What do 3D printing, jelly, liver transplants, chainmail, dental fillings, ferrofluids, and the Six Million Dollar man have to tell us about our future? Materials scientist and engineer Mark Miodownik lets us know in
this Royal Institution lecture.
posted by cthuljew
on Mar 22, 2013 -
8 comments
NEW from VIDEO Magazine, arising out of its popular "Arcade Alley" column, it's
ELECTRONIC GAMES Magazine!
(page of PDF links) Brought to you by editors Frank Laney Jr. and
Bill Kunkel, and filled with all the latest news on programmable home console games, computer games (with special coverage for the new ATARI 800 system), stand-alone electronic devices and arcade gaming.
[more inside]
posted by JHarris
on Feb 7, 2013 -
37 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
Adachi Tomomi,
Alex Baker,
Ian Baxter,
Ithai Benjamin,
Lesley Flanigan,
Lorin Edwin Parker,
Peter Blasser,
Phil Archer,
Todd Bailey,
Tommy Stephenson & Patrick McCarthy,
Tuomao Tammenpaa, and
Vasco Alvo are all featured in Nicolas Collins' extraordinarily good book
Handmade Electronic Music.
posted by mhjb
on Jan 21, 2011 -
14 comments
Kyle Wiens of iFixit talks to ArsTechnica about iFixit's history ("my iBook G3...It seemed crazy that I couldn't find any information online on how to get the thing back together"), his goals ("we realized that the world needed free, open source service manuals, and the manufacturers weren't stepping up"), planned obsolescence, the dirty tricks manufacturers pull to make it harder to repair your own stuff ("Torx has a patent...They're using lawyers to prevent people from making their computers last longer than 3-400 battery cycles"), who are the design kings of repair and servicing, who the villains are, and why recycling electronics isn't all you'd probably like it to be.
posted by rodgerd
on Sep 11, 2010 -
43 comments
HELLO WORLD (SLYT) "Lego felt tip 110" printer connected to an Apple Mac. This is not a kit you can buy and does not use mindstorms. I designed/built/coded it all from scratch including analog motor electronics, sensors and printer driver, the USB interface uses a "wiring" board.
posted by grumblebee
on Jun 2, 2010 -
42 comments
"We’re living in a disposable world. It’s just not worth it to repair things; it’s not worth it to build things from scratch. The magic of that seems to have passed.” The
death of Radio Shack.
[more inside]
posted by woodjockey
on May 10, 2010 -
123 comments
Audiophoolery: Pseudoscience in Consumer Audio.
You might think that a science-based field like audio engineering would be immune to the kind of magical thinking we see in other fields. Unfortunately, you would be wrong [...] As a consumerist, it galls me to see people pay thousands of dollars for fancy-looking wire that’s no better than the heavy lamp cord they can buy at any hardware store. Or magic isolation pads and little discs made from exotic hardwood that purport to “improve clarity and reduce listening fatigue,” among other surprising claims. The number of scams based on ignorance of basic audio science grows every day. Via.
posted by amyms
on Jan 11, 2010 -
209 comments
Computer music is relatively old, going back
to the very early 1950s. In the following decades, people have been creative with programmable technology, leading to
"She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain" being played on an IBM
chain printer back in 1966, and in more recent years,
HP ScanJet 5100c included an Easter Egg. The
HP ScanJet 4c's SCL (Scanner Control Language) unofficial PLAY TUNE command lead to
these fine little ditties. Now over a decade ago, the duo known as
[The User] enlisted
three specialists to operate a computer program via a server that synchronized the dot-matrix printers and read complex ASCII text files in order to create musical compositions. The result was a techno-sounding piece that was performed by the administrators of the system, rather than one that was simply being played. Like
a symphony of car horns, the coordination of these printers became
Symphony #1 and
#2 for Dot Matrix Printers (
samples of Symphony #2,
Symphony #2 Slashdot thread). [More computer music exploration inside]
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on May 26, 2009 -
27 comments
Inspiration to do something with your holiday weekend: Steven K. Roberts is an interesting guy with a bit of a hobby problem. In 1983 his
recumbent bike sported "only" a security system, lights, a CB radio and a state-of-the-art
TRS80/100 laptop.
Winnebikeo would eventually evolve into
BEHEMOTH, the "Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine... Only Too Heavy". BEHEMOTH incorporated (amongst other things) HUD, cooling system,
small Sun SPARCstation, HAM Radio, credit card verifier, bubblejet printer, hydraulic disk brakes...
[more inside]
posted by Ogre Lawless
on May 21, 2009 -
28 comments
Friday Flash Fun*:
Конструктор: Engineer of the People, in which you are an engineer working in a top-secret semiconductor facility called H3, designing top-secret integrated circuits based on specifications provided to you.
*For certain values of 'fun'
posted by daniel_charms
on Mar 27, 2009 -
36 comments
The coming memristor revolution in electronics and how it works. The newly created memristor, only the fourth fundamental fundamental type of passive circuit element, has the promise of computing advances both prosaic (faster, cheaper and "bigger" flash drives) and momentous (relatively effortless mimicry of brain cells and their activity). This is the story of the memristor's genesis, told by R. Stanley Williams, the leader of the team that created the device.
[more inside]
posted by NortonDC
on Dec 7, 2008 -
43 comments
