In the Apple guide tour videos, you can see that the person using the iPad has MAKE magazine bookmarked! I haven’t seen an iPad in person, but tablets are interesting to think about when it comes to portable computing. I’m really looking forward to hacking an iPad. When the iPhone came out, jailbreaking and doing […]
While this dress by Abbey Liebman incorporating flexible photovoltaics for charging personal electronics is interesting, what really caught my eye was the fact that it uses an improved type of conductive thread based on a proprietary blend of polymers and nanoparticles.
You click on a link and buy some silver-based conductive thread right now, but over the course of years, the current silver-based threads will slowly oxidize in air and the conductivity will start to degrade. Presumably, the new material (from the Hinestroza research group at Cornell) does not.
About a year ago I was considering a tutorial for Make: Projects about making one’s own conductive thread using carbon nanotubes (CNTs). At the time, you could buy small samples of CNTs from several places around the web at “educator’s” prices. Research on CNT-based conductive inks has shown that carbon nanotubes dispersed in water bond strongly enough to cellulose in paper to resist washing and prolonged mechanical wear, and would also, presumably, show similar performance on cotton thread. So I’m pretty sure you could make durable conductive thread just by soaking regular cotton thread in a dispersion of CNTs in water. Unfortunately, more research has shown, pretty conclusively, that carbon nanotubes are bad for you. Which is probably why the supply of those accessible “educator” samples seem to have dried up. Oh well.
Many of you may have seen Becky’s Make: Online post about John Young’s clever p8tch system from a couple years ago. Now we’re excited to announce that John has recently opened a store selling them in the Makers Market. When you buy a p8tch, you get a velcro-backed waterproof patch, in one of several cool […]
Xeni from Boing Boing managed to get ahold of a pre-release Apple iPad (seen above). The folks at iFixit got their hands on a pre-release Apple unit too and did their usual teardown trickery on it. Kyle writes: We had to resort to some subversive techniques involving a cop from Ottawa, a donkey, and three […]
Sony Steals Feature From Your PlayStation 3 @ EFF. Reach in and delete, b00m! …Sony provided the Other OS feature in order to support IBM’s Cell Project, which produced the PS3’s CPU and made it practical to use PS3 consoles as compute nodes for a scientific supercomputer. The U.S. Army did just that, buying more […]
Hot off the press iTunes 9.1 (not in software updates) but a download on Apple’s site – it now supports “books” since the iPads are making their way around the globe. I have a Kindle and I like it, but I might go iPad if I can’t search text on all the “Kindle” apps (Mac, […]
Heatswell via NOTCOT. Pour a hot beverage like coffee, tea, hot chocolate or soup into this thin stackable coffee cup and watch its midsection swell to form a cool insulating collar – a 100% genuine endothermic reaction.
