Month: November 2006

I-Wei, the Fabricator General at the amazing Crabfu Steamworks, sent us links to three steampunk- inspired PC clocks he did “a while back.” The one shown here, SteamClock, belches steam while the two gauges show hours/minutes and seconds.

He made two other clocks, SunClock and DragonClock. They have nifty little features such as animated watchworks, day/date display and a RAM/CPU usage indicator (which doesn’t appear to be accurate of either, but still looks cool). The clocks work on Windows PCs and float over other apps. Here are links to the three EXE files:

SteamClock
SunClock
DragonClock

Screencaps of SunClock and DragonClock after the jump…

Thanks, I-Wei!

Hey, it’s nepotism week here at Street Tech! (What’s the blogosphere for if not FOR promoting yourself and your friends and glad-handing people you want to suck up to?)

You all obviously know Mark from Boing Boing the blog and maybe bOING bOING the old print zine and Wired/Wired Online. But what you may not be aware of is his considerable talent as an artist and illustrator. It was actually his art in the first few issues of bOING bOING that first captured my attention. I was thrilled when he and I started to exchange letters and zines and he submitted some comics to my early ’90s zine Going Gaga. Over the years, I’ve been equally honored to have him work as an illustrator for some of my books, most recently, the Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Building Robots and Leo Laporte’s Guide to TiVo (a.k.a. Gareth Branwyn’s Guide to TiVo).

So I am totally thrilled that he’s finally getting his due as an artist. This Friday begins his first gallery show, at Roq La Rue in Seattle. It’s a group show (Mark has nine acrylic paintings in it) with four other artists, including Lynne Nailor and Chris Reccardi who both worked on Ren and Stimpy. The show runs through December 2. If I were the rich dot.com mogul I am in my mind, I’d fly out there in my Moller Skycar for the opening and snatch up a couple of these sweet canvases.

Congrats to Mark from all of your pals and admirers at Street Tech!

Last December, Gizmodo ran a “Biggest Dork” contest that we blogged about. In that posting, I talked about a picture that I wished I’d had to send in, of my son Blake, sitting at his grandmother’s Unix terminal. Well, we finally found it. Are we too late for the contest? I guessed that the picture was of him at 3 or 4. It’s actually from the Spring of 1989, so he’s just shy of 2. His grandmother was a researcher at Bell Labs and she had a dumb term in her house. Blake is working in a Unix drawing program (ever the artist, that kid). Look at him work that mouse. Look at that mouse!

So, what does this have to do with the price of volatile memory in China? Not a thing. Pardon a papa blogger’s indulgence. And apologies to the boy.

Thanks, Sande!