Bruce Sterling, sci-fi author / futurist / design critic extraordinaire, has posted his final Viridian note. He has lots of advice relevant for Makers. Some of my favorite: Get excellent tools and appliances. Not a hundred bad, cheap, easy ones. Get the genuinely good ones. Work at it. Pay some attention here, do not neglect […]
If seeing a tandem bike riding by makes you momentarily pause and have a look, imagine your delay when a 15-person bicycle-truck slowly passes by. Called the Busycle, this bicycle behemoth moves under the power of 28 human legs, plus a driver. And while it can only go about 4 miles per hour, the infectious […]
If you’re driving through the rural town of Panama, N. Y., and forgot to wear a watch, you’re in luck. Engineer John Miktuk used scrap LEDs and a GPS to assemble a giant clock on the side of his garage. The timekeeper began as a sign of self-appreciation. Miktuk had a bunch of red LEDs […]
Turn off TVs by just looking at them – By Mitch Altman…. “Hey, you mind turning that thing off?” Simple enough question, but I got tired of people looking at me like I’m from Mars. When a TV is on in the room, I can’t think. I just stare at the thing and drool. So […]
Photograph by Thomas Hartkop Mike and Dave Hartkop had been eyeing their father’s abandoned satellite dish in the garage for years. But it took an especially productive night of brainstorming at the local pub to come up with an idea that tapped into their respective interests in coffee and solar energy to put that dish […]
“A custom-made life is better than a Wal-Mart world,” says Sean Barrow. Tall, dark, and tattooed, Barrow looks more like a rock star than the avid eco-design aficionado he is. His post-apocalyptic appearance at first glance seems at odds with the elegant, minimal, Japa-nese-inspired aesthetic he studies and employs in his sustainable furniture making. But […]
Matt Jones contemplates life by building moving sculptures that fail to replicate it. A graduate student in art at Stanford University, his investigations have led him, among other things, to use an air compressor to animate a respiratory system fashioned from old bicycle inner tubes, and to motorize a carpet of zip ties laced with […]
