The folks at
Mellow Pages, a community-run library/
salon in Brooklyn (recently profiled in the
NYT), have put together a how-to guide for building a similar kind of space in your neighborhood: short version
here, long version (and Google Doc)
here.
posted by Cash4Lead
on May 27, 2013 -
12 comments
A few years ago
Charles Guan was a teacher's assistant in MIT's 2.007 introductory design and manufacturing class. To help out his fellow students he made a guide to building robots quickly and efficiently. Now he has expanded the original guide, retitled it
How to Build your Everything Really Really Fast (HTBYERRF) and published it on Instructables, available for anyone wishing to progress from the "zip ties and duct tape" stage of building things.
posted by Harald74
on Mar 22, 2013 -
15 comments
The New Dressmaker;
With complete and fully illustrated instructions on every point connected with sewing, dressmaking and tailoring, from the actual stitches to the cutting, making, altering, mending, and cleaning of clothes for ladies, misses, girls, children, infants, men and boys; The Butterick Publishing Co., 1921; 168 p. illus. [more inside]
posted by applemeat
on Sep 16, 2012 -
12 comments
Nearly a decade ago, Sun Jifa lost his hands in a fishing-related explosion (he was building a bomb for blast-fishing). He soon realized that he couldn't afford the prosthetic hands recommended by the hospital. Undeterred, he decided to build his own bionic hands.
Eight years later...
posted by unSane
on Aug 17, 2012 -
46 comments
Prototypes are usually the missing links in the evolution of human technology, the dead-ends of ideas that give way to the refinement of the final physical product. Prototypes aren't just for
Darth Vader. While the legal back and forth between Apple and Samsung continues, a
treasure trove of
prototype designs for Apple devices has been released to the public, showing insights into various design approaches and feature enhancements, including
larger form-factor iPads
with and without
kickstands and
landscape ports and iPhones that
parody the Sony logo, show a different layout for
camera elements, and look remarkably like
fourth-generation models, as far back as 2005. On the other hand, some have made prototypes into the end goal itself, such as the folks at
Dangerous Prototypes, a site which features a new open-source electronic hardware
project each month. Some are just
gratuitous fun, while others are a bit more practical, such as one project that
recycles old Nokia displays and another that provides access to
infrared signal, useful for hacking together remote controls for all sorts of IR-based devices. Other prototypes of
tomorrow's technology are less concerned with shrinking down the guts of the invention itself, to make it disappear, but rather on
how we
interact with and
integrate physical representations of these ideas into our daily lives. Above all else, prototypes are always forward-looking and are therefore inherently optimistic expressions of human creativity: Even
children are getting into imagining the world of tomorrow.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Aug 1, 2012 -
14 comments
Upgrade Your Nintendo 3DS’s Sound. [SLYT] "Of the variety of things one might find to complain about in regards to the Nintendo 3DS, the sound doesn’t immediately come to mind. It’s not great sound, mind, but there are a litany of things that are more obvious. Thanks to one intrepid inventor, however, you are now just a series of tubes, clips and metal funnels away from awesome sound.
Now, in order to figure out the exact combination of these things you’ll need to translate the instructions from Japanese." [Via].
posted by Fizz
on Jun 17, 2012 -
14 comments
"
From photography’s earliest days, enterprising practitioners realized they could take their services directly to the people. This lead to the horse-drawn wagons called “Daguerreotype Salons” and then to portable, darkroom tents that allowed wet-plate photographers to make pictures outside. As technology advanced, the tents morphed into a single apparatus that combined both camera and darkroom, which allowed photographers to work anywhere. Afghanistan is one of the last places where street vendor photographers still use such a hand-made, wooden camera called kamra-e-faoree or “instant camera.” Observing this practice lead photographer Lukas Birk & anthropologist Sean Foley to undertake the Afghan Box Camera Project." -
Photo Technique Magazine introduction to an interview with Lukas Birk
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on May 9, 2012 -
4 comments
Descriptive Camera, 2012 "The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene." [more inside]
posted by delmoi
on Apr 25, 2012 -
51 comments
DIY Audio,
DIY Electronics,
DIY Guitar,
DIY Synthesizers,
DIY Recording.
Fundamentals of audio.
Optimize your Mac for audio.
Build a music server.
How vacuum tubes work.
Tour a brass instrument factory. How to maintain your
clarinet,
trumpet,
flute,
saxophone,
guitar. All this and
much, much more at
THE ELECTRIC WEB MATRIX.
posted by HumanComplex
on Apr 12, 2012 -
17 comments
The SAFETY PIN REVIEW is a new, weekly literary magazine featuring fiction of less than 30 words, with a major D.I.Y. twist: in addition to being published online, each story is hand-painted onto a cloth back patch, which is attached (via safety pins) to one of our operatives—a collective network of authors, punks, thieves and anarchists—who wear it everywhere they go for a week. [more inside]
posted by Sailormom
on Apr 6, 2012 -
23 comments
