It was coated with gradoo, so I went to the local hardware store and bought a spanking new socket:
When I got home, I discovered that the wires on the socket weren't long enough to make it to the junction box. I couldn't replace the short wires with longer ones because they were riveted to the socket. This is a crappy, user-hostile design. When the wires go bad, you have to throw the entire thing away.
Fortunately, I still had the old light socket, and I had some extra wire, so I was able to rewire the old light socket. Hurray for repairable stuff of yesteryear!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
This 1961 issue of Science & Mechanics features instructions for building an electric bass out of a 2 x 4 (left). Lot of other homemade instrument plans are available at Cigar Box Nation.
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This may be one of those situations where my love of a good story gets me in trouble with the more hard-minded scientific types among you, so please understand first that this is all intended in fun. Nonetheless, there are some intriguing facts here.
During the summer of 1997, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) repeatedly detected an extremely powerful underwater sound on an array of Cold War era hydrophones originally installed to listen for soviet submarines. "While it bears the varying frequency hallmark of marine animals, it is far more powerful than the calls made by any creature known on Earth." Phil Lobel, a marine biologist at Boston University, purportedly "agrees that the sound is most likely to be biological in origin," although his opinion appears to be in the minority. (Both quotes from this article at CNN.com.) The approximate origin of the sound has been identified as 50 S x 100 W, which is almost exactly the same latitude as Lovecraft's fictitious sunken city of R'lyeh, at 48 S x 123 W, although it is 1000 miles distant in terms of longitude. [Thanks, Maredith!]
You can listen to a sped-up version of "The Bloop" on the NOAA website here.
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Here's a neat spring you can make (if you have a lot of time and patience) by folding a piece of paper.
UPDATE: I changed the link, as the other one might have pointed to malware. Origami Spring, invented by Jeff Beynon (Via Evil Mad Scientists)
Live in Philly and looking for a chance to meet up with fellow makers? Well, here's a splendid opportunity. Make: Philly is holding a meeting this weekend!
Make: Philly November meeting - Sunday, November 22nd, 3PMGUEST SPEAKER
Dana Schloss is a curious and enthusiastic museum nerd. She has been an exhibit fabricator, prototyper, museum educator, and exhibit designer in many museums in Philadelphia and around the country. She's currently playing and prototyping on the New Science Centre Project 2011 at the Telus World of Science in Calgary. She will share her work and experiences to date in exhibit design, fabrication and education.
OPEN MAKEA staple of all our meetings is Open Make -- an opportunity for you to share with the group a project you recently completed.... if interested in presenting email us at makephilly@gmail to reserve your spot
MAKER CHALLENGEDuring the second half of this and every meeting we break into teams and build something to meet the objective of the 'maker challenge'. For this meeting we're going to design and build a "Maker's Museum" -- a suite of museum style mini exhibits in just 45 minutes. Teams will select a topic in the theme of "How Things Work" and build an exhibit that teaches how something works through interaction and visuals but without using any words. Teams will keep their topics secret from other teams during construction. At the close of the meeting, everyone will get the chance to tour the museum exhibits and guess what each exhibit is about.
Make: Philly November meeting
Sunday, Nov.22 at 3pm
University of the Arts
211 S. Broad Street, Terra Hall, 5th Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19107
Do you have an event coming up? Check out the Maker Events Calendar and add yours!
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Cartoonist Peter Bagge did a funny one-pager about Ayn Rand for the December issue of Reason.
"LSD was first synthesized on November 16, 1938 by Swiss chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland." (Thanks, Mike!)
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Abandoned by floundering media conglomerates, thousands of neglected newsracks command valuable real estate on busy street corners across New York City, remnants of diminishing demand and a disintegrating economy. Many have already been reclaimed and transformed by urban alchemists, whether as canvases for stickers and paint or clever conceptual works that turn the once important vessels of information into repositories for garbage.Jason Eppink (Thanks, Imaginary Foundation!)The Print After Parties continue this line of collaboration with blinking LEDs, disco balls, cut-out silhouettes, and handheld radios. When the last vestiges of a collapsed empire litter the landscape, there's only one thing to do: throw a bumpin' party and dance on the ruins.
When I first learned about this, I was horrified. Mr. X is actually a good UX designer, and his email had me thinking there was hope for American Airlines. The guy clearly cared about his work and about the user experience at the company as a whole. But AA fired Mr. X because he cared. They fired him because he cared enough to reach out to a dissatisfied customer and help clear the company’s name in the best way he could.The guy's original response was an example of an excellent interaction with a disgruntled customer. It was honest. It responded to his concerns. It was real. It was human. It made Dustin actually reconsider his view of the company. Then, in firing the guy, American Airlines didn't just wipe out that goodwill, it pushed negative feelings well beyond where things had been before. It made it clear that American Airlines does not value honesty. It showed that American Airlines did not value actually engaging with disgruntled customers. It showed that American Airlines did not value trying to make disgruntled customers happy. And, as such, it's also probably giving a lot of people very good reasons not to be customers of American Airlines at all.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A new conservative children's book titled Help! Mom! The Radicals Are Ruining My Country! prominently features Nancy Pelosi as an evil villain. Author Katharine DeBrecht, whom you may have seen on Fox News, explains: When Nancy Pelosi was elected Speaker of the House all we heard was how wonderful it was that a mother and grandmother rose through the ranks to such a position. In reality, that mother and grandmother has played an enormous role in ensuring that our children and grandchildren are shackled with debt for decades to come.
A 20-year old Shanghai woman of mixed race has sparked a discussion about race in China. Lou Jing is half black; she was raised by a Chinese mother and speaks and acts like any other Chinese girl. But when the aspiring TV anchor entered an American Idol-like contest and rapped on-stage, she attracted both sensational admiration and ignorant hate. The presenters adoringly called her "chocolate girl" on stage — meanwhile, on web forums, people called her gross and ugly and criticized her mother for having sex with a black person out of wedlock. In an interview with NPR's All Things Considered, Lou Jing says: "I've always thought of myself as Shanghainese, but after the competition I started to have doubts about who I really am."
Lou Jing has never met her dad, who left China without knowing he had gotten her mom pregnant. She hopes to study journalism at Columbia University.
Stories about Lou Jing on NPR, Time, Shanghai Daily
Image via Shanghai Daily
A throne fit for a retro gamer! This one is comprised entirely of Nintendo cartridges.
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Meet little Cthulhu, who lives in the magic city of R'lyeh with all his friends, as you and your child embark on a fun and educational journey through the world of the Great Old Ones, meeting all kinds of new buddies from the Necronomicon along the way, from Azathoth to Yog-Sothoth! This series has won multiple awards and has been enthusiastically approved by the department of child-developmental psychology at Miskatonic University.The Adventures of Lil Cthulhu (Thanks, Gareth Branwyn!)
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Using a similar laser aimed at the sciatic nerve of laboratory rats, they caused some part of the animal’s legs to involuntarily twitch with each laser pulse. A slight movement of the beam across the nerve bundle—which causes the narrow beam to shift its focus from one fiber within the nerve to another—can cause the rat to switch from, say, curling its toes to flexing its foot.
Stimulating nerves with lasers, says Anita Mahadevan-Jansen, a professor of biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt and the person who hit upon the idea of using light instead of current, may someday make artificial limbs as dexterous as human arms and might lead to such devices as patches that zap nerves to give relief to chronic pain sufferers..."Engineers Work on Laser-Based Brain-Machine Interface for Prosthetic Arm" (Thanks, Chris Arkenberg!)
To make the device as compact and inexpensive as possible, the researchers wanted to use a diode laser like the ones used in CD players and laser printers, says Jansen. For human trials, the Vanderbilt researchers are currently working with Aculight Corp., a Bothell, Wash.–based maker of laser systems for military applications, to ready a diode laser–based prototype that is roughly the size of a hardcover book.
The prototype laser has been used in the surgical suite at Vanderbilt’s children’s hospital during rhizotomy procedures in which a nerve identified as the cause of debilitating spastic jerking is removed from children with cerebral palsy. Before the nerve is cut, the laser is fired on it, and its response is recorded.
On a scorching hot June day in northeastern Kenya, an hour west of the Kenyan-Somali border, Leila Chirayath Janah arrived at the Dabaab refugee settlement in an armed convoy. She was there on a mission: to connect jobless, displaced refugees to the rest of the world through legitimate Internet-based jobs.
Leila, 27, is the founder of Samasource, a non-profit organization reminiscent of a tech startup that outsources web-based jobs to women, youth, and refugees living in poverty in third world countries. I met her last month in the tiny office space she rents out in downtown San Francisco. She is tall and well-dressed, and has credentials that include Harvard, Stanford, and a fellowship with TED India. Her obsession with Africa started in her teens — when she was a senior in high school, she left LA to teach English to a class of 60 blind people in rural Ghana; a few years later she created an African Development Studies at Harvard, and a few years after that, she started working on Samasource.Leila's approach to development is pragmatic; her goal is to equip poor but educated people with tools needed to turn their intelligence and drive into the opportunity to earn income. "Donors love health and education," Leila says. "It's so sexy; everyone loves to be the one to save a life by buying a mosquito net or building a school. But in reality, when you look at what the developing world really needs, it's a connection to markets."
Shortly after launching Samasource, she read an Oxfam report that mentioned a Dutch non-profit had set up a computer lab in the Dadaab refugee camps in Kenya. "I thought, how crazy would it be if i can get these refugees to do real work for clients in San Francisco? What if we could prove to the world that these people who have been written off completely as only good for receiving handouts, who are stuck in this camp receiving food rations, can be productive to the global economy?"
Before she left for Kenya, Leila hooked up with Lukas Biewald, a former Yahoo! engineer who had created a job crowdsourcing software web site called Crowdflower. Lukas had agreed to help her hook up the refugees with real clients in California through Crowdflower — Leila would train the refugees to do simple work like data entry and Google searches at the camps while Lukas watched their progress remotely.
Dadaab's refugee camps are insanely overcrowded. 300,000 displaced people live in a space that is only meant to accommodate 90,000. While some resell goods acquired at the market in town, most of the refugees don't have jobs because they can't get work permits under Kenyan law. Boys are routinely recruited out of their mundane reality by rebel groups that turn them into pirates and child soldiers.
The camps are managed by CARE, so Leila coordinated with its reps to have 16 trainees picked out for her Samsource experiment. They had to have a certain level of education and basic knowledge of English. The computers in the lab were imported from China and rigged to withstand the heat, pressure, and dust that permeate the refugee camps.
The tasks ranged from simple searches to transcription to virtual assistance to app testing. Leila spent an hour teaching her workers how Samasource would work and setting them up with a special Crowdflower login and an @samasource.org email address. "I taught them how to Google," she tells me. "They totally got it."
Two days later, Leila called Lukas to see how her refugee workers were doing. "They're getting the same results as our for-profit clients," Lukas told her. "And in some cases, they're doing even better."
One of the refugees Leila trained was a 24-year old Sudanese man named Paul Parach — a former Lost Boy who was seized from his home at age nine and survived by walking through the scorching desert with no food for days before arriving at a refugee camp in Kenya, where he was shot in the leg by a guy from a rival tribe. "You could see in his eyes that he wanted to get out of there," she says.
A few weeks after she left Dadaab, Leila got a friend request on Facebook from Paul the refugee. "It was just crazy," she remembers. "This is a guy who, two months ago, had no idea he could be connected to the world this way." After that, he even dug up her cell phone number and started sending her texts with credit he bought using the money he made through Samasource. Leila points out that Paul is now just one connection away from Mark Zuckerberg (Samasource was one of this year's fbFund Rev winners). "Paul now has power and social capital; he's starting to build an online reputation and starting to become visible to the world. It was a totally unanticipated side benefit."
Leila's experiment proved that a Somali refugee with a Kenyan public education could do a lot of the same work that educated Americans were doing. She now has 520 workers in six countries who are working with Samasource. They've generated over a quarter million dollars in sales working for clients like Google and the Stanford University Library, and have made more money than they would in years of doing backbreaking 50-cent-a-day labor at the camp. "Some people have accused us of creating a virtual sweatshop," Leila says. "I find that very funny. This is like the ultimate creme de la creme job you can possibly get. If your opportunities are working at a quarry or toiling away on some field, the chance to sit in front of this cool machine and do this work that connects you to the world is so empowering for people, especially people from marginalized groups who have been told their whole lives that they're not worth anything."
You can hire a worker or donate to Samasource on their web site, or download the Give Work iPhone app to play a fun solitaire-meets-trivia type of game that helps Samasource-affiliated workers make a few bucks.
A video by Joe Sabia. I'd stop watching it, or laughing at it, if only I could. My LOLs are like her sneezes. Stick with it, 0:32 sneaky panda FTW.
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Spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool:
Lucky Larry made this neat looking radar visualizer for an ultrasonic scanner, using Arduino and a Processing sketch. I dig the green sweep line! He has an excellent write-up of the project on his blog, including schematic, wiring, and source code.
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"A lot of big powerful music-industry executives made a giant mistake," she says. "They gave the music business away on the internet. If they had just sat back and said, 'Maybe let's figure this internet thing out, it could be something cool,' we could have found a way to distribute music online on our own terms, not somebody else's. Prince had already shown them the way. He was so far ahead of the curve, putting out his own records on the web. Everyone else was stupid."Indeed. While Prince eventually stumbled, his early efforts were incredibly instructive for the industry, but every time folks like us mentioned them, we were told it could only work for Prince and that it was a terrible model. Except it worked -- and, to be honest, every model we see these days is really a more modern reflection of what Prince started doing years ago.
And now there's a T-shirt to prove it.
10 Mpixel di finissimo cioccolato by Latente.
Letter Men by Baltimore City Paper/Frank Hamilton.
Inoculation Squad, by Pharmastorm.
DSC00053, by Openfly. (Don't miss his iPhone etching, originally up at BBG)
Holy Mary Machine by Latente.
Walking down the outer stairs at the DeYoung, by Steve Rhodes.
Fallen Astronaut, NASA/crew of Apollo 15, via Latente.
Unimasters by Gert-Jan Akerboom via Kunstraum Richard Sorge.
More: Lukasch's WTF dice and Hashtag challenge; Clever Cake Studio's World of Warcraft Gnome Cake and Firefox Cake; and the droolworthy <a href="Xserve+Xraid+Xsan+Xgrid.
Add your pic to the Boing Boing flickr pool!. (And please give it a CC license so we can blog it without assuming permission from the pool status.)
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I just discovered the Replica Prop Forum, and it has me on a bit of a Star Wars kick. This replica holochess table from Star Wars Episode IV was built by Philip Wise of Dallas, Texas:
Here's a video showing the basic demo mode, which is the audio and light pattern from the 50 seconds the game has in the first movie. The table is playing music from an internal flash drive and you can start the demo mode by pressing one of the 7 functional knobs. During the mode the audio plays and the lights repeat the pattern from the movie. After the demo, it goes back to the light pattern it was running, one of many, and returns to playing music.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Furniture | Digg this!
"When I say there is no water crisis, you must be wondering, 'Is this guy talking to his hat?'" That's how Asit Biswas led off his speech last month at the 2009 Nobel Conference. And--oddly worded idiom aside--he was right. That's exactly what everyone was thinking.
The Conference--really a lecture series timed to coincide with the distribution of Nobel Prizes--brings Nobel winners and eminent researchers from around the world to Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. All the lectures orbit a central theme. This year, it was water. Or, rather, the lack of water. Most of the speakers talked about the risk of losing this important resource--how we humans threaten our own water supply, how that puts us at risk for a whole mess of trouble, and how we might be able to tackle the global water crisis.
But that crisis is a myth, according to Biswas. He's the president of the Third World Centre for Water Management and winner of the 2006 Stockholm Water Prize, and he says that there's plenty of water to go around. Freaking out about water supply is pointless, he says. Worse, it wastes time and resources that could be used to fix the world's real problem--actually getting the water to the people.
To find out more about why Biswas thinks global institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank are dead wrong on water, I called him for a post-Nobel Conference interview.
I want to make sure I understand your position correctly. You say there's not a shortage--or coming shortage--of water. That the real problem is infrastructure. Is that correct?
Asit Biswas: Absolutely correct. Neither in developed or developing countries is there a physical scarcity of water. The problem is lack of infrastructure, and more importantly, the lack of management. And those are things that are bad in both the developing and developed world. For instance, in Delhi, India, everyone was telling the Prime Minister that they had a water scarcity problem, but I was able to give him a new perspective that he wasn't hearing from his advisers or from the U.N. The real problem is the following: The average stay of a water utility manager is 30 months. And he's neither a water nor management expert. The only qualifications of these managers are how close they are to the mayor. If you put this type of person in the position to manage water, they look at it and see a horrendous problem and they just hope and pray that during their stay nothing will happen and the next fellow who comes along will hold the ball. That's got nothing to do with water. And yet the water profession goes around and says we're running short of water. And it's a bunch of rubbish.
But is there really a functional difference between a crisis of scarcity and a crisis of management? Either way, the people don't get water.
AB: There is a fallacy the world doesn't understand. Everyone in the world has access to water. Everyone. If you didn't, you'd be dead by now. The issue is whether the water is clean, drinkable, and how convenient is it to get that water. So even in the slums of the worst cities people have access, but it's not clean, they pay through the nose and supply is very erratic. The point I'm trying to make is that everyone has access. The question is can we give them better service, and much lower cost and much higher convenience. My view is that all three are possible.
Can management really make that big of a difference?
AB: Let us take the case of water supply for the city of Phnom Penh in Cambodia. In 1993, the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority was flat broke. It needed heavy governmental subsidies to run a very inefficient operation. The institution was badly managed, corrupt to the core, lost 72% of its water due to unaccounted for losses, and even the rich and the powerful people, let alone the poor, did not have access to drinkable water. By improving its governance practices, it started to supply drinkable water on a 24-hour uninterrupted basis. This public sector company made a profit from its operation from 1997, which has progressively increased year after year since that time. The poor have access to water. In fact, their water bills have been reduced by 70 to 80% compared to what they used to pay to the water vendors earlier. In addition, the poor receive clean, drinkable water through house connections. The unaccounted for water now in Phnom Penh is 6.19%, which is less than 1/4th that of London, and very significantly less than Paris, New York or Los Angeles.
You used to think there was a water crisis, what led you to change your mind?
AB: I heard it so many times from the World Bank and the U.N. that there is a water crisis. Like the rest of the world, I assumed these guys knew what they were doing. But then I started looking at the global figures they put out and what assumptions they'd made. The assumption is that a city is in a crisis of scarcity if it doesn't have 1500 cubic meters of fresh water per person, per year. What they forget is elementary knowledge that water isn't like oil. Nobody really consumes it fully. Of 100% of the water that comes to your house, 99% goes back as waste water. The fundamental question becomes how do we manage our waste water so that it can be used and reused again and again. Singapore does this. That city has 300-350 cubic meters per person, per year, and they don't have a water problem. This is an issue of efficiency. I found that the total water use in 2005 in the United States is actually less than what it was in 1975 with much less population, economic activity and food requirement. And the US is just scratching the surface on efficiency.
Let's talk a little more about that efficiency. You say that, in many developing cities, water is currently being lost and, that, if you reduce those losses you could have enough water. Where does that lost water go?
AB: Nobody really knows. All we know is that a certain amount is pumped from the reservoir. And we know how much water consumers are using from metering. And if you deduct the consumption from the total, you'll see that-in the Western world-about 25% of the water disappears somewhere. Mainly probably due to leakages and bad maintenance. In developing countries, it's worse. There are very few cities who don't lose 45-60% of the water. And we have no clue where it goes. Probably 1/3 from leakages. The rest probably goes to people who pay to have an unauthorized connection to the system.
But can efficiency and better management really make up for all the uses of water? As population increases, we need to feed more people as well, and that also requires more water.
There is waste going on with food as well. Look at the U.S. There, 27% of food is lost between retail, households and restaurants. Basically thrown in the waste. What's that got to do with the developing world? I say it's even worse there. Last year, the Agriculture Minister of India publicly admitted that slightly over 50% of fruits and veggies produced in India never reach the consumer. Why? Because of poor supply chain. Poor refrigeration. Poor transport. My argument is simple. India doesn't have much land or water to spare. But instead of increasing agricultural yield or worrying about water supply, we should focus on how we can make sure that what we produce now reaches the consumer. If you do that, what you gain can easily feed the United Kingdom and France combined. Stop wastage and get food and water to the people. You increase the amount that's actually available by half without extra water, and without extra land.
Watch Asit Biswas' Nobel Conference lecture, and follow-up Q&A
Large image courtesy Flickr user futureatlas.com, via CC
Just Posted: Our in-depth review of the D300S. By adding 720p HD video recording with contrast-detection AF and upping the continuous shooting rate to 7 frames per second, Nikon has made only subtle changes for its latest flagship APS-C DSLR, the D300S. However, its predecessor was an excellent camera and one that has proven hard to beat. So, has Nikon done enough to face up to Canon's rather impressive EOS 7D? Read our 30 page review to find out. Comments Off [link]
I'm old (never you mind the hard number). But I'm still a kid at heart and I love toys. And I'm not talking about motorcycles and cars and speed boats, aka "grown-up toys," I'm talking model rockets, radio-controlled anything, little toy soldiers, and board games. TOYS! The cool thing about being an adult, and being into the toys of youth, is that you've got a lot more money in your piggy bank! In this, our first Make: Gift Guide 2009, we'll look at a few top of the line traditional toys, with an emphasis on toys you build, mod, and hack. Please share with us in the comments what sorts of cool toys you'd like to see under the Christmas tree or Hanukkah bush this year.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Funnyman Dave Hill, who stars and performs in the music video embedded above, says,
This is the new Valley Lodge video for their song "All of My Loving." It's the story of a man tormented by his apartment furniture. Kind of like a naked Ethan Allen shoving his bait & tackle in your face all day long when all you really want is a hot girl in cute panties.The video was produced with a company called Mekanism. Mr. Hill is doing standup shows this week at LA's UCB Theater, go check him out if you're in town.Oh, and there's a bear.
They say you can't smell anything through a launch-hood, but I still smelled the pove in the next seat as the space-attendants strapped us into our acceleration couches and shone lights in our eyes and triple-checked the medical readouts on our wristlets to make sure our hearts wouldn't explode when the rocket boosted us into orbit for transfer to the *Eagle* and the long, long trip to Mars.He was skinny, but not normal-skinny, the kind of skinny you get from playing a lot of sports and taking the metabolism pills your parents got for you so you wouldn't get teased at school. He was kind of pot-bellied with scrawny arms and sunken cheeks and he was brown-brown, like the brown Mom used to slather on after a day at the beach covered in factor-500 sunblock. Only he was the kind of all-over-even brown that you only got by being *born* brown.
He gave me a holy-crap-I'm-going-to-MARS smile and a brave thumbs-up and I couldn't bring myself to snub him because he looked so damned happy about it. So I gave him the same thumbs up, rotating my wrist in the strap that held it onto the arm-rest so that I didn't accidentally break my nose with my own hand when we "clawed our way out of the gravity well" (this was a phrase from the briefing seminars that they liked to repeat a lot. It had a lot of macho going for it).
The pove smelled like garbage. There, I said it. No nice way of saying it. Like the smell out of the trash-chute at the end of our property line. It had been my job to haul our monster-sized tie-and-toss bags to the curb every day and toss them down that chute and into the tunnel-system that took them out to the Spruce Sunset Meadows recycling center, which was actually *outside* the Spruce Sunset Meadows wall, all the way in Springville, where there was a gigantic mega-prison. The prisoners sorted all our trash for us, which was good for the environment, since they sorted it into about 400 different categories for recycling; and good for us because it meant we didn't have to do all that separating in our kitchen. On the other hand, it did mean that we had to have a double cross-cut shredder for anything like a bill or a legal document so that some crim didn't use it to steal our identities when he got out of jail. I always wondered how they handled the confetti that came out of the shredder, if they had to pick up each little dot of it with their fingernails and drop it into a big hopper labelled "paper."
Artist David Ersser created this balsa wood installation called "Nothing but heavy duty," a workshop of hand-replicated tools. From Seventeen Gallery's site:
David Ersser creates seemingly cold, meticulous reproductions of Hi-Fi equipment, turntables and keyboards. The thin wooden cable running down from the stereo to the floor and to a sculpted plug, is made up of short sections of straight balsa to give the impression of a curve. From a distance these works appear at first flawless, however scrutiny reveals the makers hand. This hand is the hand of an enthusiast model maker fervently gluing late at night in his garage. This mode of production and subject matter evoke the nerds hermetic and frantic DJ-ing in his bedroom. Lifeless and slightly wonky, his facsimiles are drawings and aspirations made solid, as the teenage geek fetishizes the stereo equipment of his dreams.
I think I recognize that circular saw as a Festool, can anyone confirm? [Thanks, Andrew!]
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This “illusion” of an helium balloon is entirely made of precious or fancy fabric. There is no helium in this Helium Eternal balloon : it is stuffed with kapok, like a soft pillow. A tiny flap fixed at the top of the balloon helps hanging it to your interior’s ceiling, hook it to a curtain rod, the top of a wall etc. The key thing is to hang it up as high as possible, in order to recreate the magic illusion of a real flying helium balloon! The most beautiful effect is obtained in setting a bunch of several balloons together, forming a “balloons bouquet”.Clémentine Henrion (Thanks, Kelly Sparks!)
Well folks, it's that time of year again. I know, I know! The holidays fill you with a heady mixture of excitement and dread, pleasure and performance anxiety. So many things to do, obligatory events to attend, a Santa-long list of presents to buy, embarrassing moments to witness at the company Christmas party, etc. We hear ya. But we don't have to tell you the upsides: the time off, the opportunity to take stock and give thanks for the bounty with which you've been blessed, the time spent with family and friends. And, let's be honest: the PRESENTS!
And, just as Halloween provides an opportunity for makers to go wild with costumes and decorations, there are plenty of opportunities over the next few months to indulge in your joy of making, whether it be handmade invitations and decorations for a party, an all-out Thanksgiving feast, or handmade gifts. If you need an excuse to set aside free time for making, here's your golden opportunity. You can tell yourself (and/or your spouse) you'll be saving money and the time and hassle of shopping. Even if you don't make the presents themselves, you can make the wrapping and gift cards. With a color printer and the vast image and idea libraries of the internets, the sky's the limit in terms of what you can do for wrapping paper and gift cards.
Over the course of the next few months, we'll be posting DIY gift, wrapping, and other holiday-related projects and ideas here on Make: Online. This would also be a good time to check out our sister site, CRAFT, for more creative holiday ideas.
If you don't want to go the DIY present route yourself, but want to give presents that encourage your gift recipients to make things, we've got you covered there, too. Over the next five weeks, we'll be running a series of gift guides geared toward makers, everything from expensive DIY toys for adults who refuse to grow up, to "interestingly dangerous" gifts, to gifts that go blinky-blink, to our massive annual round-up of open source hardware. These guides will be written by our usual Make: Online contributors, but we'll also be bringing on guest guiders, such as Bill Gurstelle, of Backyard Ballistics, Paul Overton, of DudeCraft, and Diana Eng, of Fashion Geek.
So, welcome to the holiday hustle. Try and take care of yourself, don't let yourself get too stressed out (remember: these are supposed to be holidays of joy and peace and family and sharing your love and your bounty), and please, use this as an opportunity to get creative. If you do make any presents, or wrappings, or cards, or anything else, please take pictures and share them with us in the MAKE Flickr pool.
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Nicole sez, "Philebrity posted a haunting video of the recent demolition of the Drexel Shaft in Philadelphia. The tripped out music and slowly tumbling smoke stack aptly visualize a crumbling American economy."
He's One Bad Mutha- Shut Your Mouth! But I'm Talking About DREXEL SHAFT! (Thanks, Nicole!)
News and Wi-Fi service are commodities, just like cars, housing, and food are commodities. Labor and raw materials, as well as the capital to buy them, are the essential ingredients of most any good or service we might care to own or consume. No money, no commodity -- that's a basic economic principle that the digital revolution has done nothing to change.Sounds good, but it's wrong. Very wrong. Yes, they're commodities, but the defining rule of a commodity is that it is priced on the marginal cost, not the fixed costs. And yet, Synder suddenly thinks that while that applies to cars, housing and food... it goes away in the digital world? The only person really claiming that the economics has changed is Snyder, in insisting that digital products do not adhere to the same laws of supply and demand.
I don't write for free, my editors don't edit for free, and I'll bet your IT hands don't run networks or produce code for free.And yet, your content is available for free. Funny how that works. Why does it work? Because it makes good business sense. But, to Snyder, when this is pointed out, he gets confused and thinks that it proves his point:
I know, I know -- some of you are going to bring up open source.Snyder figured out the wrong thing. Yes, getting paid is important, but the question is what you get paid for, and he's asking people to charge for the parts of a business that make the most sense being free -- and doesn't explain why he gets to decide what should be free and what shouldn't. The answer, really, is that none of us decides: basic economics tells us. If you have a competitive product with no marginal cost, it's going to eventually get driven to free. Whether you like it or not. And then you shouldn't whine about the evils of "free." You should instead figure out ways to use that to your advantage.
Sorry, that proves my point. Open source has grown in influence and quality in the last few years as business models in the community have evolved. Not too long ago, any open source company that dared post a paid or paid-support enterprise version of its software would be pilloried. But not any more. The recession has put many excellent technologists out of work, but there would be even fewer employed if open source companies were afraid to make a profit, then plow it back into development projects and expanded infrastructure.
Just ask the open source millionaires at MySQL if they think everything they produce should be free.
The Steel Rod Box creates some surprisingly pleasant sound from surplus surgical hardware -
For reasons unclear, my father has a few boxes of unused spinal surgery equipment and tools in the garage. including a whole heap load of stainless steel rods that are threaded the entire length.More infos + sound samples over at Vulpestruments. [via Oddstruments]
Something had to be done.
So i've come up with the Steel Rod Box, rods of varying width screwed in on both ends into a basic wooden box. I've included a simple contact mic from a piezo transducer to pick up the vibrations for amplification.
Quebec's health-care system is doing the same, banishing seven-plus-hour waits in favor of a quick, efficient system that allows people to return at a later time for very quick treatment.
Tony Benn, the great British politician, recently gave a CBC radio interview where he decried New Labour's approach to governance, saying that they'd stopped seeing themselves as the people's representatives and started seeing themselves as the people's managers. This is true around the world, I think -- Bush was the "CEO President" and Obama has appointed a "CTO" for America. Canada's Harper government clearly sees itself as running Canada, Inc. And, of course, China and Singapore's politburos are unabashed managers and make no real pretence to representing their populations.
And there are some benefits to a "management" approach -- this being one of them. Disney manages crowds like no one else. If you have crowds that need managing, take a notebook and a camera to Disney World for a week and come back with the solution to your problem.
But in the main, I'm a lot happier to be represented than managed. A CTO tries to maximize the profitability of technological deployments for highest return on investment; a Minister (or Secretary) of Technology would maximize the social benefits of technological deployments. A CEO tries to return maximum value to his shareholders; a President or Prime Minister tries to govern for maximum social justice and prosperity.
Every now and again, though, "management" and "representation" dovetail, and here's one of those places where it does. I want my representatives to manage the problem of getting us all vaccinated, and I'm happy to see them use the best tools for doing that, wherever they originate.
Quebec's Disney-inspired solution to flu-shot chaos (Thanks, Mom!)Lines are still forming at some vaccination centres, where people are queuing up early just to get their coupons. But officials say the system has been effective. At one vaccination centre in Montreal's Plateau Mont Royal district recently, nurses and health workers outnumbered people in line.
"The system is marvellous," said Johanne Spencer, who'd whisked through her vaccination. "You know what time you're going to have your turn and you know how long you'll have to wait. You don't waste three, four hours in line."
Montreal adopted the coupon system for all 17 vaccination centres across the city.
"Something had to be done," said Deborah Bonney, a spokeswoman for the Montreal-region health and social service agency. "At the beginning, we had no idea people were going to line up in the dark of the early morning in the cold. Confronted with the situation, the coupon system seemed to be the best option. It seems to have done the trick."
(Image: Con FastPass ya habrías entrado, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from jmerelo's Flickr stream)
Where the Wild Things Are in stone (Thanks, Dan!)
Mandelbulb: The Unravelling of the Real 3D Mandelbrot Fractal: (via /.)
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Carl Zeiss is upgrading eight of its F-mount lenses by adding an electronic interface (CPU), allowing full support of automatic exposure modes and the inclusion of lens-related data to EXIF. Priced between €545 and €1,386, six of the new Nikkon-mount ZF.2 series lenses will be available from the end of this month: 18mm/f3.5, 21mm/f2.8, 35mm/f2, 50mm/f1.4, 50mm/f2 and 85mm/f1.4, while the Distagon T* 28mm/f2 and macro Planar T* 100mm/f2 will be introduced in Spring 2010. A reworked version of the Distagon T* 28mm/f2 will then follow in other mounts. Comments Off [link]
From Tom Spina Designs.
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What's more, David's story is superb, a spectacular and weird and smart story about theme parks, singularity, and humanity. Originally published in Nightshade Books's Eclipse Two, it is also now available as a free, Creative Commons licensed download.
Down & Out in the Magic KingdomThe twinks fell into Dragontown
The twinks fell into Dragontown out of the noonday sun, a constellation of spiky-black shapes each with its own trail of shadow like the tail of a cartoon meteor, darkening the tropical-blue sky, scattering frightened critters from the scaled rooftops. They were every race in the Legion: mandrill-faced bavians, jackal-headed anubit and anubim, black-beaked corven and leathery-winged gaunts, fiery clowns and scaled salamanders, goblins, mechanists, satyrs, araneae, orcas and cuttlemen. They were, every one of them, extravagantly mounted, every one level-capped, every one gaudily equipped and maximally buffed.
And not one of them belonged in Dragontown.
Dragontown was a neutral town, a sleepy town deep in the mid-levels. A stopping-point, once, for guests on their way to the Outlands or the Newlands or the Deathlands; but these days even the Newlands were old news. There were only a handful of guests in Dragontown to bear witness to the Legion's invasion, to applaud or run for cover or (like the old perroquet airmaster Valerius Redbeak, who had given up battlegrounds and quests alike in the long-ago days of the seventh expansion, and now spent his days fishing off Bonetalon Pier) simply roll their eyes, according to each guest's faction and sophistication.
Ed sez, "Here's an article from 1985 in the Association for Recorded Sound Collections Journal about record piracy in the 19th century. Includes illustrations of three duplicators from the 19th century."
Record Piracy: The Attempts of the Sound Recording Industry to Protect Itself against Unauthorized Copying, 1890-1978 (PDF)
(Thanks, Ed!)
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J44 outlines his steps for converting a basic gaming light gun into a custom Laser Tag-like system, including gun and head mounted 'hit' detectors (a la Photon) -
I hope many of you will find this instructable useful and will go on to build your own duino taggers. There is much scope for improving and upgrading this system outlined here. If you do go on to improve on this duinotagger please share your work and hopefully in time the system will evolve into a much richer gaming experience.The system is designed to be compatible with the DIY MilesTag system. Check out the project's instructable for full details.
Related:
Build your own laser tag system
playful (via Wonderland)
But it's not just a matter of dressing up. A successful pretending object has to delicately balance pretending affordance with not making you look like an idiot. That's why so many successful pretending objects are also highly functional. As anyone who's been down the Tactical Pants rabbit-hole can tell you it's easy to obsess for ages about exactly the right trouser configuration for your equipment (ooh-er), all with a perfectly straight face. But every now and then you have a moment of self-awareness and realise you're just pretending to be a cop or a soldier from the future or Val Kilmer.And of course, what you're really doing is both things at once. You're being practical and thinking about function and you're pretending. But you need some plausible deniability - the functional stuff needs to be credible. Which is why pretending objects that are too obvious don't work. You're no longer pretending in your own head, you're play acting in the world.
Another thing - I've always wondered why software/OS makers don't do more with the power of pretending. Look, for instance, at the average desktop. It's using a pretending metaphor - but it's not much of an imaginative leap is it? It's a desktop on your desk. I can see how this would have been useful in the early days, getting people used to interfaces and everything, but surely there's more opportunity to have some fun now - to make software more compelling by adding some pretending value to it.
Symbology befitting a Dan Brown novel exudes from these handcrafted iPhone home button earrings. Do they imbibe the wearer with mystical iPhone powers? Does wearing two buttons break Apple's Human Interface Guidelines? You'll just have to acquire a pair to find out. [via iPhoneIndia]
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YouTuber jodex96 souped up the basic Arduino EMF detector project with a piezo buzzer. The resulting audio feedback from the device is reminiscent of a geiger counter - very cool! I'm loving all the variations people are cooking up for this one.
Related:
Making the Arduino EMF Detector
Casio Japan has released two digital cameras that see the addition of 10MP back-illuminated CMOS sensors to existing models in the Exilim line-up. The Exilim EX- FH25 and EX-FC150 follow the EX-FH20 superzoom and EX-FC100 compact respectively, sharing similar features such as image stabilization, burst shooting rates of up to 40fps and movies at 1000fps. Comments Off [link]
From the MAKE Flickr pool
Furniture hacker Boris converted an IKEA Sniglar baby changing table into a portable folding lightbox. [via IKEAHacker]
I first thought to keep the table structure as it, but finally, I preferred to use the two level of the table to make one foldable table. I first fixed together the two vat with a long piano hinge. Then I stuck aluminium foil into the vats to reflect the light and I fixed four neon tubes into it. A few meters of cable later, I then closed the vats with two white and opaque plexiglass panels and that's it.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in hacks | Digg this!
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The copies at issue here were not lawfully manufactured with the authorization of the copyright owner. As stated, Psystar made an unauthorized copy of Mac OS X from a Mac mini that was placed onto an "imaging station" and then used a "master copy" to make many more unauthorized copies that were installed on individual Psystar computers. The first-sale defense does not apply to those unauthorized copies.Perhaps I'm missing something here, because earlier reports had suggested that Psystar legally purchased each copy of OS X and then installed the legally purchased copy on the new machine (which it then included with the sold machine). But from the description above, it sounds like part of the problem is that a single "master copy" was used to make multiple installations. Of course, that raises a whole host of separate issues. If Psystar legally purchased a separate license for each one, but still used a single master copy, is that really infringing? After all, the code is identical, and it seems positively ridiculous to say that even though you bought, say, 20 licenses, you can't just use one master copy to install 20 times. It seems like this could use additional clarification. Because, the other way one could interpret this is that there is no right of first sale if the company says a copy is unauthorized -- which would have troubling implications.
The Cabaret Mechanical Movement book is packed with information, diagrams, and useful tips on making your own automata. The book uses machines and automata from the Cabaret Mechanical Theater to explain levers, shafts, cranks, cams, springs, linkages, ratchets, gears, and even coin-op control. This is a great introduction for those inspired to go and make their own work.
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His piece even claims that the industry would love to give up the adhesive contracts, early termination fees and locked-in subsidy handsets that it won't give up, even when threatened by congress.
Now all the carriers are selling heavily subsidized smartphones. They hate this state of affairs -- and wish that American consumers would just pay full price for the phones, the way people do in Europe.
Hansell's evidence for this is the iPhone, which was "unsubsidized" when it was $600. It only dropped to $400 and then $200, he writes, when they moved to subsidies. He implies that the iPhone launch was initially unsuccessful and that this shows Americans won't buy contract-free phones: "Consumers balked at the high upfront cost. By the second generation of the iPhone, Apple reverted to a traditional subsidy model."
For customers, however, the only practical option with the $600 U.S. iPhone was to activate it on the standard subsidy-payoff contract, with a compulsory data plan to boot. Whatever the unsubsidized payment arrangements between Apple and AT&T, the contract arrangements between AT&T and consumers always assumed a subsidy. In fact, my recollection is that AT&T itself wouldn't even sell you that "unsubsidized" iPhone without activating a 2-year contract on the spot. Buying one from the Apple store did not enforce activation, but everyday customers couldn't activate on other carriers (or on a pre-paid AT&T plan) without using warranty-busting hacks that emerged only later.
In fact, AT&T didn't market a no-contract iPhone until March, 2009 -- for $600-$700 depending on model, more than the original iPhone model ever cost "full price."
Throughout his piece, Hansell writes often of people's confusion. He claims that even economists find cellphone plans baffling. But they're not hard to understand except in the nickel-and-dime details. Hansell's repeated evocation of "confusion" is reminiscent of when characters in novels continually ask what's going on, or when they wake up in white rooms: it's because the writer himself doesn't know.
Excepting the Yale professor whose words introduce the article, the people quoted in it are carrier flacks and cellular industry analysts: a fair sign of a piece tossed off inside a snowglobe of PR.
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Interesting article from MacArthur fellow Erik Demaine covering the history of origami-style models that include curved folds. Shown above is "Concentric Circular Tower" by late UCSC Professor and noted computer scientist David A. Huffman (Wikipedia), whose curved-origami work was covered posthumously by the New York Times in 2004. The Flickr curved fold pool is chock-a-block with fascinating models of this type. [Thanks, Jon!]
More: Curved tetrahedron origami
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Check out the amazing build log of this Star Wars Tauntaun costume, Scott (the maker writes)...
TaunTaun costume, 2009 for the Exotic Zone ball in Sacramento. I'm wearing the Luke Skywalker outfit for this shoot. On Halloween my buddy Brian wore the Luke outfit, and I was his spotter dressed as Han Solo. Sorry bout the shaky camera, my wife was walking and holding our daughter in the other arm.
Here are some of my favorites from CRAFT this week:
Thanksgiving Feast: Side Dishes
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Artist Walter Wick stacks 117 objects on a single Lego block, then sends little wind-up creatures toward it to knock it over. Fun! (Via Gurney Journey)
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