The lovely Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh sent me some packs of Sugru modeling repair/mod/hacking silicone to review for the next volume of Make: magazine. Here’s a preview of the tea kettle repair I performed.
Archive Page 2 of 20
I’m not sure I want to know why this ring is around the moon in LA tonight.
I’m very pleased with these goggles I got from my mother-in-law and father-in-law for Christmas. They’re getting a lot of wear around the house, as well as when I’m in the shop doing pointy, dangerous things.
Go get some for yourself at Restoration Hardware.
Blueant sent me this to review, and I’ve got to say it’s pretty darned good. It’s a handsfree bluetooth speakerphone for the car, which hooks to your visor. Actually, a little metal clip hooks to your visor, and the Blueant clings to that with two powerful magnets.
Once paired with your phone, it can answer and place calls through a quick jab at the buttons, or via voice command. I don’t have the patience for voice commands, but hitting the buttons works just fine. The speaker and voice quality are both quite fine.
You can get one for under $100. This is quite a bit more than the free earbud that came with my cell phone, but this does make it easy to have speakerphone conversations where all the kids in the minivan get involved. Maybe that’s not such a good thing after all…
Another plus is that its battery holds a charge a for good week, if you keep calls to one or two a day. I charge it with the supplied DC wall wart, but it can also be charged via USB.
This is the greenest temporary enclosure I’ve ever used. This carton has served as: an egg carton, an art supply for my kids, and now a button box and circuit board enclosure for a project I’m developing.
Don’t worry, I’ll erase all of that eco-friendliness when the finished version is made from freeze-dried petroleum and panda skulls.
“My turkey is red and white.
My turkey is made of communist countries.
My turkey lives in lots of states.”
I wish I knew what was going on in this kid’s head! This was a class assignment at my son’s elementary school. I was there for a conference and saw this posted on the wall outside the classroom.
I got a lot of great response to the articles on the laser cut Mystery Box I built for Wired blogger John Baichtal. A number of people asked where they could buy one. I’ve heard your pleas! I have started a new company, Magnolia Atomworks LLC, to build the kits.
You can now purchase one of your own from ThinkGeek and the Maker Shed.
I had a lot to learn when getting this thing going. First off, you can’t pick an odd size of wood for something like this. Has to be easy to find. I switched to 1/8″ Baltic birch plywood, since the 3/16″ I was using became suddenly scarce.
Additionally, I revised the kit to simplify assembly. I designed small notched tabs to lock the longer brackets in place. They have the added benefit of filling holes to prevent curious Mystery Box recipients from peeking inside.
I purchased an Epilog Zing laser cutter for the venture. This allows Magnolia Atomworks (me) to design and prototype products quickly. However, I don’t want to go into mass production, feeding material into the cutter for hours on end. For that, I contracted an outside company. They have many, faster cutters and can burn through a production run pretty quickly.
I’m really pleased with the results, and super-excited to see the kits for sale. I have huge respect for ThinkGeek and the Maker Shed, so it’s an honor to have my product for sale at both sites.
My Mysterious, Inspiring J.J. Abrams Mystery Box [Wired GeekDad]
Building a mystery box [MAKE]
John Baichtal
Epilog Laser
abye I’m just getting old-fashioned in my old age, but I really love the look of a beautiful drop-cap letter. I was just talking with my friend Mike about a character rigging book I had lent him, in which the binding had disintegrated (on my watch). I told him to enjoy the book, but please, don’t return it without having it re-bound. In tooled leather. He said he’d do so, but only after first buying a second copy of the book so he could mount each page separately on another, larger matted page, and then illuminating it like so many scriveners and monks of yore. Fair enough. I’m not sure this particular book warrants all this attention, but I’m happy to have it done nonetheless.
The beautiful drop-cap above is from the Daily Drop Cap. thanks to @barrymcw for the tip.
My friend Tod Kurt and I built this laser tripwire art heist event for the Machine Project Benefit. Here’s what it looked like:
We’re using a hazer to make the laser beams visible, which works surprisingly well in this semi-open space. To increase the spectacle we installed a few extra lasers that are not being sensed for tripwires, but just look cool. The heisters didn’t know which those were, however, so it added to the challenge without increasing complexity.
In this side view you can see what happens when you break too many beams: lots of lights come on, including a blinding, red LED array. For this Tod used an Arduino-controlled AC optical relay. I’m hoping Tod will write up the whole project for a MAKE article, because he has all kinds of neat tricks like this throughout.
The event was fantastic. People got very competitive about getting the art stolen in the shortest time. Most adept thieves did it in about 20 seconds, but the top three scores were between 5 and 7 seconds!!
