Mizuta Tasogare and Kato Jado do some intricate fancy artwork by carving pencils. Their amazing techniques create some fascinating subjects such as “Chained pencil” and my favorite “Winter’s Big Triangle”. Number two pencils will never be the same. Link.
Feria Urbana, is an urban crafts fair featuring artists and designers from the Bay Area. Recently the Make team went to check out the event and all the cool crafty goods. There were lots of great handmade items from knitted scaves, silkscreened t-shirts, tons of jewelry, and paper goods as well. The event happens again next weekend, December 17-18 at The Canvas Gallery in San Francisco. Photos. Link.
Doh! er, Play Doh! “Fingerprint scanning devices often use basic technology, such as an optical camera that take pictures of fingerprints which are then “read” by a computer. In order to assess how vulnerable the scanners are to spoofing, Schuckers and her research team made casts from live fingers using dental materials and used Play-Doh to create molds. They also assembled a collection of cadaver fingers. In the laboratory, the researchers then systematically tested more than 60 of the faked samples. The results were a 90 percent false verification rate.” [via] Link.
Nice mod if you have an old Dreamcast laying around, Raph writes – “The image on a TV is always a little too blurry for my taste, and the quality of a VGA image is very superior. I had always dreamed to be able to use my SNES on a PC monitor, but the SNES did not have a VGA output. When I learned that the Dreamcast could output a VGA signal, I installed a VGA connector on it almost instantly.” [via] Link.
300 hours and approximately 130 wood joints to build, Nicholas Falzone’s excellent case mod “The Sangaku case mod a fusion of computer technology with Japanese the furniture-making tradition. Sangaku translates to “mathematics tablet” in Japanese. The top connects the sides, with the shorter pieces lining up with the lines from the doors and the acrylic strip carrying the black from the front of the case up and over through the back. The two sides started out being four sliding shoji doors, two per side, but to get the lighting to work, I combined the two on one side. The joinery on the doors was made almost entirely by hand, using Japanese chisels and a dozuki saw.” [via] Link.
Print out a working plastic gun, or a self contained puzzle…Sascha from wmmna writes “The design products-department at the Royal College in London teamed up with a company called 3D Systems to get their hands on some state-of-the-art rapid-prototyping equipment. The brief was to create projects that are not prototypes but products that couldn’t have been made with any other technique. The results were quite stunning and point towards a future of manufacturing that seems to be swiftly approaching…” Link.
In MAKE 01 we have a great soldering primer, here’s another to check out from the Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library. “This written guide will help beginners and novices to obtain effective results when soldering electronic components. If you have little or no experience of using a soldering iron, then EPE recommends that you practice your soldering technique on some fresh surplus components and clean stripboard (protoboard), before experimenting with a proper constructional project. This will help you to avoid the risk of disappointment when you start to assemble your first prototypes. If you’ve never soldered before, then read on!” Link.
