More on the geekly dressing tip, here with an Instrucable on incorporating EL wire into a skirt. Fire shirt! Rave on, dudette.
How-To: Incorporate Electroluminescent (EL) Wire Into Clothing
Gareth Writing for the Make Blog
I’m going to be a regular contributor to the Make blog. I’m psyched! I think it’s, hands-down, one of the best ports o’ call in cyberspace. Phillip Torrone consistently does a bang-up job. So I’m honored to be asked to contribute.
My first item is up. It’s a How-To on telling temperature using crickets. It’s a follow-up to a piece that Robert Krulwich did on ABC World News last night (6/2/07). It’s currently a very cool and comfortable 37 cricket chirps here at Street Tech Labs.
Roll Your Own External Drive for HR20 HD DVR Upgrading
My posting of the WeaKnees upgrades announcement for DirecTV HR20 HD DVR boxes sparked a response on DBSTalk, the sat TV forum. Apparently, it’s not hard at all to upgrade with an external e-SATA drive, and high-capacity drives and drive enclosures are pretty cheap. This post summarizes the general thoughts on the thread fairly succinctly:
“With the Weaknees upgrade you 1) may lose the warranty, 2) you lose the original drive so who knows what you do if you ever need to return your HR20, 3) if you ever need to switch HR20s, or upgrade to D*’s next DVR (whenever that is), you’re back to square one. A Weaknees benefit is that you don’t need to assemble anything.
“With the e-SATA upgrade, you need to buy two parts (the Seagate DB35 750GB HD + MX-1 Enclosure), takes literally 5-10 minutes to install, plug it in, and re-boot. No issues with the warranty, can easily upgrade later to another HR20 or successor to the HR20, and can easily replace the drive if it ever fails (5-year warranty).
“While Weaknees has been great in the past, doesn’t seem compelling at this time for the HR20.”
ToM Sucked Under by Giant Squid, Ectoplasmosis Emerges
The diaspora of writers from Wired’s Table on Malcontents blog is complete as the plug is pulled and John Brownlee and Eliza Gauger make the leap to their new home ectoplasmosis, where the tentacular weirdness is sure to continue. They describe ectoplasmosis as “a wonder closet of fringe art, culture, and ephemera.” Sounds like fun to me. But will we see Cthulhu Cthursdays? I mean, how else are we going to learn about things like the Cthulhoid Case Mod or Cthulhu Kitty?
Jerome Demers Brainless But Brilliant Beetle Bots
Jerome Demers is the designer of the single-motor walking machine featured in Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Building Robots. I’ve been a big fan of Jerome’s ingenious designs ever since I discovered the walker, but his sites (and he’s had several) were either in French or site components were frequently broken (or both).
So I was thrilled to discover that he’s started putting his bot projects on Instructables. His first is so cool. It’s a two motor/two switch (SPDT) “Beetle Robot” that has the switches/motors cross-wired so that the switches trigger the opposite motors to reverse while that switch is being depressed, creating a basic obstacle-avoidance behavior, with no chip brain of any kind (analog or digital). This is the simplest type of “real” robot (with a sensor-(processor)-actuator chain) that one can build.
Let’s hope that Jerome puts up more how-tos for building his bots. Instructables is a much bigger and better platform for his wonderful ideas.
[Via Make]
WeaKnees Now Offering DirecTV HR20-700 HD DVR Upgrades
The fine fellows over at WeaKnees, who did the Tech Editing for my TiVo book, emailed to tell us that they’re now selling high-capacity versions of DirecTV’s HD DVR (non-TiVo). This is significant because, until now, it was impossible to get more capacity into this box. Michael writes on their blog:
“Since the HR20-700 was released, people have come to us looking for upgrades. And now we’re ready to upgrade the HR20-700 units! We are now selling two upgraded HR20-700s: a 100 hour HD unit, and a 145 hour HD unit.
We’re still TiVo fanatics at heart, but since the TiVo HR10-250 is out of production and DirecTV’s new channels can only come through this new DVR, we’re upgrading it also.
Finally, if you already have an HR20, and you want to send it to us for an upgrade, we’re doing that too. Just find the HR20-700 upgrade that you want, and once you checkout, we’ll email shipping information. Send us your unit, and we’ll turn it around within two business days (most often the same day, in fact). Due to various complexities, we are not offering self-install kits.”
Phooey on that last bit. But the rest is good news for DirecTV owners, and if you’re going to send your precious box to anybody, you can’t do better than these guys.
Plenty o’ Emerging iPhone Hacks
My pal Brian Jepson is posting a lot of very interesting and useful info and hacks for the iPhone on Hackszine, like this one:
If you’re a heavy iTunes and iPhoto user, you will probably quickly overflow the limited storage in the iPhone. You could dedicate a day of curatorial work to sifting through your photos and music to pick the ones to put on your phone, but if you want a quick and dirty solution, try creating a Smart Playlist and Smart Album that favor recent music and photos.
Read the rest of this post.
Mind-Boggling Miniature Painting Contest
A few years back, I got obsessed with sci-fi tabletop wargamming (namely, Warhammer 4000). I even ran a popular sci-fi game modeling site for a time. As part of covering the hobby (at least that’s what I told the taxman), I attended several Games Day conventions in Baltimore. I thought my painting and modeling were pretty damn good. And then I saw the Golden Demon Awards, the model conversions/painting contests held at these cons. The conversions were incredible, the paint jobs were absurd. Keep in mind as you look at these images that these figures are 28mm scale (that’s about 1.1 inches!). You start with bare metal, and after hours sometimes counted in the hundreds, you end up with results like these. An eyeball on one of these models is like the point of a pin, and yet, these painters manage several levels of highlights, reflections, and glints. A current trend is painting lighting effects, torch light or laser blasts reflected on models and scenery. Crazy.
Pictured above is Natalya Melnik’s Gold-winning “Dark Angels Company Master” and Bennett Blalock-Doane’s Sisters of Battle Canoness which took Silver, both in the WH40K Single Miniature category. Bennett also took Gold in Warhammer Regiments, with his Beastlord and Retinue (seen below). Natalya, who’s sort of a rock star/goddess in the miniature painting world, took home the grand prize, the coveted Slayer Sword, also for her Company Master.
For all the coverage of this year’s Baltimore Games Day and the Golden Demon Awards, check out Games Workshop’s website.
Herr von Slatt Profiled on Wired News
Our pal Jake von Slatt gets the front n’ center star treatment on Wired today, with an interview and a gallery of some of his work. Congrats, Jake!
In the slideshow of projects, he includes the above pic of an old radio he’s currently converting to a digital music machine. Here’s what he says about it:
“There are a million ‘MP3 player in old radio case’ mods, but with this one I intend to entangle the very DNA of these two devices The filament supply of the radio will be tapped and regulated to power the MP3 player and the output of the MP3 player will be spliced directly into the audio output stage of the radio’s vacuum-tube amplifier. I’ll then load it with a bunch of period music and radio plays.”
We like the way this guy thinks! Make him Fabricator General and Minister of the Manufactorum!
BTW: If you haven’t seen my Wired News steampunk piece from a few weeks back, it’s here.
The Balls to Think
We were talking about this project at… oh nevermind… just check out this awe-inspiring 4-bit computer built entirely out of K’Nex. Here’s the description from the site:
“The K’NEX calculator stands over 10 feet tall, and can perform 4 bit addition and subtraction operations in about 30 seconds. The slowest part of the operation is the user entering the balls. From there the balls trickle down, computing the result of the operation, and then sending that through a 4 bit decoder, which flips a flag that tells the user the answer. Since it is 4 bit, we can add and subtract numbers from 0 to 15.”
Read the Ball Theory page for a succinct and graphical description of how this system can be used to create the various logic gates needed in computing (and some of the design challenges involved). The videos explain a lot, too.
[Via Make]