Month: December 2010

Make: Projects – Light switch time capsule

Make: Projects – Light switch time capsule

I get nostalgic when I move out of a home, especially if it’s one I’ve lived in awhile. Leaving a secret treasure or two, stashed here and there, seems to help me get closure. Unlike, say, dropping a note down inside the wall, a note on the back of a switch plate is likely to be found sooner or later, but not right away. I’ve included a PDF template with a tiny font that makes it easy to fit a 500-word message on the back of a standard light switch plate.

Lego gunge

Lego gunge

Searching Flickr groups for “Lego” returns over four-thousand hits. Among the interesting oddities I’ve discovered so far is the LEGO Life-Size weapons group, which has 160 items. Shown here is M4 v5 by The Dawg’s Guns. There are also Lego knives, Lego bombs–even a wearable Lego Boba Fett get-up.

Top 10: Robots doing stuff that scares the &$#! out of me

In truth, I regard the “robot uprising” meme with about the same level of seriousness as the “zombie apocalypse” meme. I suppose robots becoming sentient, independent, organized, and uncontrollably violent is at least plausible, but if I let all the plausible apocalypses keep me awake nights, I’d never sleep again. So, in the spirit of fun, here’s a collection of videos showing the mad, mad foolishness that roboticists have been up to equipping our future overlords with their tools of power. Or, in a more serious vein: Look at all the amazing stuff robots can do these days!

Intern’s Corner: Yagi Antenna

Intern’s Corner: Yagi Antenna

MAKE’s awesome interns tell about the projects they’re building in the Make: Labs, the trouble they’ve gotten into, and what they’ll make next. By Tyler Moskowite, engineering intern One of my all-time favorite projects to build has to be the Yagi Antenna from Make: Volume 24. The Yagi Antenna tunes into satellites orbiting the Earth […]