Insalata caprese, an Italian classic, becomes an instant halloween classic as well.
The traditional ingredients for this delicate salad are fresh mozzarella, basil, plum tomatoes and olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper. Our version goes only slightly further, adding a thin slice of olive as the garnish. And, a clever trick produces perfectly round pupils every time.
Continue reading High Cuisine for Halloween: Eyeball Caprese
It’s a holiday weekend here in the states, and holiday weekends are great for getting organized and working on projects. In that spirit, here are a couple of pictures the workbench in my dad’s garage. Mmmmm….tools!
Happy birthday to us! Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories is now two years of age. Collected below is a “Best of Evil Mad Scientist” for the past year: Some of our favorite projects that we’ve published over the last twelve months. Here’s to the next year!
Quick projects:
Rubberbands made from old bicycle innertubes.
Light tent made from a lampshade.
Spool spinner from an old fan.
The $1.00 C to D adapter
Electronics projects
How to make a Joule Thief from Make: Weekend Projects.
How to make a dark-detecting LED night light.
The Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronic Junk
How to make a Sawed-off USB Key
AVR microcontroller projects
Using an ADXL330 accelerometer with an AVR microcontroller
Kit Projects
Crafty Projects
Food Hacking
CandyFab
Printing complex shapes: Sugar Chain
Candyfab improvements: higher resolution and edible output
Papercraft:
Rotary Fraction Adding Machine
Observations & silly projects:
Lego Projects:
Forbidden Lego review & build
Reviews:
Lee Valley & Veritas Catalog Review
Teardowns:
April Fool’s Day is one of our favorite holidays. Here are couple of contests to help you get in the spirit:
If you happen to be in San Francisco and are looking for a way to celebrate, we recommend the St. Stupid’s Day Parade. Whatever you do, have fun!
Can’t figure out what to do with all of your leftover conversation hearts after Valentine’s Day? It turns out they do a passable impression of sidewalk chalk, even without being a significant source of calcium!
Not that we would know anything about having too many candy hearts. The giant melted together heart ought to work like those multicolored crayons. That could actually be a good use for it.
Last year as Valentine’s day approached we suggested writing new messages on your conversation hearts and loading up your trebuchet. We still advocate catapults for Valentine candy distribution and disposal, but we’ve upgraded the presentation a bit. With a rubber stamp kit and a food-safe pen, you can stamp your messages so they look nearly authentic, but have much more appropriate messages.
Continue reading Conversation hearts: Stamp your own messages
All cynicism aside, one of the cool things about the holiday season is that it often provides a good excuse to play with lights.
Hanukkah in particular has been a festival of lights for more than a dozen centuries longer than there have been lights on Christmas trees. History notwithstanding, Hanukkah still lags behind Christmas in the transition from traditional light sources like candles towards microcontroller driven arrays of LEDs. While that may be simply due to the relative flammability of dry pine trees versus that of metal menorahs, the irony is that Hanukkah– unlike Christmas– actually requires observers to light up specific lights in a specific order, which is exactly the sort of thing that you want a microcontroller for.
Can’t find an open-source LED menorah at your local big box store? Not to worry!
Make one yourself from our instructions, which include source code for the AVR microcontroller (we use an ATtiny2313). Complete soldering kits to make your own– no programming needed– are also now available in quantity at our new web store.
(Note: While I cringe every time that I see Christmas displays up before Halloween, we aren’t actually too early in this case. Hanukkah starts on the evening of December 4th this year.)
This updated bat costume puts wing spreading at your fingertips where it belongs. It also boasts a more impressive and slightly more dangerous wingspan. Watch where you point your wingtips!
Continue reading Umbrella Bat Costume Update: Now more anatomically correct!
