Over on O’Reilly Radar, MAKE editor and publisher Dale Dougherty has a thought-provoking piece on remaking public broadcasting: Imagine a broadcast network in America that was dedicated to education, where the best educators had the opportunity to produce its programming, and where individuals as well as institutions could develop a new genre of wide-ranging educational […]
I’ve come across some pretty cool headphones, but most of them lack the mic and remote of the newer Apple earphones that come with the iPhone. This mod is pretty much what you’d expect, but sometimes a good visual cue helps trigger the creative process.
I’m digging the rocks supporting this ‘Agua Table’ by designer Domingos Tótora. Though they look totally real, they are actually made of recycled paper and glue.a
Over on DinoFab, Dean shows off his latest bike improvement, an LED light system that uses a generator built from an old printer stepper motor. He points readers to this article about how to generate electricity using steppers. Stepper Motor Powered Bike Light
Here’s a neat sound sculpture made by The Books. The spoons are animated by playing sounds on a speaker mounted behind them.
We recently had a question from a reader about this prop. “Connie” wrote in wanting to know how to replicate the mechanism that, in the movie, is used to unlock The Book’s cover. Never having seen The Mummy, I went into research mode and enqueued it from Netflix. Then I watched it. Big mistake.
But, you know, to each his or her own. And “The Book of the Dead,” with its ornate clasps and intricate star-shaped key, is admittedly an awesome prop. The scene Connie is referring to, I believe, occurs at almost exactly one hour into the “Deluxe Edition” cut of the film, and shows the intrepid but remarkably foolish archeologists inserting the aforementioned star-shaped key into a correspondingly star-shaped opening in the book’s cover, turning it, and thereby releasing the spring-loaded cover clasps and, with them, all manner of unpleasant whatnot.
So I started Googling around, looking for dweebs enthusiasts that might have already built such a thing. And while I did not find any working mechanical replicas of the prop, I did discover the remarkably beautiful static replica shown in the photo at the top of this post by Jeff Stelter of Stelter Creative Woodworks.
This deep trashcan appears to be an ad for Volkswagen, however I really like idea of giving regular objects impossible properties.
