Owen has put together a pretty amazing computer controlled sheet metal cutting system. The metal is cut using a 100 watt C02 laser, it took him two years to build. He’s only had it up and running for one week, this weekend was the first time he started making parts.
Via del.icio.us– Here’s a neat article about making a magnetic spice rack using a sheet of metal, magnets and watchmaker cases. I really like this since you can see the spices inside the cases and arrange them in all sorts of neat ways or even via recipes. I think I might make one for all the little screws, nuts and bolts I have and mount it to a huge wall, possibly adding a white board between the metal. Article here, photo here.
I hope to get to NYC to check this out, it looks amazing! Many of the geared, motor driven exhibits are so big, they needed to be housed in the Sculpture garden. Ãœberorgan, created from multiple bus-size biomorphic balloons, each with its horns tuned to a different note in an octave, is a gargantuan self-playing organ. Its musical score consists of a 200-foot-long scroll of dots and dashes encoding old hymns, pop classics, and improvisational ditties. Tim Hawkinson explains: “The score is deciphered by the organ’s brain- a bank of light-sensitive switches- and then reinterpreted by a series of switches and relays that translate the original patterns into nonrepeating variations of the score.”.
Here’s a neat site- it’s an ongoing journal on building an independent movie theater in Springfield, MO. In Seattle we have few, and I’ve seen tons of great movies, but I know many places only have the big Cineplexes and nothing else. If you’ve ever wondered would it would take to start a theater, this is an interesting read.
I just got around to listening to this week’s Science Friday I recorded. The 2nd hour had a great segment with clips of people who knew or worked with Einstein. It’s his 126th birthday and 2005 is the 100 year anniversary of Albert Einstein’s “miraculous year” and- it’s worldwide “Year of Physics” (more here). The other part of the show had Mitchell Baker, President, Mozilla Foundation talking about FireFox. You can listen to the segments here.
Around June 3rd of last year I happen to be staring at the sky around 3am and saw a huge ball of fire streak across the sky followed by a few “thumps” (story here). This weekend we were treated to another- a huge green glowing ball with a blue tail. Oddly enough we also had a small earthquake at the same time, but our local seismology laboratory said it was unrelated.
The Zipit is a little $99 WiFi device with LCD screen that is primarily targeted to homes with kids who instant message a lot and would use this as opposed to using a computer just to chat. Some folks are starting to hack it up in some really cool ways, here are a few sites I’ve gathered- Yahoo groups with instructions and posts about getting Linux on it, Zipit’s GNUpage, AiboHack’s Zipit page (he’s doing some amazing stuff) and a great Zipit overview page from Elk Grove wireless. If you’re in to these let me know, we might do an article on it in Make.
