When I was a kid, I read in a science book about how to make a directional compass. You magnetize a sewing needle and balance it on a cork floating in a bowl of water. Even today, this is the standard story. For example, How Stuff Works still says that this is how to make a compass. (There are a lot of other examples, too.) It turns out that it’s a whole lot easier than that. All you need is a really good magnet.
Continue reading Super-Easy Supermagnet Compass
Quartz Composer is an easy to use tool that lets you create amazing digital art, even interactive digital art, without writing a single line of code. You might already have it: Quartz Composer is included as part of developer tools package (Xcode) that comes with Mac OS 10.4 Tiger. In this tutorial, I’ll show how to get started with Quartz Composer. No prior programming experience is required. As an example, we’ll build a video feedback screen saver that can take input from an iSight camera.
Continue reading Make a Video Feedback Screen Saver in Quartz Composer
Once upon a time, we lived in a small apartment. Things got worse once we got a washer and dryer, because the hookups were in the tiny kitchen. In order to allow for comfortable dining space for three, it turned out that we needed to position the table up against one corner of the room. If we had a rectangular dining table, then someone would always have to sit at the pointy end of the table. If we had a round or oblong table, it would also be rather awkward. The solution was to build a new (funny shaped) table from scratch. And as long as we’re building something, why not make it unique?
Continue reading Mixed-Media Mosaic Dining Table
We set up the camera pointing at the hummingbird feeder on our front porch to try and take pictures of the birdies as they perched. But, holy smokes were we surprised to see a bird perch on a nearby vine and begin its performance, going through his checklist and pre-flight maintenance routine.
Embedded above, watch on YouTube or download the high-resolution Quicktime Version (3 MB).
This isn’t a time-lapse movie, this is real time.
Continue reading Video: Hummingbird preens like he means it.
You have one drywall screw, one 1.5 V alkaline cell, six inches of plain copper wire, one small neodymium disk magnet, and no other tools or supplies. You have 30 seconds to make an electric motor running in excess of ten thousand RPM. Can you do it? Surprisingly enough, you can.
Continue reading How to make the simplest electric motor
We’ve just posted a set of instructions on Instructables, showing how to cook papadums, a type of cracker-like bread that you get at Indian restaurants. Shown here: our serving suggestion.
While we ponder the excellent selection of entries to the Supercapacitor Contest, it’s time that we do something far more important: look at pictures of baby animals. While we’re not Cute Overload, we do occasionally accumulate pictures of baby animals, and right now they’re burning holes in our proverbial pockets.
We might as well get this over with. Let’s start with the baby egrets:
On my way to work, I ride my bike along a path that goes behind a number of small industrial buildings. From the bike path you can see the back entrances to all of the buildings. The other morning I noticed this interesting doorway, labeled “Secret Entrance.” I don’t recognize the company logo or know whose building this is, but it must be an okay place to work!
Update, 8/12/2006: Reader mongux recognized the logo as that of Infoblox. Thanks!
The Supercapacitor Contest ends at midnight on Monday night, July 31. The end is near! This is not eBay; there is no advantage in waiting until the last minute. It’s your last chance to submit an entry and possibly win fame and/or fortune, in the form of ten sweet supercapacitors. To recap: submit your best idea for what to do with a bunch of 2.5 V, 1.5 F carbon aerogel capacitors with ultra low equivalent series resistance. To enter, leave your entry as a comment here or E-mail it to us. Keep reading to see some of the cool ideas that we’ve already received. Can you do better?
Continue reading Supercapacitor Contest: The End Is Near.
As Marty McFly says, “You don’t just walk into a store and buy plutonium.” Actually, all I was after was neodymium, but the principle still applies. I needed a pile of rare earth magnets in a hurry. Neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets are cheap, extremely strong, and surprisingly ubiquitous. Despite this, most corner drugstores do not carry sets of rare-earth magnets, and it can be hard to get them unless you have a few days to wait for a package.
It turns out that you can get NdFeB magnets at the corner drugstore, and they’re cheap. You just have to extract them from the toys that they come in.
Continue reading How to extract magnets from plastic toys
