Month: January 2007

It’s so fascinating how cultural vectors work, how things seem to happen in clusters, how ideas tend to emerge from indie sources simultaneous. Last year, I was looking at my ridiculous glut of charging bases, dongles, cables, and the like. I started thinking about ways to minimize, standardize, organize. Then I saw an item in a DIY magazine about making a cabinet to hide all of this mess, then a commercial carrying case/power bar to do the same, at home and in the car. Now I’m seeing solutions everywhere. This latest one is simple and easy to make.

[Via Make]

Our new cyberpal Jake von Slatt (whom I profile in an upcoming MAKE) has moved from Electrolytic Etching, which we covered a while back, to Electrolytic Machining (i.e. instead of just etching images onto the surface, etching all the way through the brass). He’s put up a two-part tutorial detailing the process, first trying his hand at a three-layer “clockwork trilobite” (which turned out looking a little like the Antikythera Mechanism), then trying to make individual parts using a thinner brass stock.

Herr von Slatt is also responsible for sending Boing Boing the link to the Flickr set for jonny5rd’s awesome retro-chic Persistence of Vision (POV) viewer, built from a US$5 POV toy, an X-Acto knife case, and a few other misc parts. Very cool.

Seems like we stumbled over some converging geek cultural vectors with our Thumbnail Guide to Soldering. It came out at the same time that Bre Pettis was working on MAKE’s solder how-to netcast. They made our Guide into a PDF to travel with the netcast and we’re still getting crazy links o’ love on the Web version. And now, Instructables has declared January “Learn to Solder Month.” They have a page on their site with soldering resources, links to beginner solder projects, and if you post an Instructable geared towards beginner solderers this month, they’ll send you an Instructables patch you can sew onto your Star Fleet uniform, Robot Wars team jumpsuit, or other geekly attire of choice.

But the important thing is to fire up that iron and start polluting the upper and lower atmospheres in earnest. And if you have any questions related to soldering, don’t be afraid to ask.

BTW: I’m working on our next Thumbnail Guide now. It’ll be on Breadboarding. Stay tuned…

I know plenty of PC users who have ventured as far inside the entrails of their machines as installing extra RAM, a new DVD drive, and maybe a graphics card, but who wouldn’t think of venturing further, to say, replace a motherboard or a fried power supply. These and other seemingly gnarly hardware upgrades are not that much more challenging, if you’re halfway sober when you’re doing it and you carefully follow decent instructions. Lifehacker’s Rick Broida offers such instruction for replacing a power supply in today’s Alpha Geek column.

He’s got some good tips in there, like taking “before” pics of the existing installation to make sure you hook everything up properly with the new power unit. Such uses for digital cameras can’t be stressed enough. We all have the damn things on our phones, on our belts, but rarely think to use them as a memory jogger/reference keeper (at least I don’t).