Cheap portable book scanner Instructable
For about $20 in parts and a spare point-and-shoot digital camera you can build a cheap portable book scanner with this Instructable from DHagen.
Imaging
Postmodern propaganda posters
Brooklyn’s Brian Moore makes these cool information age / 20th century propaganda mash-up posters. Right now, he’s selling prints of Loose Tweets Sink Fleets and Wikipedia is Free, shown above, and he’s got several more designs in this Flickr set. [via Boing Boing]
ANSR near space balloon launch
Todd Harrison (Mesa, AZ) has a nice post on his blog about a recent ANSR (Arizona Near Space Research) balloon launch, the group’s 55th! Rich Osgood from Heatsynclabs.org and I were invited observers. Our objective was to help track the balloon and locate the landing zone while testing our own radio balloon tracking equipment. I’m […]
Mechanically dimmed fluorescent lamp
In a purely practical sense, this idea is kind of goofy since electric lights can, in general, be dimmed, you know, electrically. However, and if my understanding is correct, that’s a little trickier with fluorescent lighting. It can be done, but it’s considerably more complicated than with incandescent bulbs, and there are problems maintaining a consistent color temperature. Even though it’s not exactly ground-breaking, then, I still really like this mechanically-dimmed lamp by designer Camille Blin, at least in part because it reminds me of the cool tunable neutral density filters (e.g. below) I used to play with on the optics bench in grad school. [via NOTCOT]
Caleb Charland’s science art
I love Caleb Charland‘s geeked-out photography. His work, in essence, consists of scientific experiments explored on film — magnets, electricity, fluid dynamics — all beautiful. My process and choice of subject matter stems from growing up in a do-it-yourself household where I learned to appreciate the power that tools and materials hold. As I explore […]
Charles Platt at Space Access ’10
MAKE Contributing Editor (and author of Make: Electronics) Charles Platt just filed this little report from the commercial space conference he’s covering for us. — Gareth The Lynx suborbital spaceplane from XCOR I’m attending the Space Access ’10 conference in Phoenix, Arizona, with the intention of writing about some particularly exciting ventures for a future […]
Owl nest web cam
I lived in a rental years ago that had a water tower on the property. Each year barn owls nested in the eaves of the water tower, and each year my husband and I spent many evenings sitting nearby watching them. We saw babies learn to fly, mother and father swoop in and out with […]
