Five Minute Project: iPod Cozy

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iPod inside

The iPod Touch (or iPhone, for that matter) is a slim little thing that fits well in all kinds of places. However, in pockets and bags, it runs the risk of getting scratched unless you protect it. Here is a super quick fabric sleeve you can make to keep your lovely device safe. It is snug enough that it won’t fall out, even when shaken upside down. As an added bonus, you can even use the multi-touch screen through the fabric. A few minutes and a few cents worth of fabric seem like a bargain when compared with the exorbitant prices and shipping costs (or, even worse, a trip to the mall!) for the commercial variety.
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A Velvet Bristlebot Racing Snail

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A velvet bristlebot racing snail

A few weeks ago we showed you how to build a BristleBot, a tiny vibrating robot (vibrobot) that is formed from the unlikely union of a toothbrush (with directional bristles) and a vibrating pager motor. Despite its simplicity, it drives like a drunken bat out of hell– propelled by the ratcheting action of the vibrated bristles.

Of course, toothbrushes aren’t the only system where you can find find oriented bristles. Approaching this process from an entirely different perspective, it turns out that certain types of velvet can also form a directional bristle system that can be driven with vibrations. Here we build a plush racing snail– a velvet vibrobot that crawls forward… at a snails pace.
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Linkdump: January 2008

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One Hundred Percent EDIBLE Googly Eyes!

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Nilla is watching you.Googly FSM
After more than a year of painstaking directed research by our Experimental Foods Division, we have finally achieved one of our most important longstanding goals: the production of edible googly eyes. Like many other great inventions, it seems almost simple in retrospect, but in this write up we walk through the process and show you how to make your own.
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How to organize your Lego bricks for efficient building

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Messy Lego

If you spend any time at all with Lego, then the sight above is probably a familiar one: a giant bin full of assorted Lego bricks and parts. As a kid, this was about the pinnacle of my organizational skills (hey, they’re in a box, right?) but I’m sure that in aggregate I wasted several years of my life pawing through boxes like this trying to find the next piece that I needed.

Twenty years later I have Lego again, but much less tolerance for digging through piles. So how can we make things better? In this article we show off some of the tricks that we use to keep our stacks organized, so that we can spend our Lego time building efficiently, not looking for bricks. (Warning: article is image heavy!)
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Vintage Software Documentation Purse

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vintage software book handbag

Vintage software documentation often comes in 6″ x 9″ three ring binders which are just the right size for a small handbag. Many of them are cloth bound, making them ideal for reuse. Tech surplus stores such as Weird Stuff are good places to look for interesting covers, like this Pepper Graphics user’s guide from Number Nine. With the addition of a fabric liner and handles it has become an excellent geek purse.
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