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Play with your food: Five pounds of licorice wheels
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.
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Escargot Grand Prix
How fast are your garden snails?
Are they faster when you threaten them with garlic butter?
How do they leave dotted lines in their wake?
And what are you going to do with the built-in iSight camera on your new Mac?
Answer all of these questions at once with Gawker, a cute little GPL’d mac program that makes making time lapse movies a cinch.
Watch a 30-second quicktime clip of my garden here (1.7 MB quicktime .MOV). The video quality suffers a little from variable lighting [stupid moving clouds!] and the tiny lens.
Go snails go!
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DIY skirt guards
On a costumed bike ride, my red Princess Bride dress wrapped around my seat stay repeatedly and caught in my rear cog once. Not quite a total loss, since it looked post-fire-swamp with the holes and black streaks. However, it made me determined to fix the problem. You can see how I did it on instructables.
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Making the “Evil” LED logo
On this breadboard there are four Kingbright PSA08-11HWA sixteen segment displays that I got from BG Micro some years ago. The PSA08-11HWA comes in an eighteen pin (16 + decimal point + common anode) dual-inline package. Normally that’s great– ideal for use in a breadboard. Note that the rows of pins are oriented 90 degrees from how you’d like them to be– this is really only good if you want your displays to be read top-to-bottom in the breadboard, rather than left-to-right. Turn your head sideways to read this display saying “M7H7.” Controlling these displays is not difficult. However, in this case, where you don’t need to change what’s displayed, it’s absurdly easy.
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Watsonville Fly-in and Air Show
The lab staff went on an outing to the Watsonville Fly-in and Air Show in May. It was an enjoyable small-town event with lots of small planes. The biggest was a Coast Guard C-130 Hercules that took a break from guarding the coast for a couple of fly-bys and a touch-n-go. We got slightly sunburnt and took some fun pictures.
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TechEBlog list of strange kitchen gadgets
We’re number 2! We’re number 2!
On a recent list of the top ten strangest kitchen gadgets, our Interactive LED Dining Table narrowly edged out the tetris cooking timer.
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Shuffle Headphones
Lenore demonstrates the Shuffle Headphones. These are designed to remove loose cables that can be a safety hazard. I’ve written a set of instructions, hosted on instructables, showing how to build your own set of Shuffle Headphones.
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Cat Monitor
JellyBean hangs out in Harley’s converted Apple Two-Page Monochrome Monitor, which has been repurposed into a cat bed. I removed the CRT, circuit boards, and added the towel and some catnip. Click on the photo for some comments on its flickr page. This was also covered on the Make Blog: Monitor Cat bed (Make Blog).
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South Bay Birds Catalog
We’ve been taking photos of birds around the south end of the San Francisco Bay. We’ve cataloged some of the interesting ones and put them up as the South Bay Birds Catalog. Pictured above, Anna’s Hummingbird, male. It’s smaller than it looks.
