Knit One, Perl Two

I love this 1980s computer-controlled knitting station hacked by Becky Stern of Craftzine.com. First of all, its interface is basically indistinguishable from the Apollo Guidance Computer. Second, it’s a remarkable melding of the digital and the manual�as you’ll see at the end, the pattern is instantiated by the computer, but the knitting carriage is run by hand�kind of like an inkjet printer working like digitized mimeograph machines? Finally, I love Stern’s brilliant hack, which talks to the knitting machine by way of a Python floppy-drive emulator. It’s a version of the brain-in-a-vat problem: here’s this Brother knitting machine jacked into a sleek 21st-century MacBook Pro, happily racking up knits and purls, believing all the while that it’s hooked up to some jittery old floppy drive in pebbly gray plastic with a Garbage Pail Kids decal stuck to it. [via Core77, where you can see an identity-preserving balaclava made on the hacked Brother knitting machine.]