Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, a Finnish crafter who presented today at the Reboot conference in Copenhagen, has written a draft crafter’s manifesto that reads like a blueprint for the Enlightenment crossed with an entrepreneur’s prayer. Good stuff. My favorite, #6 – Work inspires work. Seeing what other people have made generates new ideas and designs. [via] Link.
Altoids tins are one of favorite projects cases (seen here). Now Altoids is having a very neat Maker-like contest. To enter you just need to make something out of the Altoids Tin, it can be techy or arty, it can also be the tin from mints, sours and chewing gun. I really like that Altoids is encouraging reuse of their containers. First prize is $1000! Update: Just be aware they’ll own the copyright to it. They should do a Creative Commons License Link.
Great little how-to…I did some research on drip irrigation systems and was impressed to find the cost and features of this technology has really come along. You don’t need to know much about hardware or plumbing, nor do you have to dig any trenches. While older systems were prone to clogging these new systems are really flexible, pretty much leak-proof, and go together like a box of legos. Link.
Here’s some really good photo documentation of binding books. Printing, threading and the part I was most interested in – making and gluing a cover. Put a nice coverage of glue on the spine of your signatures. I also like to put some glue on the inside of the cover along the spine, making a little side to side pattern. Try not to get any glue on the face of the pages or the inside covers. If you make a mess just wipe it up. [via] Link.
Chris writes “Selected articles from past issues of ReNew magazine (sustainable technology – lots of DIY/MAKE-type articles). Of interest in light of recent blog entries see “Issue 83: Biodiesel on the farm – One Victorian farmer is running all his vehicles and machinery on biodiesel he makes from his own oilseed crop. He even supplies his own biodiesel recipe tips.” I’ll be reading a lot of these! Link.
The Juicebox is a cheap (under $25 in some stores) music, video, photo viewer from Mattel aimed at kids. There are some hacking projects going on, and we’ll have some articles on that soon, but here’s a good how-to on putting ebooks on one using JPEGBook which makes images from text and you view those on the Juicebox. Link.
I need to try this to confirm it works…It’s possible to send a VGA “video” signal down an ordinary Cat-5 ethernet cable. This is possible for two reasons: firstly, although VGA connectors have 15 (or 13) pins, only about 8 wires are actually necessary to send the VGA signal; and secondly, ethernet cable is twisted pair, and we can use the magic of twisted pair to push the analog VGA signal further than spec. Link.
