The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for digital gadgetry, open code, smart hacks, and more. Processing power to the people!
This man really belongs on Broadway, but he’s coming to Queens for World Maker Faire on Saturday, and will be doing David Pogue’s iPhone Brain Dump on the Main Stage at 4pm. In this half hour, he’ll dazzle you with the coolest apps, share some undocumented tips and tricks, look back at the iPhone’s unlikely origins, and look forward to the future of mobile phones and applications.
Josh Billions demonstrates the Mapbag at Maker Faire Bay Area 2011. It is a bicycle messenger bag with a ring of vibrating motors sewn into its strap, whose positions correspond to compass points. This soft circuit project uses a Lilypad in conjunction with the gps feature in an Iphone, allowing the user to set a destination and be given constant haptic feedback through the fabric in order to stay on course and in the right direction. This acts as an exploratory wayfinding tool – a fun and useful alternative to a standard turn-by-turn map.
Copenhagen art studio illutron conducted a 3-day hackathon using Xperia phones. Illutron is located on Copehnagen’s south harbor in a boat, how cool is that? [Via Arduino]
Cool find by my old pal Billy Baque. The manual describes the operation of the Hasselblad 500 EL/M, and gives general advice about how to take good photographs in space, should you ever find yourself there. With a camera. As Billy says, “[i]t makes working on the shuttle seem less glamorous and a lot more like hard, hard work.”
Our friends over at iFixit recently tore apart a Motorola Droid Bionic to check out what’s inside. Surprisingly, the new 4.3″ handset was a breeze to strip down, with only eleven screws to get down to the board.
Leading off our Flickr pool round-up this week is a hot little red-headed astromech from Atlanta Mini Maker Faire, photographed by Chris Palmer. Other highlights include wooden gears, a homemade high-polish “dishing hammer,” and some more workshop pr0n. Check it out!
Michael S. Hart, the founder of the Project Gutenberg, passed away this week at age 64 in Urbana, Illinois. He single-handedly created the first free e-books and then organized a worldwide effort to give books their first digital form — as ASCII text. His chief goal was to make sure e-books were accessible to anyone for free on any device. His work in creating a truly public library is a lasting legacy, and Hart should be considered among the founders of the Free and Open Source movement.
