Crispy wonton wrappers add cheerful crunch to an asian salad, but shouldn’t they be… more interesting? Presented here is the ideal upgrade. No more must you clutter your salad with amorphous crispies or chow mein noodles to obtain the requisite crunch: Crane Croutons will be your piece de resistance.
Continue reading Play with your food: Edible Origami. Crane croutons for your salad.
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.
Flickr went down today. There was some sort of data storage issue that required them to transfer twenty terabytes of data. To cope with the downtime, they put up a message that said (in a stroke of brilliance) “Arrggh! Our tubes are clogged!”, and announced a coloring contest: print out the web page and color in the dots– a pair of circles in the shape of their logo. Take a photo of your creation and post it to Flickr, and (when the site returns) post it, tagged with flickrcolourcontest.
We printed out the page and sent Christian to get his crayons. We instructed him to scribble thoroughly between the lines with red and brown. That completed, Lenore donned the Flying Spaghetti Monster crown for our contest entry.
As of this writing, about three hours since Flickr came back online, there are about 450 entries. Ours is one of them.
Graduate school can do funny things to your head. Sometimes the urge to procrastinate becomes so overwhelming that you strike out in a great burst of creativity; determined to do something, anything, to avoid that which you’re supposed to be doing. Like the time that I painted my bicycle purple (with green polka dots) to avoid studying for my qualifying exam– but I seem to digress.
Where was I? Oh, yes: hard drive wind chimes. I used to disassemble hard drives, whenever possible, both to extract the magnets and to see how the different types worked. Different hard drives contain all kinds of wonderful components: voice coil motors, stepper motors, exotic bearings, electropolished machined parts, chemically etched metal webs, flexible circuitry, and my personal favorite: optical quadrature encoders for pivot arm position readout. The drive platters themselves are also quite remarkable: precisely made aluminum patters with a surface not unlike recording tape. The disks make a lovely clear note if you strike them, so it was only natural to make them into a set of wind chimes.
Continue reading How to make hard drive wind chimes
We got 5 Pounds of Red Licorice Wheels from Amazon.com. It’s a bulk package of Haribo strawberry licorice wheels, quite possibly the most perfect movie candy ever invented. It just might be the best thing that we have ever purchased. And it only cost $13.
Continue reading Play with your food: Five pounds of licorice wheels
