- Boris Karloff’s Guacamole Recipe
- Can you fake a TV Remote control with paper and a lighter? Probably not.
- EL wire Nixie Tube
- CatterPlots: Scatter plots, with cats as points
- Convert Inkscape SVG drawings to KiCad footprints
- Double pendulum with UV LED & GITD backdrop (Youtube)
- The Rotating Hallway Scene from 2001, stabilized
- A review of science books for kids, on pages 4-5 of the Reno News & Review Family Guide 2017 including The Annotated Build It Yourself Science Laboratory
- What’s in that Subway Oven Roasted Chicken Sandwich?
All posts by Windell Oskay
Evil Mad Scientist Valentines: 2017 Edition
Today we are releasing our newest set of “Download and Print” cards for Valentine’s day. This is our fifth year, and fifth set of cards: The 2013 set had six equation-heavy cards, the 2014 set was a set of six symbol-heavy cards, and the 2015 set included love, hearts, and arrows. The 2016 set featured Pluto’s cold heart, and the perfect card for your robotic expression of love.
This year’s set features relativity, atomic orbitals, exponential growth, an LC resonator, and an epsilon delta declaration of love.
“You put me in an excited state.”
Roses are red. Which does suggest that they’re moving away from us, quickly.
While this sounds much like an “epsilon delta proof,” it lacks the logical rigor that we would normally associate with one. It’s more of a postulate, really.
“You make my heart feel like sin(1/x)….” If your heart isn’t jumping yet, you’ve probably never tried to graph that.
The original title for this one was “my love for you grows exponentially.” But hey, your valentine is smart (or you wouldn’t be sending these kinds of valentines): Let them do the math.
You can download the full set here, which includes all 30 designs from all five years (a 1.5 MB PDF document).
As usual, print them out on (or otherwise affix to) card stock, personalize, and [some steps omitted] enjoy the resulting lifelong romance.
Update: New cards have been released! Please check out the 2019 set, which contains all 42 cards from 2013 through 2019.
Linkdump: January 2017
- Cool drafting tools: the Keuffel & Esser Trammel Ellipsograph. (See also: 507 movements.)
- Just Add Water: The history of Sea Monkeys, dark side and all.
- Magica: A beautiful solenoid coil driven wooden clock
- An introductory servo control project with ROS, the Robot Operating System
- Dial-A-Grue: Text adventure games with a rotary dial phone
- Another take at weaving string art with a 3D printer
- VisiCut: a userfriendly tool for laser-cutting
- How Canned Mandarin Oranges are made: in Spain and China, and Japan
- The history of the MOS Commodore KIM-1 Computer in pictures
Linkdump: December 2016
- A jumping sun dog.
- Design and 3D print parametric battery holders.
- Code Combat: An open source programming game for learning how to code.
- 3D print your own (oversized) Curta Calculator.
- Why spaghetti breaks into 3 pieces, via finite-element simulation (YouTube).
- Inside the LM108 op amp on Ken Shirriff’s blog.
- A baby dinosaur tail, preserved in amber.
- Mike’s Electric Stuff tears down a $500k Genome sequencer (YouTube).
- The Brother Type-O-Graph pen plotter.
- If you don’t talk to your kids about quantum computing, who will? (SMBC Comics).
- Single-stroke fonts on the HP1345A vector display and in the movie WarGames (1983).
- How it’s made: Ribbon candy (YouTube, via Neatorama).
- Threadtone: Computational string art
- A sweater for your drone.
Introducing the AxiDraw V3
This new AxiDraw has been redesigned from the ground up for high performance. It features smooth rolling wheels on custom aluminum extrusions, specially designed for high stiffness and light weight. Its sturdy, rigid construction gives it finer quality output and in most applications allows it to operate at up to twice the speed of the previous AxiDraw, which it replaces.
As with the previous version, AxiDraw is a simple, modern, precise, and versatile pen plotter, capable of writing or drawing on almost any flat surface. It can write with fountain pens, permanent markers, and other writing implements to handle an endless variety of applications. Its unique design features a writing head that extends beyond the body of the machine, making it possible to draw on objects bigger than the machine itself.
AxiDraw V3 is available to order today, and begins shipping next week. See it in action and learn more on the product page.Linkdump: November 2016
- Matchbox cars: 1965 Factory tour video
- Strain wave gearing (like Harmonic drive) as a Lego ball lift mechanism (Youtube)
- Help crowdfund the Open-V, an open source RISC microcontroller
- Disseminating the New Kilogram: An International ‘Dry Run’
- “How we turned $140k on Kickstarter into $40k in debt. And how we broke even.”
- Cat demonstrates Anamorphic 3D cube optical illusion (YouTube)
- Shape Tiler application in Processing — tile shapes for use with WaterColorBot and other plotters.
Linkdump: October 2016
- Spiny backed orb weaver making its web (Video by Rachel Barry Hobson).
- Why Your Next iPhone Won’t be Ceramic.
- A Wirebonding Factory Tour.
- How gas station fuel pump nozzles work (YouTube).
- Finalists of the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.
- Cardboard CNC Mill (YouTube).
- Steve Jobs apparently hated function keys.
- A programmable Stranger Things wall costume.
Linkdump: September 2016
- The Art of Making a Nixie Tube (video)
- How The World’s Most Beautiful Typeface Was Nearly Lost Forever
- A photographic tour of a Soviet Typhoon class submarine
- The BBC Creates Step-by-Step Instructions for Knitting the Iconic Dr. Who Scarf
- Sonicare toothbrush teardown by Ken Shirriff (complete with an interesting footnote about Bluetooth)
- Insulin pump teardown (video) by Mike’s Electric Stuff
- Repair and restore video of a 1980’s Armatron toy robot arm
- A series of ‘shopped pictures showing the relative scale of things
- Noodlefeet the robot: Progress on the gripping, tasting, and drooling mechanisms
- TED talk: An athlete uses physics to shatter world records in high jumping
- Ghost Minitaur: A quadruped robot that can leap and open a door
Linkdump: August 2016
- Reading makes you carsick because your brain thinks that it’s being poisoned.
- “Freshly ground sprinkles“
- High speed footage of past SpaceX missions
- The Moral Machine: Try to think like an (ethical) self-driving car.
- Hot-wheels POV video: As awesome as it sounds.
- The GIF is dead. Long live the GIF.
- Centro de Exposições do Centro Administrativo da Bahia: not a suspension bridge, but a suspension building. Exhibit hall in rising pyramid, auditorium in descending pyramid
- Apollo CPU Core 1, implemented in open FPGA code
- Tiny Caterpillar Robot Powered by Light
- Reverse engineering a real candle
- Teardown: Same Product, Fifty Years Apart by Steve Hoefer
- The center of our solar system (its barycenter) is located outside of the sun for the next few years, thanks to the motion of the planets.
- A Robotic ‘Burger Drop’ Machine to Capture One Slow Motion Shot
Linkdump: June 2016
- A tour of the MegaProcessor (YouTube)
- Inside the tiny RFID chip that runs San Francisco’s “Bay to Breakers” race
- Inkscape extension: Trace along centerlines
- A 3D-printed light-based zoetrope
- Dinosaur-era feathers, preserved in amber.
- Feynman diagram sculptures by Edward Tufte
- Schematics and manuals for the 1979 Asteroids video game cabinet
- Fliers for a Father’s Day Sale, from Obvious Plant.
- Dashcam footage: Driving Around San Francisco in 1953 (YouTube)
- NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter: Orbit insertion as a dramatic movie trailer.