Craft & Design
From traditional crafts to modern crafts, we’re covering news and interesting projects to educate you and keep you inspired. Design trends and pop culture related projects are here to inspire.
The Ascent – A Wooden Clock Kit
Krazydad writes – “I decided a few weeks ago to build a wooden gear clock because I wanted to understand the clock mechanism better. There are a number of websites that offer plans for wooden gear clocks, but as someone with absolutely no woodworkng experience (band practice generally interferes with taking shop class), and no tools, I needed something that was ready to build. I found three sites that offer such kits…” Here’s a review of the Ascent Wooden Gear Clock kit. Link.
HOW TO – Make caffeinated chocolate
We do cover a lot of food how to’s here, but this one is one I’ll actually make – “Ever had a big lunch and then fall into a food coma when you go back to work/class? Here’s a nice ‘pick me up’ treat that’s simple to make and delicious as well! Here are the stuff you need: Semi-Sweet Chocolate chips (or block), Coffee beans (maybe canned), wax paper, butter knife (or sm. offset spatula).” Link.
Turn virtual 3D objects into real world objects
Here it is…3D-printing a SecondLife / WoW character, and mashup into Google Earth! “OGLE (i.e. OpenGLExtractor) is a software package by Eyebeam R&D that allows for the capture and re-use of 3D geometry data from 3D graphics applications running on Microsoft Windows. It works by observing the data flowing between 3D applications and the system’s OpenGL library, and recording that data in a standard 3D file format. In other words, a ‘screen grab’ or ‘view source’ operation for 3D data.” [via] Link.
HOW TO – Inexpensive Panoramic Video
Bcmeikle has a great way of making cheap(er) QuickTime video panoramic movies… “For some time now I’ve been making video panoramas but how to capture them has remained a mystery. Here’s a great page that shows a ton of panoramic video systems. However when we talk about the QTVR community, we want fairly inexpensive, and it has to work on a macintosh computer….” [via] Link.
Etsy – Request something handmade
Etsy is experimenting with idea of requesting what you want made and having folks make it…love it! “If you want something made, create an Alchemy post describing what you want. You can post helpful pictures, set a deadline and a price range. People will then place bids, showing what they can do, for how much, and by when. As the person who made the listing, you choose which bid to accept and finalize the deal by agreeing to pay someone the specified price to make the item.” [via] Link.
Run an Apache web server on your phone…
“For quite some time it has been possible to access the Internet using mobile phones, although the role of the phone has strictly been that of a client. Considering that the modern phones have processing power and memory on par with and even exceeding that of webservers when the web was young, there really is no reason anymore why webservers could not reside on mobile phones and why people could not create and maintain their own personal mobile websites.” [via] Thanks Brian! Link.