Year: 2010

What do YOU call these things?

What do YOU call these things?

I use this tool all the time, but rarely have I ever heard any two people refer to it by the same name. “Wire cutters” is what I called them growing up, but since then I have heard “diagonal cutters,” “diagonal pliers,” “diags,” “side cutters,” “side cutting pliers,” “snips,” “snippers,” “dog-nips,” the easily-misinterpreted “strippers,” and the downright offensive “nips” and “dikes” (which apparently upsets Dutch people for some reason). So I’m starting a collection. Have I missed anything? What do you call them?

LED lighting PCB board etching

LED lighting PCB board etching

MAKE Flickr pool member Joel Miller (jmillerid) is planning some LED lighting for his house and has been evaluating Luxeon Rebel LEDs. He etched these boards to experiment with different colors, their heat values, etc. Luxeon Rebels are designed to dissipate heat through a large “no connection” solder pad directly under the chip. There are […]

Typekit to the Rescue!

For those of you who have beat your head repeatedly against the archaic wall of finite system-only web fonts, relief is here. Tired of Arial? Bored with Times New Roman? Fatigued by Verdana? Insulted by Comic Sans? Me too. Typekit to the rescue! Typekit is a San Francisco web app company produced by Small Batch […]

Circuit bent toy frog

Spotted in the MAKE Forums: Mischka modified this motion-activated greeting toy, making it into a simple sample and loop frog noise machine. There don’t seem to an explanation of how it was done, but it looks like a fun project! More: Flashback: Circuit Bending How-To: Circuit-bending the VL-Tone Circuit bending work station MIDI-controlled circuit bending […]