Hardware Beyond the Hype
The Huffington Post has a fascinating video exchange between Richard Dawkins and the Bishop of Oxford. Given that Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, an outspoken atheist, and the author of The God Delusion, and the Bishop is… well, an Anglican Bishop, you’d expect the fur to fly. But in fact, they’re friends and have written together about evolution and “Intelligent Design.” The discussion is very reasoned, surprising, and surprisingly interesting ( at least to me).
Thanks, Ron!
I think Jake von Slatt and I-Wei have a contest going to see who can post the most and coolest steampunky tech projects. We just blogged about I-Wei’s amazing Steam Beetle a few weeks back, and now, he has a new creation, each one always seeming to outdo the last. The R2S2 (R2 Steam 2) is a steam-powered droid built using the Cheddar steam boiler I-Wei uses in most of his creations, and Wilesco D48 marine engines. The R2 body is a Hasbro R2D2 Interactive Droid he snagged for cheap on eBay. I love the boiler pressure needle guage on the face plate. Check out the video. It’s hysterical. He has a little “ad” for his other Crabu creations at the end. 
I just found out that I-Wei is going to be at the Maker Faire next month showing off his steam vehicles. I’ll finally get a cnance to meet him. I’m going to be there running Mousey the Junkbot workshops. Any other Street Techies going?
Man, does our boy Jake von Slatt ever sleep? Seems like he’s crankin’ stuff out of the Steampunk Workshop on a near daily basis.
His latest project should help all of his future projects look even snazzier than they do now. It’s a foamcore and packing tape-special, a light diffuser, used to soften the intensity of camera light flash. And as Jake points out in the project’s intro, light flare can be particularly problematic when shooting a lot of polished brass, as he frequently does.
Check out the results of using the diffuser on his Telegraph Sounder we blogged about last week. Nice!
I’ve always been fascinated by keyboards and the various types of materials and switch technologies that underlie them. This Instructable shows you how to make a cool-looking wallet out of the flexible circuit material used in the typical keyswitch assembly.
It sounds like it’s not the easiest cut n’ fold job you can do, but it looks like you get a very unique, and uniquely nerdy, bit o’ kit out of the effort. Hey, I need me a new wallet. Maybe me and my Leatherman will get Medieval with one of the half dozen old boards I have gathering Radon in the basement.
When I first saw pico the robot on the MAKE blog, I thought its Li-Poly battery, which appears gigantic here, looked familiar. It’s the same brand, Full River, and type as is used in the FlyTech Dragonfly. The builder of pico even credits the indoor R/C flyer market with developing the miniaturized batteries, thinner PCBs, and other weight-conscious components that made his dime-sized bot possible. The name pico refers to a Sumobot category which has been proposed but has so far remained unrealized, until now — although some work will have to be done to stop pico from driving off the table, as it does now. The builder is looking to an even smaller battery and motor to allow him to add other parts, such as a wireless bootloader for hands-free programming.
I finally got a chance to read my issue of MAKE Vol. 9, the Fringe issue, and I think it’s one of the better ones they’ve done. I kind of winced at the Fringe theme, thinking it was going to be a lot of psychic silliness, reinforced by the Kirlian “aura” on the cover. But they do an awesome job of maintaining skepticism and decent B.S. detection, while still being open-minded and not forgetting the fun.
One of the more intriguing pieces in the Fringe section is a piece on the Freemasons, by MAKE’s Project Editor Paul Spinrad. The basic point of the piece is that the Masons started out as a society of geeks, stone masons/ engineers, who knew the “secrets” of cathedral building. He calls this period “operative Masonry.” Over time, more and more members joined who weren’t geeks/engineers and didn’t have any direct experience of the knowledge held in the Order. He calls this “speculative Masonry.” Paul asks the question: Wouldn’t it be cool if geeks reclaimed the Masons by joining in large numbers to a create new generation of operative Masonry, a place where people doing amazing things with technology could get together and share their discoveries? As he points out, the Masons have an amazing infrastructure, with lots of cool resources and swanky Lodge buildings. The Masonic membership is looking very gray these days and some Lodges have allegedly closed down because of dwindling membership.
A few weeks ago, I saw an intriguing item on a hardware hacks site (which shall remain nameless) about greatly improving your WiFi network range by using your cell phone as an antenna. Whah? I took the link, began watching the how-to video, a show called “Infinite Solutions,” and hilarity quickly ensued.
At first, I thought it was real — goofy looking and sounding — but real. But by the time the host started wrapping Ethernet cable around a cellie to achieve “Ethernet induction,” I knew something was horribly, horribly wrong (not the least of which was the fact that the linking site hadn’t figured out that this was a put-on). I went to the Infinite Solutions page on YouTube and watched some of their other episodes. They’re genius, a hysterical mix of cheezoid production values, just enough real information and hand-holding to suck in the ill-informed, plenty of impenetrable geekspeak, and lots and lots of good ol’ Blarney.
Leo, Merlin, and the boys at MacBreak do a excellent job of quoting from and discussing the EMI/iTunes announcement this week.
If you’ve been living under a rock: EMI is releasing its entire catalog on iTunes (minus The Beatles, at least for now), all DRM-free, at twice the audio quality (for .30 more than the DRM’d tracks, which will still be available for .99). Full albums will get the higher audio quality and DRM-free for the current full album price. Yay! I might actually start buying music on iTunes now.
Last week, I got my copy of Recording The Beatles, a new magnum opus from Curvebender Publishing. I’m doing a review of it for MAKE Vol. 11.
I cannot begin to tell you how off-the-hook amazing this thing is. I was so excited by it, my hands were sweating when I first cracked it open. The “out of box experience” is intense. First off, it weighs a freakin’ TON. It’s oversized, hardbound, 540 pages long. It comes in a thick card slipcase, modeled on a ’60s reel to reel master tape box. Besides the book, you get all sorts of nifty goodies, like copies of B&W snapshots of the Fab Four and their engineers in the studio, a two-sided repro of the lyric sheet for “A Day in the Life,” a postcard to “The Beatles Band” from George Martin on vacation, a poster of the control surface of the main mixing board at EMI Studios, and other misc. stuff.
Inside the 11-pound wonder, you travel deep, deep into the minutia of the recording process. The book has detailed specs and photos of nearly ever bit of hardware used at Abbey Road from the mics to all of the tape machines and mixing consoles, the effects gear, the speaker systems, the studio instruments, the echo chambers, everything. The recording section goes through things like the Effects, how they were created, how they were used, what tracks they were used on, etc. There are even sidebar charts listing the tracks and the timecodes, so you can cue up the track to the place where various effects were employed. There are gorgeous photos throughout, even floorplans of Abbey Road and each of the studios within.
Oh those crazy kidz with their hardware mash-ups.