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.
Neat lamp a MAKE Flickr pool member made – the base and top are poplar, while the dowels are oak. I used very small dowels to hold the base together (you can barely see them as spots near the bottommost CD). The bottom two layers of the base are hollow, and there’s a piece of round plexiglass to hold everything in. The light is a standard cold cathode tube used for case modding. This thing is freakin’ heavy, since there’s over 200 CDs. Link.
The midiGun is a MIDI controller in a gun. Not a real gun, but one covered in slightly camp flouro green plastic, lots of knobs and switches, a crossfader on the bottom of the barrel, a laser sight and lots more, detailed on this chart. It’s designed using a Doepfer pocket electronics module to control DJ software. [via] Link.
Very fun processing app – Drawing toy that produces parameterized organisms. Procedural animation allows the organisms to swim around in a virtual fluid environment interacting with each other. The project now interprets strokes made from a tablet pen. When a stroke is completed (or closed into a loop) it manifests an organism based on stroke length, speed, and pressure. While not exactly gesture recognition, it was a quick and dirty solution to what otherwise might have been a nightmare to develop (gesture recognition). [via] Link.
G4’s Attack of the Show tricked out a Big Wheel adding DVD, GPS, neon lights, extra wheels and a lot more. Link. If you’re interested in the Big wheel modding comminuty, check out www.bigwheelrally.com – lots of HOW TOs and events.
Nice hack for duping slides- I started this because I have about 2000 35mm slides and nearly that many color negatives I’d like to convert to digital images, and many of them are 30 years old or more and starting to deteriorate. My first attempt involved purchasing a slide scanner from the-store-that-must-not-be-named, but it took like 3 to 4 minutes to prescan and then scan to file, and then it usually botched the exposure or the color balance. I realized that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life scanning slides in this manner, so I started thinking about other solutions…[via] Link.
Pretty cool case mod- Lucas could easily sell these and pre-load copies of Galaxies on them. Here’s how to make your own Darth Vadar head PC. Ingredients: PIA 800 Mini-ITX Mainboard, Fujitsu 20gig 5400rpm HDD, 1×256 generic SDRam, Astek Micro ATX PSU 90wt, LiteOn 16x DVD drive, Don Post Studios Darth Vader helmet Link.
Hmm, I’d like to learn how to make these. These pencils don’t consist of any wood. Instead they are made out of 20-33% recycled blue denin jeans that have been ground up. The rest is the recycled post-consumer paper. To complete the blue theme, they have a blue eraser and a pewter blue ferrule. For something…greener, you can also get pencils made out of “old money” or recycled U.S. dollar bills. A pack of 12 costs $6. Link.
