How to Kick Ass and Take Names in the Spice Aisle

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Spice 7

There are a few standard ways to acquire spices. The usual involves buying a new spice now or then when you need it for some new recipe. Or perhaps acquiring a “set of spices” with a built in organizer system. These obviously work, but are prone to being expensive, disorganized, or subject to artificial limits. Obviously, a more optimal solution exists. We set out to create a better, backwards compatible, scalable spice organization system so that you don’t feel silly adding another 20 or 30 or 40 items to your palette.

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Start seeing magnetic fields

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Magnetic Fields - 15   Magnetic Fields - 30Magnetic Fields - 02   spin

Magnetic fields are everywhere– you just can’t see them*.

Here we introduce some basic and inexpensive visual tools, as varied as iron filings and Arduino, pre-school toys and OpenGL, for getting to know your local fields. It’s not exhaustive, but might provide you with some useful starting points for your own exploration.

(*Unless you count the magnetic field inside those photonsthat you use to see things.)

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HP Sauce

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HP Sauce - 2

HP Sauce - 1


HP Sauce - 4


HP Sauce - 5

There. Fixed that for you.



HP Sauce is a popular condiment in the UK and Canada, though now made by Heinz (yes, that Heinz) in the Netherlands.


It says you can use it on pretty much anything– not sure that my printer will taste that much better with sauce on it, though.

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One of many lemon pickles

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Lemon Pickle

Indian style preserved lemons, commonly referred to just as “lemon pickle,” come in probably not hundreds, but thousands of varieties. Here’s how to make just one of these amazing creations: Gujarati Lemon Pickle.

Sweet, salty and easy to make, it takes a few spices, a few minutes and about a month.

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Linkdump: April 2010

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Revenge of the Cherry Tomatoes

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Revenge!

Revenge of the Cherry Tomatoes is a new game for the Meggy Jr RGB, our open-source 64-pixel video game kit.

“Revenge” is a written-from-scratch sequel to Attack of the Cherry Tomatoes, the built-in game on Meggy Jr. It was written by Chris Brookfield, who discusses the game and shows off its features in our video:

Revenge is available as one of the example programs in version 1.4 of the Meggy Jr RGB library for the Arduino development environment. You can download it at the Google code site for Meggy Jr.

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Upcoming events: RoboGames and Maker Faire

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Hey Guys!

Neat-o stuff to do in the San Francisco bay area:

Next weekend, go to RoboGames, Fri-Sun, Apr 23-25, 2010 at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. It’s the worlds largest robot competition, featuring combat robots, humanoid robots, art bots, soccer bots, sumo bots, and more. We’ll be there as exhibitors, with kits from our web store and other goodies like pager motors for making BristleBots!


In May, we’ll be heading back to the San Mateo Fairgrounds for the Bay Area Maker Faire 2010— our favorite event of the year. It’s the world’s biggest DIY festival, and well, there’s just too much to describe. You have to see it for yourself. We’ll be there showing off one of this year’s Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories blog projects, the Playable game of Tabletop Pong— you can come by and try it out.

Hope to see you there!

This entry was posted in Education, Engineering, Field Trips, Robotics and tagged , , . Bookmark the Permalink.

Evil Mad Scientist LA Meetup: Sunday April 11th

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This weekend the lab staff will be visiting the Los Angeles area and we’re planning a meetup if you’d like to say hello. This will be informal, but we’ll be bringing along a few of our little projects to show off.

The fine folks at Crash Space, a Los Angeles hacker space, have generously offered to host the event, which is scheduled for Sunday evening, 6-11 PM.

Crash Space is located at
10526 Venice Blvd, Culver City CA 90232
(Google Map | Street View)

In case of overflow, or other last-minute changes on Sunday, please check our twitter feed, http://twitter.com/EMSL for updates.

We’ve already heard from a few of our maker/hacker friends who might drop by, including Eliot Phillips, former head editor of Hack a Day, and Tod E. Kurt, co-founder of ThingM and Crash Space. We hope that you’ll join us too!

Update 4/10/10: Looks like John Park of Make: TV and Mister Jalopy of Dinosaurs and Robots may be able to join us as well!

Update 4/14/10: Thanks to everyone who came out, and special thanks to Crash Space for hosting! It was great to meet new friends, hang out with old ones, and see the projects everyone was working on. @daryll put together a nice video of the event (via).

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