How-To: Build a bicycle sidecar
A wooden body upon a welded steel frame, by Briton Steve Bodiley. Build details available at his website. [Thanks, Billy Baque!]
Retro
Hollow spy nickel conceals Micro SD card
Brian Dereu and his family have a thriving cottage industry machining these pocket concealments from real currency and selling them online. I have one of their MicroNickels, shown above, and it may well be the coolest thing I have ever owned. It’s sized perfectly to conceal a Micro SD card, and when assembled it really is indistinguishable from a regular nickel. So, you know, just don’t lose it.
The worlds only working pallophotophone
A while back Schenectady Museum curator Chris Hunter came across some old pallophotophone recordings from radio station WGY. “What’s a pallophotophone?”, you might ask. Also known as the RCA Photophone, it’s an early recording device developed by GE researcher Charles Hoxie. GE Engineer Russ DeMuth, recreates a pallophotophone from Hoxie’s original design and manages to extract some rather interesting recordings.
Typewriter repairmen on Wired
In Wired’s “Raw File,” they have a charming piece about typewriter repair shops and repairmen, profiling three shops in the Bay Area: Despite these inefficiencies, there are a few places where typewriters still clack away. New York City police stations, the desks of a few stubborn hangers-on, and, increasingly, the apartments of hip young people […]
Vintage radios at Hamvention 2010
I like to think of ham radio operators as some of the original makers and hackers. They called hacking “kinking,” said “hi hi” instead of “LOL,” and assembled Heathkits long before Makershed, Adafruit, and Sparkfun were around. I had a lot of fun checking out some of the vintage radios at Hamvention in Dayton, Ohio […]
Original Mars Attacks art in Makers Market
Aw, man, this is almost too good to be true: Makers Market seller John Doffing, of Philadelphia, PA, has scored a license to reprint every card in Topps’ famous 1962 trading card series Mars Attacks. John’s company, LTL Prints, has a novel full-color print-on-demand process using environmentally friendly inks, at 1440 dpi, on a 10 mil self-adhesive “fabric paper” substrate that can be removed and repositioned over and over again. He’ll sell you any card in the series at your choice of six sizes ranging from one foot to six feet on the long edge, with prices starting at $15. He’s also selling complete sets at a steep discount over the per-print price.
Building your own rocketship
I know we’ve done a lot of coverage of the Raygun Gothic Rocketship, but it really is an astounding piece and we were thrilled to have it as the centerpiece of the Faire. And, as this mini-documentary shows, it’s really an amazing maker story, about a large community of some 60 people coming together to […]
