Here is how you can put together your own extra-snazzy wine charms out of electronic components. They look great, are easy to make, cost next to nothing, and make great conversation pieces. For an added bonus, you can solder them in place, making them semi-permanent yet easily removable.
Continue reading Solder your own wine charms
It’s a simple formula, really: hot air gun + bread = interesting toast.
Continue reading Play with your food: Rework your toast
We don’t normally dwell much on the word “Evil” in “Evil Mad Scientist,” but this list of advice for Evil Overlords (and heroes, and henchmen, and wicked-but-beautiful daughters of evil overlords, and so on) is really quite insightful and comprehensive.
Hearses are generally classy vehicles, but this one takes the cake. This hearse is not just olive-green, but it also matches the mortuary perfectly.
I just about passed by the Jones Mortuary in East Palo Alto (right next door to Ikea!) when I saw the hearse in the nearly empty parking lot. I have admired it before, and it seemed like a perfect opportunity to take a picture.
I stopped and got out my camera and a big guy came out of the side door to ask me what I was doing. I told him I wanted to take a picture of the beautiful hearse to share with my photo group. He told me I would need permission from the owner. I asked if the owner was in today, and was told yes, and directed to go around to the front and go inside and wait. Eventually he came out of the office (where I presume he spoke with the owner) and told me it would be fine if I took pictures.
Afterwards I realized that I was wearing all black, which does not seem like the best choice in retrospect.
I’m glad they didn’t mind my taking pictures, because I think the hearse is absolutely gorgeous. If I ever need to be taken somewhere in a hearse, I want it to be one like this.
A version of our RC car floor sweeper project is featured in the April 2007 issue of Popular Science as a “five minute project.” Popular Science is a great magazine and we’re honored!
Daily Cup of Tech’s lost USB drive trick was also featured in the April issue. Over on the Daily Cup of Tech web site, we read that someone managed to use it to find not just a drive, but a lost kid as well– good work guys!
Kits for Japanese boxes like these are often given in Japan as gifts to foreign vistors. Here in the states, you can sometimes find the kits in stationery stores starting at about $6, for example here and here.
Alternately, you can make one yourself– no kit required. You can use paper, paperboard and tissue you probably already have on hand to make a box that will be the shape you want, not one of the three or four readily available designs. These instructions will take you through the steps of making a business card display box, but the techniques are general and can be used for any shape that you like.
Continue reading How to Make Japanese Papercraft Boxes
Don’t you just love nixie tubes? They glow with a lovely neon color and have gorgeous stylized numbers– something you can’t get with a dot matrix– or even sixteen-segment LED or LCD display.
Recently, we disassembled a well-loved tube when there was a photogamer challenge to break something, and so we had a chance to peek inside and look at how they are made.
Warning: This article contains graphic images of the dissection of vintage electronics which may be disturbing to some viewers. (No working nixies were destroyed in the making of this article.)
Continue reading Nixie tube take-apart
If the phrase “My spoon is too big” either makes you fall over on the floor laughing or reply with “I am a banana,” you must have seen the deadly-funny cartoon “Rejected” by Don Hertzfeldt. We recently got a copy of Bitter Films, Volume One, a collection of six of Don’s animated shorts including “Rejected,” “Lily and Jim,” “Billy’s Balloon,” and “Ah L’Amour.” Even though I’d seen all but one of them before, I laughed so hard that I had trouble breathing during three of these cartoons.
Besides the classic shorts and some other minor gems, the DVD also features a few short Don Hertzfeldt “bookend” animations produced for The Animation Show, a festival-formatted collection of animations produced by Don in collaboration with Mike Judge (of Beavis and Butthead fame).
The Animation Show is now in its third year and the first two years are available on DVD. Even if you’ve already seen the Hertzfeld animations from it, it’s worth getting Volume 1 of The Animation Show just to see the music video “Bathtime in Clerkenwell” by the band (The Real) Tuesday Weld, featuring sublime and surreal animation by Alex Budovsky. If you like that, you may also enjoy Return I Will to Old Brazil, also by Budovsky and (The Real) Tuesday Weld, which is a music video and new recording of the classic song “Brazil.”
This spring, I’ll be teaching several classes on Saturday afternoons at TechShop. TechShop is a San Francisco Bay Area “open-access public workshop,” located just off of 101 in Menlo Park, where you can go use a wide range of tools to make things. They have full-size milling machines and lathes, welding and rapid-prototyping equipment, Lego, sewing machines, computers, and well… just look at this list of equipment. (Seriously.)
One of the things that TechShop does is hold classes on a variety of topics. These are inexpensive (typically ~$30) drop-in classes that anyone can take without a long-term commitment. Many of them are short “safety and basic usage” classes that teach you what a given machine can do– and how to do it without killing yourself. Other classes teach simple and specialized skills like soldering for kids, blacksmithing, or silk screen printing. I’ll be teaching three (or four, depending how you count) classes, each of which will be held on a Saturday afternoon at Techshop.
Technical Graphics with POV-Ray
The first class is called “Technical Graphics with POV-Ray,” and is a hands-on workshop where you’ll learn how to use POV-Ray, a free cross-platform raytracing program that lets you make killer 3D graphics and animations. You can see some example images that I’ve made in POV-Ray (including the TechShop logo above) here, and master works in the POV-Ray hall of fame here. This is a two-part workshop with part 1 on 3/31/07, 1-3 PM, and part II on 4/7/07, also 1-3 PM.
Make a custom LED Micro-Readerboard
On April 14, I’ll be teaching a little soldering class, suitable for anyone with a little bit of soldering experience (well, anyone whose age takes at least two digits to express in base-10 integers), where you can customize the phrases in and assemble an LED Micro-Readerboard, like the ones that we programmed to be ornaments a few months ago. But, since it’s not the holiday season, perhaps you want to make yours into an LED Micro-Readerboard Nametag instead!
Choosing a microcontroller
Finally, on April 21, I’ll be giving a large-format seminar that’s an introduction to microcontrollers, called Choosing a Microcontroller. This is designed to be an introduction to the capabilities and variety of single-chip computers, as well how to actually pick one for a given application. It’s easy to get overwhelmed looking at the variety of range of micros, from four-bit micros that have a 4-bit wide data path — and actually cost four bits— to AVRs and PICs, basic stamps and Arduinos, to 32-bit gorillas with names like ARM, Blackfin, and Coldfire. So, we’ll try and cut through the fog and help you figure out where to get started.
If you’ve heard people getting excited about or doing cool things with microcontrollers and want to learn more, this might be a great introduction to the field.
Sign up for these and other TechShop classes here. Sign up early, since space may be limited!
Also, if you have suggestions for other classes that you’d like to see taught by the Evil Mad Scientists, you can E-mail us or leave comments here.
We’ve just set up syndication through FeedBlitz so that (if you like) you can get new evilmadscientist.com articles by E-mail when they are posted, typically 3-5 times per week.
(Geek translation: It’s a feed reader for people that don’t read feeds.)
To sign up, enter your E-mail address in the box and click the button:
It’s free of course, but you’ll have to wait for confirmation E-mail to arrive from FeedBlitz, which may take a few hours.
We’ve had some inquiries about project E-mail and/or newsletters, and so we think that this might be another useful tool to keep up with what’s going on here in Evil Mad Science land.
