I, for one, welcome our new waffle making robot overlords – Jesse Klein is in no rush to get to the patent office. His invention – a robot that toasts, butters, pours syrup and spreads whipped cream on waffles – is both ingenious and absurd. It’s a contraption in the mold of Rube Goldberg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist known for his drawings of inventions that make simple tasks agonizingly complex [via] Link.
Garth on Extreme Craft writes “For every crafty punk rocker or artist dipping their toes into the craft world, there’s a techno-geek with a heart of gold and a yen for the handmade. So it is with Leah Buechley, a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Colorado. Leah is a part of the Craft Technology Group, which investigates intersections of craft and technology with a pedagogical bent. Her personal projects have included LED tank tops and bracelts with programmable light-up ornaments, math handbags, and an automated wine glass orchestra”… [via] Link.
It looks like taking your digital photos to the photo mart for printing might be a bit cheaper than printing it yourself at home. The printer companies make a lot of coin on the the ink, so in the end you pay more. As this is going on, more people are sharing photos online and may later use print services from those sites. How do you Makers out there print your photos? [via] Link.
Yahoo! enters the podcast arena with their own podcast directory and service – if you use the Yahoo! Music engine (our review here) or anything else it seems, you can sync to your music player too. I’ll give it a spin soon, looks promising. It’s pretty incredible that the DIY audio scene has so many options now – ODEO, iTunes, all the podcatcher applications… Link and here’s the MAKE audio show, which we’ll have more of soon, promise!
Go Stanley! Three driverless robotic vehicles led by Stanford University on Saturday crossed the finish line of a $2 million Pentagon-sponsored robot race across the rugged Mojave Desert. The race announcer did not immediately declare a winner because 22 out of the 23 robots left the starting line at staggered times at dawn, racing against the clock rather than each other. Link.
Neat HOW TO for keeping the mouse quieter if you have roommates – “Having used my silenced rodent for nearly 1/2 year at home, I finally decided to get rid of the clicking noise at work too and here’s the how-to. Some people wanted me to translate the original article, but I guess it’s better to start afresh with a revised and simplified approach”. Link.
Here’s a site with 1000 things made from Bamboo; once I looked at all the photos, the only thing I could think of is what can’t be made from bamboo. The gallery is pretty fun: the bike and mutli-story car park are my favorites. Link.
