I really love the detail in Phil Jern’s description of cold-starting a steam locomotive: Looped under the fireman’s seat is an electrical cord. I uncoil it and drape it over to the wall, and plug it in. I climb up into the cab, open the engineer’s seatbox, and remove a trouble light. Plugging it into […]
Low-tech magazine is back with another well-written and thoroughly-researched article from Kris de Kecker, this one covering the history and evolution of elevated-cable systems for hauling cargo and people. As always, Kris’s updates are informative and inspirational. [Thanks, Blake!]
Cory writes on Boing Boing: Xavier Antin’s installation piece “Just in Time” uses four devices spanning 100 years of desktop printing to generate a rather lovely book; each printer’s output is the input for the next one down the line. Just in Time, or A Short History of Production
Especially this one. Unless, that is, it seems to you like an original sculpture prepared by Chicago sculptor Jessica Joslin for the Twin Peaks 20th Anniversary Art Exhibition coming up on February 12-13 in LA. In which case, well, at least this one owl is exactly what it seems. [via Bong Boing]
Hellenistic technology has always fascinated me, especially the work attributed to mathematician, engineer, and inventor Hero (or “Heron”) of Alexandria, one of the world’s first steampunks. Much of the documentation of his work (and likely those of many others of his time) come to us by way of The Pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria (or […]
A telecine is a machine which converts motion picture film into video. The process is a bit more advanced than just pointing a video camera at a running projection of film. Each film frame is captured individually and some advanced math goes into converting the frame rate to video, if necessary. They’re extremely complex and […]
The Tweetagraph uses an Arduino to capture the dots and dashes created by the telegraph. The Ardruino itself is running Firmata (now comes as a built in library with the arduino software) so that it can talk to Processing. The Processing sketch is using the java library twitter4j which handles the communication with the Twitter API.
