Roman Multitool from 3rd Century CE
I see a knife, a fork, and a spoon. Plus some other implements about which I don’t really care to speculate. No flash drive, though. More deets over at The Fitzwilliam Museum. [via Neatorama]
Computers & Mobile
The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for digital gadgetry, open code, smart hacks, and more. Processing power to the people!
Fail Whale hat
Rachel @ CRAFT points us to Hine’s awesome Twitter Fail Whale hat, which is most certainly full of win.
DIY Arduino water meter with iPad display
Some of the folks over at Teague Labs have been noodling around with measuring water consumption. They’ve built a graphing water meter using a YellowJacket Arduino board with built-in WiFi and coolant flow meter from a PC cooling system to see how they used water around the office. Water conservation is major concern in many areas around the world. Tools that allow us to observe and correct our behaviors help us towards a path to sustainability. Schematics and source code are available if you want to try it out for yourself.
Following MAKE (or any RSS feed) on a tiny LCD
Flickr user YILDIRIM Ahmet put together this simple LCD RSS feed reader so that he could stay up to date with the latest MAKE Online posts, even when his computer monitor is off.
Duelling useless machines
YouTuber SaskView is doing alright with this stunt: He’s coupled two Most Useless Machines together with a bar, at the switches, and turned them loose against one another. The result is highly amusing to watch (500K+ views so far), even without the whole “it’s a metaphor for the two-party system” bit. [via Boing Boing]
Magnificent mech costume
Holy smokes. My personal post-Halloween costume timer officially expired yesterday, but I had to make an exception for this work of art from “friend of a friend” of Redditron This_comment_has. So. Awesome. [via Boing Boing] More: Behold Your Doom: Children’s battle mech Real-life mech awakens, emits flame from appendages Star Wars AT-ST (Chicken walker) costume […]
How-To: Build large couches on the cheap
There’s a lot to like about this tutorial by Rain Noe over at Core77 about how to build upholstered benches called “banquettes,” not the least of which is Rain’s amusing and engaging prose style. His attention-grabbing opening line is one for the books. We don’t see a lot of DIY couch builds.