According to the anonymous hacker-proprietor of Teravolt.org, shining a 250 mW green laser through a hanging drop of scummy plant water will project shadows of all the little microflora on the wall and you can watch them flitter about with the naked eye. The embedded video is nothing short of amazing. I felt just like that cat.
We just got the new line of Leatherman tools in the Maker Shed. There is the MAKE: Warranty Voider, MAKE: Bomb Defuser , and the MAKE: Circuit Breaker. All of these tools make the perfect companion for mobile fixing, hacking, and MacGyvering. This is a limited offering with custom MAKE laser etching.
San Francisco, as many of our regular readers will know from experience, is hilly, and can be windy. It has many narrow, winding roads and lots of low-hanging power lines. Which is why the SFFD is the only major US fire department still using wooden ladders–they don’t conduct electricity, and won’t fault a power line to ground in the event of an accident. The SFFD ladder shop made its first wooden ladder in 1917, and they’re still crankin’ em out today, using Douglas Fir timbers that are first aged 15 years in the shop itself. Very cool maker story and an excellently produced video from Adam Kaplan of ASK Media Productions. [via Gizmodo]
Spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool, this handy homebrew jig from the UK’s oomlaut:
We’ve recently grown annoyed with the slightly bow legged stance DIP ICs ship with (it makes inserting them into sockets ever so frustrating). Rather than continue to spend longer than we liked on less than perfect results we decided to make ourselves a little jig to help out.
Details and laser-cutter files are available at the link above. This post from EMSL is cited by way of inspiration.
My “concise” imperative really wanted to call this a bulletproof messenger bag, but I’m quite confident Instructables user Culturespy, author of this interesting (albeit, to my mind, slightly paranoid) tutorial, would be quick to point out that there’s no such thing as “bulletproof.” Writing a free public tutorial about how to build a piece of […]
I love PVC pipe: It’s weatherproof, cheap, commonly available, easy to work, and easy to join temporarily or permanently. Apart from a slightly icky environmental footprint, the only serious drawback of PVC pipe is that it’s ugly, owing largely to the fact that it’s usually available only in white, off-white, gray, or (sometimes) black. PVC can be painted, sure, but getting a good finish requires careful surface preparation, and even then the paint tends to flake or wear off with time, weather, and/or handling.
But, as you’ll know if you’ve ever tried to remove a purple primer stain, it is possible to indelibly colorize PVC pipe. I got curious about what was in purple primer, and a bit of digging revealed that it’s just clear primer plus purple dye. I reasoned, then, that I ought to be able to make my own “purple primer” in whatever color I wanted by adding solvent dye to clear primer. Long story short: It works, and it works great. You can read all about it here.
Don’t forget, we’re closing in on our Technojunk Teardown contest. If you’re participating, do send in your entries ASAP. If you haven’t whipped out the drivers and gotten busy on a cast-off piece of technojunk yet, there’s still time! Deadline is 11:59 p.m. PDT on September 24, 2010. There are some great prizes at stake […]
