Great use of retired cigarette machines! What is an Art*o*mat? Art*o*mats are retired cigarette vending machines that have been converted to vend art. There are 76 active machines in various locations throughout the country. What do you get from an Art*o*mat? The experience of pulling the knob alone is quite a thrill, but you also walk away with an original work of art. Ker-plunk! What an easy way to become an art collector. Link
In MAKE 01 readers were challenged with a scenario of being stranded far from civilization with a dead car battery. Tons of amazing responses and earlier we posted the analysis and winners. Here’s what they won- a custom Maker-made T-Shirt, a SWISSMEMORY
USB Victorinox 512MB and this MAKE trophy from William Lidwell of stuffcreators -photos of the Victorinox, packaging and shirt here. Issue 02 (shipping now) will have another great shifter! Be sure to enter!
If you live in Bat country, this is good project- A bat detector is an instrument that will detect the presence of bats by tuning into the echolocation ultrasounds they produce. There are a variety of commercial bat detectors available but what excited me were the numerous internet sites with home-built detector circuits. I stumbled across these sites while trying to decide what to do with a 1968 Braun Cylindric T2 cigarette lighter. What resulted was the Cylindric Ultrasonic Bat Detector. Link.
IBM has a cool series of articles where they build an embedded application using a Mac Mini. The application itself is the classic photo booth: you pay a bit of money, a flashbulb goes off, and a minute later you’ve got some pictures of yourself, or perhaps yourselves if you’re out with a friend. More recent versions of this booth create more complicated pictures, adding additional features, such as overlays, or possibly adding video to the mix. The test application starts as a a fairly simplistic form of the photo booth application, with room for further development. By the end of this series, you’ll be accepting money and printing pictures. Link.
The knitPro tool will take any GIF, JPEG or PNG image you throw at it and make a knitting grid in PDF as a guide. Handy, it’s also part of a larger project called “logoknitting” microRevolt fiber hobbyists use the tactic of “logoknitting” for sweatshop awareness. Logoknitting means knitting a logo into a garment. They knit logos of well known sweatshop offenders, as a way to promote discussion on how advertising, labor, production and consumption relate. Link. Gallery.
Incredibly lo-fi DIY attempt in making panoramic video, with interesting results- Ingredients: Old plastic Christmas tree bauble found in the garden, Felt tip pen, Blu Tak, “Polar Coordinates” distortion in After Effects. Seems possible to make a version with a larger mirror ball, the effect is pretty neat. Link.
I’m going to try to round up some Science listening or watching each week- Science Friday: Self-Replicating Robots / Science of Sexual Abuse & Stem Cell Spinal Cord Treatment / Science and Technology in the UK. The power chat with Sir David King was really great, you can conserve resources and grow economies it seems. Subscribe to the Podcast here. Eyes of Nye has Addiction and Antibiotics as the two episodes that came over my TV recorder. It would be great to get a non-Flash version of the eyesofnye site, RSS feeds and an easy way to link to the content on the site- there’s great stuff hidden in there. Link.
