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.
Feria Urbana, is an urban crafts fair featuring artists and designers from the Bay Area. Recently the Make team went to check out the event and all the cool crafty goods. There were lots of great handmade items from knitted scaves, silkscreened t-shirts, tons of jewelry, and paper goods as well. The event happens again next weekend, December 17-18 at The Canvas Gallery in San Francisco. Photos. Link.
Doh! er, Play Doh! “Fingerprint scanning devices often use basic technology, such as an optical camera that take pictures of fingerprints which are then “read” by a computer. In order to assess how vulnerable the scanners are to spoofing, Schuckers and her research team made casts from live fingers using dental materials and used Play-Doh to create molds. They also assembled a collection of cadaver fingers. In the laboratory, the researchers then systematically tested more than 60 of the faked samples. The results were a 90 percent false verification rate.” [via] Link.
MAKE Instructable group member Radiorental made a really nice laptop bag from 1/4″ thick antistatic workbench rubber mats – “Materials are irrelevent. I wanted a slightliy durable material and opted for this 1/4″ thick antistatic workbench rubber mat. Some neoprene for the parts of the bag that will directly cover the laptop to provide some shock absorbsion and a combination velcro & tarp snap for fastning.” Nice work! Link.
Old Professor Bear writes “This place is 2 blocks from my home. I pass by it every so often, but at night when it’s closed. But it looks like it would be of much Maker interest. Building Junior Makers, or something like that … Anyway, FWIW, have a look – Build-It-Yourself has developed a creative robotics program in collaboration with MIT that inspires, engages and guides kids to build in a unique global laboratory of the future. Build-It-Yourself seeks corporate partners who can bring our program to 20 million+ kids in the after-school market.” Link.
This is a great, use an old Palm to control your PC’s music. JT writes “After using several mp3 player thin-clients and other Palm-based Winamp interfaces, I decided to write my own. Basic requirements: Must not require using (and losing) a stylus – Edits playlist order with a single touch/drag – Direct searching Winamp media library and server directory browsing.” Link.
Peter is looking for some Makers out there, he writes “Basically, the folks at National Instruments have added DSP (digital signal processing, useful for lots of audio applications — both industrial and musical), to LabVIEW, their high-end development platform for creating test / measurement / control applications. Here’s the cool part: they designed a free synth (as in musical synth) to run on the platform. Somewhere out there, there’s a scientist or engineer who’s going to love fiddling with this thing. It’s electronic music for Dr. Bunsen Honeydew. Know anyone in those communities (blogosphere or printosphere) who might be interested in this?” Link.
Remember when we asked about cool Home Depot projects? Here’s one that Patrick sent in, he writes – “Want a interesting looking, reasonably priced hanging pot rack? Here is one that I built in about thirty minutes. Everything screws together, so it is fun and easy to assemble, after you have the parts. The hooks are purposely fixed in one direction so that you are not up all night listening to your pans swivel and clang around. You can also slide the hooks into different places on the bar to accomodate the different sizes. It might take longer than thirty minutes to build if you do a better job than I did peeling the stickers off all the parts.” Link.
