From traditional crafts to modern crafts, we’re covering news and interesting projects to educate you and keep you inspired. Design trends and pop culture related projects are here to inspire.
“A small wireless battery powered device – Turn it on near a friendly wireless network that contains iTunes shares and plug your headphones in. It picks a random iTunes share, picks a random tune and starts playing. Repeat until bored or the batteries are dead. The size of the system is amazing. The main board is about the size of my little finger. By default it’s running an ssh server, a web server and advertising itself to the network with bonjour.” Link.
You can find these old digital microscopes on eBay for under $20. Here’s a blog that catalogs some of what you can see with them – “Last week, I got myself a toy I’ve wanted to play with for many years — the Intel Play QX3 Digital Microscope. When I was a kid, the old medical microscope my parents bought for me at a garage sale was my favorite toy. I would spend hours putting whatever I could find underneath it… and now, with the digital microscope, I’m doing it again as an adult. I am adding new pictures every day and will continue to do so until I run out of things to look at with the microscope”… [via] Link.
Awhile back we made our own Flickr photo frame from an old Tablet PC we got on eBay, and now there’s a real version you can pick up, too. “The eStarling frame is a standalone Wi-Fi LCD photo frame that connects to a wireless network and automatically displays photos e-mailed to it in a slideshow format. Additionally you can specify an RSS photo feed from Flickr based on your own tagged keywords. You can even shoot photos on your mobile phone then e-mail them directly to your eStarling frame for display.” [via] Link. There are also a ton of other ways to make photo frames, too, if you’re in the DIY mood.
We’re getting ready to cover Macworld here in San Francisco, and as usual, bizarre flight and travel things tend to initially seem dismal, then work out – I saw two friends as I walked by Ritual Roasters in the Mission area that I haven’t seen since weirdos like us were running Generator 1.0 on online banks and Comcast cable boxes with Flash 3. Any way – one of them makes really fun things, here’s his photo set Link. Then, a few hours later, at the crosswalk, Stewart and Caterina from Flickr happen to be here, so we told them our plan to send live photos from the Macworld floor via EVDO, a WiFi network we’re making and the Kodak Flickr hack we did to auto-upload.
Chris writes: “I recently read this interesting article in Wired magazine about “Light-Graffiti Hackers“. The problem with light graffiti is that you need a power source to make them permanent, so you usually can’t put them everywhere you like. So, I built myself a Solar Powered Light-Graffiti Projector out of a cheap solar garden light.” Link.
Michael writes: “I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. I remember reading about an expensive commercial product for it, and there’s a much cheaper product available that is similar, but it records only things of a smaller size and the description seems to imply the recordings can only be played back on these machines, not regular turntables. (It’s a kit, which is nice, but the Gieskes.nl recorder looks much cooler.) I’m interested in trying Gieskes.nl’s project, but I’m wondering if there are other people out there who have done this so I can supplement these instructions a bit. Do you know of anyone else who has information about doing this sort of thing?” Link.
A MAKE reader writes in about some DIY film gear projects: “Today’s posting on Self-Reliant Film considers the pros and cons of DIY film tools, along with a compilation of a number of links (and a reference to the “Crafter’s Manifesto” found in Make)!” The article has a pretty good overview of many of the film gear projects we cover here, including the $10 video camera stabilizer. Link.
