Sci-fi and horror author extraordinaire, John Shirley (whom William Gibson dubbed “Cyberpunk Patient Zero”), sent me a link to this fascinating article about the birth of the square pixel in digital imaging. The piece starts out: Russell Kirsch says he’s sorry. More than 50 years ago, Kirsch took a picture of his infant son and […]
By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics Kirigami is a traditional art of cutting paper. Ulrich Mikloweit takes it a step further by assembling many pieces of kirigami into intricate mathematical models. This is a snub dodecadodecahedron made from 924 cut and colored facets. Ulrich has dedicated years to making hundreds of such hand-cut […]
Cut on the solid lines, fold on the dashes, and glue on the striped tabs to create dimensional block letters of your text.
Those who follow Jeri’s mad-scientist-like curiosity and sci-tech explorations in her many YouTube vids know that she’s recently been hot to create electroluminescence. In this vid, she tries to make her own phoshor. It didn’t quite work out, but she explains the process and then shows something cool that she did discover, triboluminescence, the optical […]
Just last week we mentioned the OpenPCR project and included a link to their Kickstarter page. Throughout the week support for the project poured in from all over the Internet and eventually the project surpassed their initial target. Then on Friday the project hit a snag. The heated lid that warms the top of the tubes kept burning out. That’s when Tito Jankowski decided to post a question soliciting feedback on O’Reilly Answers.
From Pat and Tim of BotHacker, printed on their RepStrap. STL files available on Thingiverse.
They sent me a couple of samples, shown above, which I just now received and applied to my wall, and I am pleased to be able to report that the technology is apparently everything they claim. Plus the prints look great. They sent me the four-foot size, which they recommend applying with a friend, because you have to peel it off of a wax-paper backing and get it aligned and smooth on the wall and that’s a lot easier, with a large size, if you’ve got four hands. But I was able to do it by myself with only a minimum of swearing by just peeling off the top edge of the decal, aligning it and smoothing it down on the wall, and then reaching behind the hanging print to peel off the backing from the top down, smoothing the decal to the wall as I went. I just put them up a week ago, so I can’t report anything about how long the adhesive really lasts, or if it will really stay on the wall for months or years until I move. Or whether, when I do finally remove it, if it will really leave the wall undamaged. But this far into the product life-cycle, anyway, I am beyond impressed. The prints cling tight to the wall and, unless you look really close, appear to be painted on–like you’ve got custom murals painted right on your walls.
