule is connected electrically to the back side of a female 1/4" TRS connector that is affixed to the turntable. The male end of the Male 1/4" TRS --> Male XLR adaptor is used as the axis of rotation for the turntable and also functions like a slip ring by maintaining an electronic connection while the female 1/4" TRS spins around its axis.- Make a Rotating Microphone Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!
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These giant web 2.0 pieces of graffiti were not viral marketing, and found in locations ranging from Cambodia, Mali, and Vietnam. Although we're not sure about their origin, we wonder if they stay true to their web 2.0-isms and are user-customizeable beyond a can of paint.
via Kjeft a!
If true, this could prove incredibly awesome -
Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.- Scientists extract images directly from brainThe scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs.
- Dreams may no longer be secret with Japan computer screen
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One of the longest standing information systems has got to be the notebook. With a notebook, you can put any idea down on paper, and get it out of your mind. Often this will give you more room for new and maybe even better ideas. Sometimes, the notebook itself can become a wonderful object in its own right. The Familiar Strangers have a great rundown of some incredible modifications for Moleskines. Inside the post are lots of example pictures, dozens of links and a bit of Make and Craft's own Becky.
If dogs are human's best friend, I dare to say Moleskines are artists' and designers' best friend. Rumors says Picasso, Matisse, and Hemingway were using their Moleskine to sketch. It was select as the best designer's sketchbook in LifeHacker. I bet many of you guys are having one in your pocket. Here in this post, TFS will discover how to customize the moleskine to better suit for designers.
Where do you park your ideas? Having a trusted system to hold onto the imaginings of your daily life is essential to developing your creativity and following through on your great ideas. Moleskines are a wonderful way to hold onto them so you can temporarily forget. Paper has a much longer holding time for ideas than the gooey stuff between our ears.
The Maker's Notebook has a ton of great features, and is nice and hackable. Your notebook can be just about anything you desire. Lights,. pockets, circuits and more.
What does your information system look like? Do you have a favorite size, shape and orientation for your notebooks? Lined, gridded or blank pages? How have you customized your notebooks? Do you like Moleskines, or is that too commercial, perhaps you would rather make your own notebook. Share your ideas with us in the comments below and add your photos and video to the Make Flickr pool.
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?The "Float-A-Pet" system is both a pet locator and safety system for pets. To find your pet at night, the collar illuminates solar powered LEDs around the neck of a pet. For safety, the collar includes an integrated humidity sensor that detects moisture and if you pet is submerged in water, automatically triggers the onboard CO2 cartridge to inflate and provide a floating life preserver.
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Here's a cool way to put an inexpensive thrift store camera to use -
Do you ever see a pile of Kodak Instamatic cameras collecting dust at the thrift store? They always seem to be in surplus. Maybe it's because people think they're a little too special to throw away, but assume 126 film is the way of the floppy disk. Well, I bought one (Instamatic X-25) and thought I would mess around with it. After a little bit of work, I was able to rig it for use with common 135 35mm film and got some really cool results.I love projects like these - using/misusing easily attainable and oft-overlooked devices in creative ways rules. - How to Make a Psycheldelic Camera Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!
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Just posted! Our latest lens review featuring the Sony 50mm F1.4. Rounding off lens reviews for the year (and completing for the moment our mini-series of 50mm F1.4 lenses), we find out how this fast prime matches up to the exacting demands of Sony's 24 Mp A900 full-frame DSLR, as well as how it performs on the more popular APS-C sensor format. Comments Off [link]
This video shows swarm bots attacking pulling a child across the floor. The look on the kids face at 2:37 is classic. All joking aside, this is an amazing demonstration of the advantages of many small robots working together to accomplish a task.
The goal of this project is the study of a novel design approach to hardware implementation for testing and using the capability of self-assembling, self-organising, and metamorphosis of robotic systems. Such an approach finds its theoretical roots on recent studies in swarm intelligence, i.e., in studies of self-organising and self-assembling capabilities shown by social animals.
More information about the Swarm-bots
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"Lightdrops" by Sang-Kyun Park uses a special type of fabric that can generate electricity from rain drops. The electricity is then used to power LEDs that will light your way. I really hope this product actually works, or will work in the future.
Appearing for all the world like a prop from the set of Bladerunner, the Lightdrops umbrella is constructed from a new type of fabric that harvests kinetic energy. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology revealed just such a microfiber nanogenerator fabric earlier this year this year that when made into a garment like a shirt, "could harness power from its wearer simply walking around or even from a slight breeze..." Unfortunately, the zinc oxide coating in that fabric degrades when wet. Now designer Sang-Kyun Park is reported to be using a similar experimental material known as PDVF.
More about the Lightdrops: Rain-powered umbrella
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It's that time of year again so why not start it off with a guide to the greenest gadgets this holiday season! MAKE intern Peter Horvath and Jill Fehrenbacher of Inhabitat.com and Greenergadgets put together an amazing list!
We wrote about Fritzing before, but they have a new Alpha version available that is worth checking out. I really like this program and can't wait to see the future enhancements.
Fritzing is an open-source initiative to support designers and artists to take the step from physical prototyping to actual product. We are creating this software in the spirit of Processing and Arduino, that allows the designer / artist / researcher / hobbyist to document their Arduino-based prototype and create a PCB layout for manufacturing. The complimenting website helps to share and discuss drafts and experiences as well as to reduce manufacturing costs.
More about Fritzing
In the Maker Shed:
DIY Design Electronics Kit
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(Flash video embed above, downloadable MP4 here.)
Longtime Boing Boing tv contributors monochrom have brought us Soviet terrorism training videos, improvisational urban fires, and highfalutin economic philosophy from the mouths of sock puppets.
Monochrom sock puppets Kiki & Bubu return to us today, for a very special holiday-themed episode: Kiki & Bubu & The Feelings. The yuletide song they perform for us is sure to be an instant classic -- Killing Capitalism with Christmas. You can grab it on iTunes, on the 2008 album "Monochrom: Carefully Selected Moments".
Bonus: Watch this behind-the-socks footage, from the secret filming location in the Austrian alps.
SYNOPSIS (some spoilers):
Yes, it is a time of crisis, but it is also a time of Christmas. Slovenian hackers crack CNN's hologram thingie, and bring us the avatar of gender-ambiguous singing sensation Enron Hubbard. Enron sings a hypnotic call to reject holiday consumerism and replace malls with meaning. Or if not meaning, post-internet nihilism and the ironic use of MySpace smiley-gifs. Online porn monster shows up after Enron is finished singing his holiday song, then Kiki and Bubu scamper off for eggnog frappucinos.
(Special thanks to chief executive sock puppet overlord and awesome guy Johannes Grenzfurthner!)
MAKE continues its in depth coverage of interactive technology projects with the "ITP Winter Show 2008" a two day exhibition of interactive sight, sound, and physical objects by the student artists of ITP @ NYU.
Each year I try and spot the trends of what the students are heading towards, a few years ago it was processing and Arduino... then it was the Nokia 95 and the Wiimote -- now it's power aware, wood and the iPhone. Look for more iPhone apps developed by places like ITP and also look for a "return" to using wood in high-tech projects, power sensing will be big too in ambient ways. We'll see how it all pans out in 2009 but that's what the radar picked up. Arudino is of course part of many of the projects, it's pervasive at this point, as it should be. Here are all my photos & video...
And drum roll :::::::::: Each year I pick a few projects I really like and call them "best of show" - the thing is, they're all great, ITP gets better each show - and it's always hard to just pick a few, but since that's what everyone always asks me, here are my top 4.5 favorite projects from the ITP Winter Show 2008. You can check out all the specific projects here. Marc and I will have many other projects we'll post up about but this will give you a good taste (literally) of what was is at the show.
DJ Porcelain and the Plates / ITP page.
Students: Thomas John Gerhardt
Instructors: Steiner, Hans-Christoph
DJ Porcelain and the Plates is a new form of DJ'ing where you use spinning plates on sticks instead of records on a turntable to mix a track. DJ Porcelain and the Plates is a NIME (new instrument for musical expression) that consists of six sticks and 16+ plates. To make music, the composer spins plates on a combination of the sticks and modifies the speed of the plate to change a prerecorded loop's playback speed. Each stick represents a channel of sound, and each plate represents a sound track. The computer knows which plate is spinning, how fast it is spinning, what stick it is on, and plays back the corresponding sound loops at the specified speed; thus enabling the musician to compose/mix a six channel track on the fly.
Pianocktail / ITP page.
What if you could drink a song? What would the Black and Tan Fantasy taste like? The pianocktail is a piano that mixes drinks based on the combination of keys played. Each key corresponds to a different spirit or liquor and cocktails are produced appropriate to the mood of the song played. Now music can be drank in addition to being heard. The pianocktail exists in a world of contradictions and exceptions where music and liquor are in harmony with mood and nothing is as it seems.
The pianocktail is an absurd creation, an object imagined by Boris Vian in his novel "L'ecume des Jours". How does the invention work? As it is described in the book:
Students: Florica Vlad & Oscar G. Torres
Instructors: Steiner, Hans-Christoph
"For each note there's a corresponding drink - either a wine, spirit, liqueur or fruit juice. The loud pedal puts in egg flip and the soft pedal adds ice. For soda you play a cadenza in F sharp. The quantities depend on how long a note is held - you get the sixteenth of a measure for a hemidemisemiquaver; a whole measure for a black note; and four measures for a semibreve. When you play a slow tune, then tone comes into control to prevent the amounts growing too large and the drink getting too big for a cocktail - but the alcoholic content remains unchanged. And, depending on the length of the tune, you can, if you like, vary the measures used, reducing them, say, to a hundredth in order to get a drink taking advantage of all the harmonics, by means of an adjustment on the side."
The fabrication of the pianocktail will be a seamless automated creation with switches underneath each key. 88 sensors will be used to detect the music being played. Specific combinations of keys will trigger a release of alcohol, juice or garnish into a glass. In theory, the right combinations of keys can produce a specific cocktail. The mixing is possible by using a series of shift registers and an Arduino microcontroller for the logic, electric motors and electronic valve control.
The ReedBox / ITP page
Students: John Kuiphoff
Instructors: Igoe, Tom & Shiffman, Daniel
The ReedBox is a device that allows users to interact with a computer using magnets.
The ReedBox is constructed using an array of reed switches each paired with an LED indicator. Users control the device by placing magnets on the surface of the box. This unique method of interaction lends itself to a myriad of applications.
There are currently five applications developed for this device:
Living shade / ITP page and Window vision / ITP page (I'm grouping these since they have a similar theme)...
Living shade students: Adam Lassy, Adi Marom Emeri Audra Yarnoff
Living share instructor: Hartman, Kate
Our lives are surrounded by pixels: on our i-phone, laptop, TV.....everywhere: so why not add the power of *pixelization* to the light entering from our apartment windows.
We created a kinetic shade that adjusts the amount of light entering a room in response to the changing outdoor brightness. The shade is constructed from an array of foldable units, shaped like pixels that can open and close in different sequences. As the folding units/pixels transform, they create a "living" shade that "breathes" the light through it.
The kinetic shade is constructed from rows of the folding units fixed to a firm aluminum frame. The units of each row are folded by the force of a servo motor. Each Servo is attached to a metal rod, which transfers the rotary motion into a linear motion.
The Servo's are activated by photocells in the back of the screen (facing outdoors).
The shade acts as an interactive dimmer. The lighter it gets outside the units open/close in a higher speed or different patterns. In the current prototype, the kinetic pattern between the different units was programmed as a continuous wave. However, the units could be programmed into different modes such as a continuous loop, different shapes, or random openings.
In the future we plan to further enhance the interactivity of the shade by setting it to respond to the users' presence, by means of different sensors.
Window Vision
Window Vision is a reactive installation that highlights changes in the surrounding environment by shifting its components in response to light and dark.
Window vision students: Angela Joy Chen
Window vision instructor: Hartman, Kate
Given the importance in how we understand the world through the intersection of science and art, Window Vision is a piece that emphasizes the neurological impulses that enable our eyes to perceive the things around us. It also draws upon the idea of a window as the architectural medium through which the inhabitant can still interact with the outside environment.
The article "Bandwidth of Consciousness" article informs us that our eyes take in thousands of bits of information per second yet our consciousness registers so little. Much of this is enabled through the structural properties of your retina which is the part of your eye that responds to light. Within the retina there are two photoreceptor cell types: rods and cones. These cellular structures react at different varying light levels to help you both perceive objects in the dark and to see color.
For my piece, I am striving to create something that contains objects both on a modular level that work together similarly to a cellular structure but also speaks of the neurological manner in which our eyes are constantly adjusting to differing levels of light and dark, and the way in which our eyes are constantly trying to "focus".
Using photocells and some basic mechanics controlled by a stepper motor, I will have two systems of modular pieces: one that will take over during moments of day/light and another at night/dark.
Power Aware / ITP page
Students: Martin Ceperley
Instructors: Hartman, Kate
A power strip that generates awareness of the user's energy consumption through dynamic colored lighting as well as logging the energy data to a web application through Wi-
In our digital lives every new gadget and tool comes with a new power plug that is capable of silently and quietly drawing our electricity 24 hours-a-day. This has serious environmental consequences for our society and financial consequences for the consumer who is paying for this wasted electricity. How is a person to know which power adapters are efficient and which are so-called power vampires? Or how much energy playing a Playstation 3 consumes versus a Wii?
With the powerAware power strip, this live energy consumption data can be visualized through the speed and color of a set of full-color LED lights that illuminate bundles of fiber optic cable arranged in a house-plant like form. The user can see these patterns in the corner of their eye every day, leading to an increased awareness of the energy they consume, hopefully leading to less energy used overall and more energy-efficient habits, like turning off or unplugging appliances when leaving the house.
In additional to the passive energy feedback through lighting, the user is able to analyze their usage online, as powerAware is continuously logging this energy data via WiFi at fixed intervals to a web database. This allows for live graphs of energy usage, as well as analysis of this data, like showing the peak hours of the day energy is consumed. A social-networking component could be added as well, letting users share their consumption via a Facebook app, giving social rewards to users who have kept their energy usage down or showed a significant decrease day-to-day or week-to-week.
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Stanford released their iPhone programming course—syllabus, lecture notes, assignments, and all—online. It's what you'd find in any serious software engineering and object oriented design program, but it's been designed around the iPhone target platform, with Objective C as the instruction language.
There are lectures and assignments on a number of topics, including the MVC pattern as it pertains to Cocoa development, UI and Multitouch considerations, OpenGL, and even going through the rigamarole of publishing your work to the App Store. The assignments seem to be really practical and fun. The price is right. I think I'll be taking the virtual course, starting this weekend.
CS 193P - iPhone Application Programming
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This is PhysOrg's post regarding the scientists at the Cluster Workshop, a group funded by the National Science Foundation, Sony, IBM, and some others, that formed a supercomputer out of PlayStation 3's last year. Now the developers have written a guide on how to build your own (at http://www.ps3cluster.org), including downloadables and directions on how to run your new supercomputer on Linux.Scientists Write Guide to Build Supercomputer from Sony Playstation 3Researchers typically rent the use of supercomputers to simulate experiments, but with these they can build their own for about $4K, saving cash and freeing up time for additional experimentation. Moreover, with guides like these floating around, communities can build their own: imagine every major city running its own sims on agriculture, employment, energy infrastructure, virus transmission...with your own supercomputer, the sky's the limit.
In each DNS query, 7 bits are reserved for a number of flags, one of which is the Recursion Desired (RD) flag. If set to 0, the queried DNS server will not attempt to recurse -- it will only provide answers from its cache.The DNS Dead Drop (via Schneier)Combine this with a wildcard zone and it's possible to signal bits (RD on), and read them (RD off). To set a bit to 1 the sender issues a query with the RD bit on. The wildcard zone resolves all requests, including this query. The receiver then issues a query for the same hostname, with the RD bit off. If the bit is 1, the query will return a valid record. If the bit is 0, no record will be returned.
So, it's easy to signal a single bit, but what if you want to share more than 1 bit of data? This requires both sides to compute a list of records -- one record for every bit of data we wish to send. In my implementation, I chose to do this with a pre-shared word list and initialization vector (IV). Given the same word list and IV, both sender and receiver can independently compute an identical mapping of words to bit positions. The sender can then signal the '1' bits, and the receiver can query all bits.
Unfortunately, it's hard to gauge the true privacy impact of this policy change until we know exactly what steps Yahoo will be taking to anonymize the data. The devil's in the details, and if Yahoo's anonymization process isn't robust enough, this new logging policy may end up being more privacy PR than privacy protection. Fully anonymizing IP addresses and cookie data can be tricky, and even if that data is thrown away completely, there's still the possibility of individuals being identified based on the content of their search queries, as AOL's search data spill demonstrated.Yahoo To Anonymize Logs After 90 Days, Compared to Google's 9 MonthsSo, as Yahoo finalizes its policy plans, it should take a look at EFF's newly-revised Best Practices for Online Service Providers, which recommends a range of techniques to strongly anonymize online user data. Hopefully, we'll see the details of Yahoo's plan soon, as well as new announcements from other search engines trying to keep up in this accelerating privacy competition. Internet users have long trusted search engines and internet portals like Yahoo and Google with the privacy of their most intimate and sensitive data, and we're glad to see those companies finally vying to earn that trust.
Update: Christopher sez, "You note that Google currently 'anonymizes" logs after 9 months. That
is not true, due to the fact that they do not attempt to mask cookies
until the 18 month mark. Removing some tiny portion of an IP address
from the logs is worthless, if cookies can be used to match up new log
entries and older log entries."
Check out this awesome piece by Ara Peterson at the NADA art fair in Miami this year. It reminds me of the cut paper work by Jen Stark. Via Cool Hunting.
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MAKE attended the ITP Winter Show 2008 at NYU this evening. It featured over 100 unique projects from the students enrolled in the program. I really enjoy talking to the students at ITP. They are all so enthusiastic and passionate about the work on display. [Pictured above: Window Vision by Angela Joy Chen]
Over the next few days I will be writing about a few of my favorite projects. Until then you can check out my flicker photo set of the event. [Pictured above: DJ Porcelain and the Plates by Thomas John Gerhardt]
If you happen to be in the NYC area, you really shouldn't miss this amazing show. You can learn more about the ITP Winter Show 2008 on their website. [Pictured above: ReedBox by John Kuiphoff]
Update: Phil has a great photo set too!
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Today on Offworld, as Nintendo released its 100+ game list of DS and Wii titles expected through Spring of next year, we whittled it down to the essential 11 Offworld-ian titles to be excited for.
We also discovered that area/code's Chain Factor (one of our top web games of 2007) had been ported to the iPhone as snap7, listened to Merry Pixmas, a fantastic new chiptune Xmas album, and read Jim Rossignol's latest Ragdoll Metaphysics column on the Ten Things That Made Him Glad To Be A Gamer In 2008.
Elsewhere, we saw that Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill were also coming to the iPhone, heard another good holiday song with The Doyouinverts' Gears of War parody 'A Happy New Gear', saw a slightly slurred Burt Reynolds in the movies, flipped wistfully through the 1983 Sears Wishbook again, saw Spore's DRM debacle coming to half a close, at least, and heard reports that certain job recruiters have been told not to hire World of Warcraft players.
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This contest by Instructables is a great opportunity to trick out your workshop! And your entry instructable can be about almost anything, as long as it uses tools! The deadline is coming up, so get your entires in! From the site:
The Craftsman Workshop of the Future Contest is here and we have $20,000 worth of tools to give away to the best Instructable that uses tools to make something awesome. Seriously... twenty-thousand dollars of gear! You could build some incredible things with that in your workshop and the best part is that the Instructable can be about anything! Show us your skills and your passion for building in an amazing Instructable and be sure to provide plenty of details and tips to help others out. We want to see what tools you use and how you use them. We also want to see enough instruction that others can follow in your footsteps to make it themselves.
The entry deadline is January 4.
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This worm farm is a wonderful reuse of an old bathtub. I especially like how the drain was plumbed for serving up that rich, fertilizing "worm tea". My wife and I did some worm composting a few years ago in a much less attractive plastic bin. Next time we'll build a stylish, bathtub-based worm mansion.
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Via Mother Earth News, here are plans for 6 different toys for tots (32 months and less) along with developmental reasons for them. Some are incredibly simple, like this 'tracking toy:'
All include explanations linking your creation to the baby's development. For the toy above:
1 1/2 to 3 months
The first three month's of your child's life involve critical brain development in visual recognition. Tracking tools help children this age learn to use both eyes to follow movement, which will help them become better readers, among other things.
A little more interesting (and a lot cheaper) than another stuffed animal!
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