It’s a holiday weekend here in the states, and holiday weekends are great for getting organized and working on projects. In that spirit, here are a couple of pictures the workbench in my dad’s garage. Mmmmm….tools!
All posts by Lenore Edman
DIY d12 Handbag (of Holding)
Retro-dork-chic-DIY-d12 handbag.
Cubyrop: the perfect candy
We first discovered Cubyrop via flickr and were smitten, so we put them in an Amazon wishlist. But after more than a year, we happened to just come across a bag of them at Nijiya(a Japanese supermarket) and were thrilled!
The verdict? Cubyrop are intensely charming — even better in person than they look in the photos. They are hard candy, intensely fruit flavored as only Japanese candies can be. While the name would imply that they are perfect cubes, they are indeed perfect but are not always cubes– the sides vary from 11-13 mm. They come wrapped two to a package, which is just the right amount of sweet and flavor.
They are color coded:
- Orange = Mango
- Yellow = Lemon
- Orange = Orange
- Dark Pink = Grape
- Super Light Pink = Litchi
- Green = Melon
- Light Pink = Peach
- Medium Pink = Strawberry
Mango and orange are difficult to tell apart visually, but they definitely taste different. Cubyrop also come in a (slightly larger) gummy variety, which also have intense flavoring but are jiggly with a dusting of sour powder. (Note: Some of you who grew up in the same era as us may also have an innate fear of gelatinous cubes.) There is also a variety labeled as throat drops, with some sort of cough-drop powder in the center of the cubes. They taste vaguely medicinal, but are still significantly better than most cough drops.
As with so many Japanese products, presentation is everything. The product shape carries over into the font, and the square color coding for the flavors is listed both in English on the front and in Japanese on the back. Charming, andtasty! What more could you want?
Party Potato
We stopped by Japantown in San Francisco the other day and picked up an absolutely hilarious toy in the Japanese dollar store. Drawing straws meets the game Perfection in the “Party Potato”. Each person pulls a french fry out of the container. When the right french fry is pulled out, the spring is released and the french fries fly.
You don’t have to be able to read Japanese to understand these fabulous instructions. Two of the french fries are attached to strings which trigger the spring. It is awesome to see the plastic fly!
Hop Trellis
Even if you’re not a home brewer dealing with the hops shortage, hop plants are great to have in your garden. The trick is that they like to grow vertically up twine, so you have to rig a trellis. You can make one using scraps of soaker hose and antenna wire while taking advantage of tree trunks already in your garden.
Floral Arrangements for Engineers
Bonsai rose: a new use for wire-wrap sockets.
Continue reading Floral Arrangements for Engineers
Catalog review: Practicon Dental
We recently had occasion to order a lot of toothbrushes, and received a catalog with our shipment from Practicon Dental. There are few things better than a catalog specific to a particular industry. There are so many items that can be applied to various projects having nothing to do with teeth. I’ve never noticed a small vacuum former in a catalog before. There are compartmentalized storage boxes have plenty of utility beyond storing dental impressions. Diamond wire (listed as diamond floss) could be very useful to have around for filing in tight places. Another interesting tool I hadn’t seen before was a small sandblaster.
If you know someone who need to be scared into proper dental hygiene, you can get gross-out posters of what happens when you don’t take care of your teeth. Speaking of scary, for your next ultra-creepy halloween costume, there are “Marvy Masque Cone Face Masks,” which are sure to frighten: especially the clown version. I’m not so sure they will “increase smiles, decrease anxiety” as claimed.
On the less useful, but more interesting front, there is information on dosimetry services so you can track your x-ray exposure. You can order business card dental floss packets. I’m thinking that “tidy tube winders” would make a great give-away for people with as many half-used tubes of glue as we have. But one of my favorite items were these adhesive-tip applicators, which “help you securely hold and place fragile or small” things. Those definitely fall on the useful side. I’m not sure what for yet, but I’ll think of something.
Clearly there are many tools and supplies in the Practicon catalog that are applicable to a much wider audience than just dental practices. We may have to order from them again, and not just for bristlebots!
EMSL has a Twitter
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories now has a twitter feed. Enjoy!
The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk
The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk is a progressive lending library of electronic components. An internet meme in physical form halfway between P2P zip-archive sharing and a flea market. It arrives full of wonderful (and possibly useless) components, but you will surely find some treasures to keep. You will be inspired look through your own piles, such as they are, and find more mysterious components that clearly need to be donated to the box before it is passed on again.
Recipient Conditions for The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk:
- Take out and add as much electronics junk as you like (but keep it small enough to fit in a USPS flat-rate Priority Mail box).
- Write up, photograph, document or otherwise publish in some way online at least one thing you took out (suggested flickr tag: TGIMBOEJ).
- There is a little book in the box. Add a checkmark by your name to show that the box has been to you. Also propose a future recipient by adding their name and e-mail address to the book.
- Within two weeks pass the box along to one of the people whose name is in the book. Before mailing it to them, send them this list and make sure that they want to participate.
If you get the box, who you should send it to?
A proposed recipient should be someone you suspect of having a critical mass of (or at least sufficiently interesting) electronics junk, should have a non-zero online presence, and should be reliable enough that you think they actually will send it off again within two weeks. (Naturally, bonus points for open source oriented hardware hackers.)
Why would you want to get a box of junk in the mail?
As Mark Frauenfelder observed in Make: vol. 12, there is a certain importance to keeping a junk box for future projects. We heartily agree. Perhaps a component in the box– or the box itself– will inspire your next project. Or just maybe it will have that frobnicated interoceter you’ve been looking for forever. Or maybe you just want to join our fledgling junk-sharing movement because it’s fun.
Don’t sweat the details.
Can you say “no” if someone offers you the box? Yes. Can you send it to the person whose name you wrote down? Yes. Can you send it to someone who already has a checkmark by their name? Yes. If the box gets too full, can you split the contents in two and send them in two different directions? Yes (but don’t forget to add a new book to the new box).
So, what did we take from the box before readying it for its next trip? Here are a few of our favorites:
A piece of plastic fiber-optic cable.Some beautiful capacitors which will round out our wine charm set nicely.
A couple of nifty old-school right-angle DIP sockets.Three nicely made phillips flat-head machine screws with great heft.
(And what did we put into the box? Not to name names, but we did add a small pile of cool and most mysterious components to help the box along on its journey.)
Update:
A commenter asked “So this sounds cool, how does one participate?”
- When someone e-mails you and asks if you want to participate, say YES and send them your mailing address!
- Work towards meeting the guidelines for proposed recipients: save interesting electronics junk and make sure that you have some online presence.
- If necessary, suggest to people participating in the project that you might be a good candidate.
- Take that one step further: Set up a wiki and start a network of people interested in participating in the project. (List people’s web sites, not e-mail addresses!)
- Alone, or with some friends, start your own box and send it off. What goes around comes around!
PS: On the topic of setting up a wiki: We’ll offer to host it if we get five serious volunteer administrators who will set up and run the site. Want to be one?
Update 2:
This is not chain mail. You do not send it to “the next person on the list.” You send it to a worthyrecipient, as determined by your own judgement. The purpose of the lists is to help identify proposed recipients who might meet the recipient conditions and exchange interesting junk with the box.
(By the way– we still need a couple more volunteers for a potential wiki site.)
Update 3:
There are many boxes. And they have a plan.
Update 4:
We have a wiki now! http://tgimboej.org/
Update 5:
(7/2009) A year later, we’ve learned a lot and updated procedures. Please see updated guidelines here.
Maker Faire Update
We’re having a great time at Maker Faire! We’ve been pretty darned swamped, but did have a little time to get a few pictures. Some of them are in my flickr set, like the one above from early this morning at our display area. We were lucky to have John Maushammer, the maker of the Pong Watch, hang out with us.
One highlight of the day was when the editor of Make: Japan dropped by and brought us a copy with the CandyFab article in it! We also got copies of the brand new Maker’s notebook to play with. There are lots of Maker Faire pictures up on flickr now– check ’em out!.
