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The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the kitchen, garage and backyard from food to furniture to fun & games for your family.

Flux Thursday in NYC

Flux Thursday in NYC

If you’re into DIY in NYC, I wouldn’t miss Flux Thursday tomorrow: Flux Thursday is a monthly dinner, potluck and salon held at Flux Factory, your and my favorite artist collective in Queens, NYC. The June 2010 installment is kind of special, because it will also include an awards ceremony for Flux’s current exhibition, The […]

Diana Eng reports from Hamvention 2010

On May 14-16, 2010, over 15,000 ham radio enthusiasts gathered for the annual Hamvention in Dayton, Ohio. From the moment I drove up behind the creator of APRS (GPS for ham radio) there was something radio-related to see. It was like ham radio’s Maker Faire. I’ve captured some of the highlights in this video. There […]

Recipe: Schiacciata Italian Bread

Jamie Nisbet spent a year living in Florence, Italy, and one of her favorite foods from the region is schiacciata bread. On her blog, she writes: It is a flat bread, whose name is derived from a verb meaning “crushed.” The bread is typically oiled and salted, but can be made into several different varieties […]

Beautiful overengineered tape dispenser

Beautiful overengineered tape dispenser

There’s a great thing that happens, every so often, when people have access to machine tools: They go a little bit nuts. They’re bumping along one day, doing what they do, and some mundane object crosses them for the last time. This or that thing never works as well as it should, or breaks too easily, or gets misplaced once too often, and it occurs to them: Hey, I could fix that–and not just for myself, for today or for the next couple of weeks or months, but for the rest of my natural life and possibly those of my descendants for the foreseeable future of the species. And something like this solid 6061 aluminum Scotch tape dispenser from Henry Herndon is the result. The sea may be vast, our boats may be small and constantly buffeted by the gales of an indifferent universe ruled by a howling demon of entropy, but that Scotch-tape-dispenser-problem is fixed now, by God. On to the next thing.