The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for digital gadgetry, open code, smart hacks, and more. Processing power to the people!
Mike Szczys of Hack A Day wrote in with this guide to hacking parallel ports on old computers. It turns out it’s super easy to use the parallel port (most likely hasn’t been used for years IF your machine has one) to trigger external electronic projects. I’m using an NPN transistor to use pin 1 […]
This beautiful little gadget dates to the 1920s, and is known as Kaufmann’s Posographe. The linkages, of course, are hidden inside. The linked site, above, includes a patent illustration that shows how they work.
Personally, I find The Gadget Show’s breathless production values (and forced hipster-geek wardrobe) to be really annoying, but the results of this build are undeniably impressive.
Over the weekend we lost Diaspora co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy to suicide. I can honestly say that I was privileged to be his acquaintance.
This past May I came out to the Bay Area for Maker Faire. It so happened that the night before the Faire was to begin, the Noisebridge hacker space was having an event for speakers to present their projects in five minutes or less. When I delivered mine I happened to mention that I’m an NYU student. Being from the same alma mater, Ilya struck up a conversation with me. The topics covered were as varied as you might expect when two creative technologists get together. One thing that stuck out for me was his love for MAKE, especially the how-to videos by Bre Pettis he watched online as a teenager.
The folks at Ardic Technologies in Istanbul seem to have developed a prototype for the ultimate tablet user experience. Isn’t this what we all secretly wish our handsets and tablets would do out of the box? Didn’t you expect you’d be able to smoothly transition from mobile device to a massive touchscreen effortlessly, like ten years ago? In any case, if Ardic can get their device to market, they’ll have one of the nicer presentation tools out there. I imagine this would go well with some of the newer apps from Adobe and Autodesk.
Decent mobile tools for creative professionals are slowly starting to appear. Graphics powerhouse Adobe recently released a set of touch focused apps targeting Android tablets that appear to take advantage of the format. This first group of six tools, called Adobe Touch Apps, include a vector drawing app, raster photo app, color palette explorer app, presentation app, moodboard app, and wireframing app.
Because color can differ wildly from one monitor to another, many designers and publishers rely on proprietary colorimeters to calibrate their displays. Software developer and electrical engineer Richard Hughes has been working on his own open source colorimeter he calls ColorHug. Along with the Linux software (also open source), it takes about a minute for ColorHug to take several hundred measurements and create an ICC color profile, which can be read by other operating systems.
