"Make" entries

Time Lapse of Galactic Center of Milky Way rising over Texas Star Party

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | May 21, 2009

According to William Castleman: “The time-lapse sequence was taken with the simplest equipment that I brought to the star party. I put the Canon EOS-5D (AA screen modified to record hydrogen alpha at 656 nm) with an EF 15mm f/2.8 lens on a weighted tripod. Exposures were 20 seconds at f/2.8 ISO 1600 followed by 40 second interval. Exposures were controlled by an interval timer shutter release (Canon TC80N3). Power was provided by a Hutech EOS203 12v power adapter run off a 12v deep cycle battery. Large jpg files shot in custom white balance were batch processed in Photoshop (levels, curves, contrast, Noise Ninja noise reduction, resize) and assembled in Quicktime Pro. Editing/assembly was with Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9.”

Clothing as Conversation (Twitter Tees on Threadless)

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | +Tim O'Reilly | May 19, 2009

Threadless just announced their Twitter Tees on Threadless program. What a great idea. Submit or nominate tweets, community votes, best make it onto shirts. From the two shirts they sent me in advance, I can see only one trick they are missing: the author of the tweet is on the label rather than on the shirt. As I found myself…

Four short links: 12 May 2009

Storage Superfluity, Data-Driven Design, Twit-Mapping, and DIY Biohacking

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | May 12, 2009

Lacie 10TB Storage — for what used to be the price of a good computer, you can now buy 10TB of storage. Storage on sale goes for less than $100 a terabyte. This obviously promotes collecting, hoarding, packratting, and the search technology necessary to find what you’ve stashed away. Analogies to be drawn between McMansions full of Chinese-made crap and terabyte drive full of downloaded crap. Do we need to keep it? Are there psychological consequences to clutter? (via gizmodo)
In Defense of Data-Driven Design — a thoughtful response to the “Google hates design!” hashmob formed around designer Douglas Bowman’s departure from Google. When you’ve got the enormous traffic necessary to work out if miniscule changes have some minor, statistically significant effect, then sure, if you can do it quickly, why wouldn’t you? But that’s optimization that should happen at the very end of the design cycle. The cart goes after the horse. Put it the other way ‘round and you have a broken setup. It doesn’t mean horses suck. It doesn’t mean carts suck. Carts are not the enemy of horses. Optimization is not the enemy of design. Get them in the right order and you have something really useful. Get them the wrong way around and you have something broken.
Just Landed: Processing + Twitter + Metacarta + Hidden Data — Jer searched Twitter for “just landed in”, used Metacarta to extract the locations mentioned, and then used Processing to build visualizations.
Do It Yourself Genetic Sleuthing — MIT is starting a hotbed of DIY biologists. The 23-year-old MIT graduate uses tools that fit neatly next to her shoe rack. There is a vintage thermal cycler she uses to alternately heat and cool snippets of DNA, a high-voltage power supply scored on eBay, and chemicals stored in the freezer in a box that had once held vegan “bacon” strips. Aull is on a quirky journey of self-discovery for the genetics age, seeking the footprint of a disease that can be fatal but is easily treated if identified. But her quest also raises a broader question: If hobbyists working on computers in their garages can create companies such as Apple, could genetics follow suit? It’s unclear what those DIY-started “genetics” companies would look like–the potential is there, but it’s yet to met the right problem. (via Andy Oram)

Just Landed – 36 Hours from blprnt on Vimeo.

Four short links: 30 Apr 2009

Youth, Government, Tween Arduino Hackers, and Table Slurpage

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | April 30, 2009

Ypulse Conference — conference on marketing to youth with technology, from the very savvy Anastasia Goodstein who runs the interesting Ypulse blog on youth culture that I’ve raved about before. Register with the code RADAR for a 10% discount (thanks, Anastasia!).
Government in the Global Village — departing post by the NZ CIO (and Kiwi Foo Camper) Laurence Millar. The principles here are applicable to almost every nation. We need to recognise the network effects of opening up government data in a form that means others can access it. Economic value is created by businesses building innovative new services using government data. Public value is created by enabling a richer and deeper understanding and dialogue among interested individuals about what the data tells us about our lives.[…] The legal, policy, and moral position is clear – New Zealanders own the data, having paid for its collection through taxes. These “problems” will all be solved by the community, and our role as government is to give priority to this. These efforts are stuff that matters. See also Google adds search to public data.
Children’s Arduino Workshop (Makezine) — video of three eleven-year old girls working on an Arduino project, and should be inspiration to anyone who has ever wanted to work on hardware projects with kids. Whoever did it succeeded in making it fun! (via followr on Twitter)
With YQL Execute, The Internet Becomes Your Database — YQL is a query language for Yahoo! data sources, and now they’ve added a server-side Javascript way to import your own web page’s tables into YQL. YQL and Pipes are turning into very interesting pieces of infrastructure (e.g., Museum Pipes blog). (via Simon Willison and straup on delicious)

Four short links: 21 Apr 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | April 21, 2009

Space arrays, mobile hell, book scanners, and open source brains:

Great Brazilian Sat-Hack Crackdown (Wired) — Satellite hackers in Brazil are bouncing ham signals off a disused US military satellite array.
Truck drivers love the birds because they provide better range and sound than ham radios. Rogue loggers in the Amazon use the satellites to transmit coded warnings when authorities threaten to close in. Drug dealers and organized criminal factions use them to coordinate operations. […] “Nearly illiterate men rigged a radio in less than one minute, rolling wire on a coil.” As William Gibson said, “the street finds its own uses for things.” One man’s space junk is another man’s Make project. (via BoingBoing)
My Students, My Cellphone, My Ordeal — there’s probably a market selling lightweight forensic tools to schools, specifically to avoid scenarios like this poor man’s.
DIY High Speed Book Scanner From Trash and Cheap Cameras (Instructables) — $300 of parts gets you a reasonably high-quality scanner. It doesn’t have an automatic page turner, but it’s still a step up on “open the scanner lid, change the page, close the lid, hit scan, wait, [repeat until braindead]”. We have a huge legacy of analog, and we’re going to need consumer-grade consumer-priced systems if we are to rip-mix-burn our cultural legacy. What would the Google Books settlement look like if we all had high-speed scanners to do to our bookshelves what iTunes did to our CD shelves? (via BoingBoing)
OpenCog Brainwave Projects in Google’s Summer of Code — in case you think GSoC is all about GNOME apps getting alternate shortcuts for DVORAK keyboards, there’s some esoteric stuff being approved. I wish that when I was a college student someone had paid me to work on a Application of Pleasure Algorithm Project.

Four short links: 20 Mar 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | March 20, 2009

Space, Space, Micromanufacturing, and Sensors:

Teens Capture Images of Space With £56 Camera and Balloon (Telegraph) — DIY/MAKE culture at its best, four 18-19 year old Spanish students (with guidance of a teacher) rigged a balloon to carry a camera over 100,000 feet (that’s twelve trillion and seven Canadian meters) above the earth, take pictures, and return to the ground. Here’s their project’s web page with a Google gadget to translate it into English. (via @erikapearson)
The Robot Who Helps Astronomers Identify Stars – IO9 interviewed Fiona Romeo, about the Royal Observatory’s Astronomical Photograph of the Year contest and the astrotagging bot I linked to earlier.
Clive Thompson on the Revolution in Micromanufacturing — talks about his experiences with Etsy. I was aware of the site but had dismissed it as some sort of urban-hipster thing—until I started seeing chatter about it on discussion boards for wealthy professionals and stay-at-home moms.
How The FitBit Algorithms Work — The Fitbit’s primary method of collecting data is an accelerometer. Its accelerometer constantly measures the acceleration of your body and algorithms convert this raw data into useful information about your daily life, such as calories burned, steps, distance and sleep quality. How do we develop these algorithms? Our approach is that we have test subjects wear the Fitbit while also wearing a device that produces a “truth” value. […].

Four short links: 28 Jan 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 28, 2009

Sensors, games, recession indicators, and book prep in today’s four short links:

New Networks Take Nature’s Pulse – an article in Christian Science Monitor about sensor networks. Makezine pointed out that hobbyists are building low-cost versions with Arduinos. Sensor networks are part of the “Web meets World” change we’re in, where the Web ceases to be something you sit down to interact with. Instead, our everyday life will inform and be informed by the Web in ways we won’t realize.
Interactive Fiction Goes to Market – a company, Textfyre is readying new text adventure games (“interactive fiction”) for the iPhone market. I dream of a day when the text adventure world becomes lucrative again (the tools like Inform are divine) but I can’t help think that the iPhone is the wrong platform. The make-believe keyboard makes text entry such a chore that it would seem to count against text adventures. I hope and wish that I am proven wrong and some day the CEO of Textfyre buys the house next to me just so he can build a huge mansion and paint on the walls “Nat Torkington thought the iPhone was the wrong platform for text adventures”.
You Know It’s a Recession When More People Search for Coupons Than Britney Spears – interesting tidbit from Bo Cowgill, who runs Google’s internal prediction market. His blog is full of fascinating pointers to prediction market research. Between him and David Pennock, my prediction market cup runneth over.
How To Write a Book – Steven Johnson writes, on BoingBoing, how he uses DevonThink to gather and organize his book thoughts and structure before actually sitting down to produce the words. I love reading about the act of literary creation (I have a long shelf of “how to write mystery novel” books that I can almost quote chapter and verse), the way it’s so different for every author yet so the output is so similar.

Four short links: 16 Jan 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 16, 2009

Toys, telegraphs, transparency, and travel in today’s roundup of short interesting links.

New Law Could Wipe Out Handcrafted Toy Makers – CNN story on a new consumer safety law that mandates expensive quality tests for components of toys, even those handmade in the US by micro-businesses. It’s not clear what a solution looks like: mass-produced in China or micro-produced in the USA, a lead-filled toy is still unsafe. However, if the cost of proving safety prevents safe toys from reaching the market, the consumer has lost. I wonder what Make and Craft have to say about it.
Bio of Samuel Morse – he was more interesting than I realized. He also came up in Andy Kessler’s How We Got Here, which I just finished reading and thoroughly enjoyed. See also Steven Johnson’s guest post Joseph Priestley and the Open Flow of Ideas on BoingBoing. Understand the history of technology if you wish to understand its future.
Ze Frank’s Explicit – a serious blog by Ze, where he talks about how he does what he does. I had always thought of Ze as a funny guy, based on his video podcasts, but when I met him at Foo Camp I realized he was a performer. George Clooney isn’t a bankrobber like Danny Ocean. Sarah Michelle Gellar doesn’t slay vampires like Buffy does. Miley Cyrus isn’t a teen musical superstar like Hannah Mon… ok, some actors are like their characters, but most aren’t. Ze takes performance seriously whether it’s on the web, on video, in person, or on Twitter–he consciously approaches it as a task, and deliberately chooses how he does it. Think of this as “Inside the Actor’s Studio” for the Internet age.
The Dopplr Personal Annual Report – a beautiful PDF report of your travel, automatically generated using the Prawn PDF library. Their sample travel report is that of Barack Obama. Internet businesses are able to capture lots more data than was possible in the past, and one way they differentiate themselves is by reflecting it back in useful and beautiful ways.

Four short links: 9 Jan 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 8, 2009

Four questions, one per link: what next, can it solve a big problem, what’s the final boss for Python programming, and why on earth would anyone want yogurt that glows in the dark?

End Times – gloomy piece on the future of journalism, to be added to the large pile of other gloomy pieces on the future of journalism (e.g., Bad News, Good News). The critical problem is still how to pay for journalism if the new media revenues are significant lower than old, and if the new media economics decree that journalism is dead then who fills the social good role that journalism’s death will leave?
Ward Cunningham’s Visible Workings – an intriguing glimpse, from March last year, into the way Ward lays out web interactions. Nice system for laying out these interactions, but it’s also fascinating for how it makes transparent what will happen as a result of the data you submit. How scalable is this? Could it tackle privacy?
Project Euler – fun programming exercises that require more than math to finish. We learn by doing, not by reading, so interesting exercises are part and parcel of training. It’s interesting to see educators are moving from being authors to being game designers, providing a series of staged challenges that make us stronger by defeating them. I’m presently dieing in as many ways as I can while learning iterators and generators in Python, as a way of ensuring I have Python’s “game physics” sussed.
Rise of the Garage Genome Hackers – more on hobbyist molecular biology. It mentions DIYBio, the Cambridge biohacker collective that I first heard about at BioBarCamp. (via Glynn Moody)

The Visible Hand

by Dale Dougherty | @dalepd | +Dale Dougherty | November 10, 2008

I wrote this piece about a month ago as the Welcome for Make: 16, which will be on the newsstand soon. As I write this, there is panic on Wall Street despite Washington’s $700 billion rescue attempt. The crisis is not contained by U.S. borders, but extends to Europe and Asia. Like many people, I’m incredulous. How could this happen?…