Any DIYer worthy of the title should know about Lady Ada aka Limor Fried. She’s the ultimate maker and when I ran into her last week at a Gawker party, she brought along an Arduino-based robot she was working on. Needless to say, such a technophile needs an appropriate business card to match. Limor’s feature pop-out Spirograph shapes that you can use to create fun ’80s designs.
Badass? Far from it. Mind-blowing? Absolutely.
In the latest issue of MAKE, there are instructions for a DIY project that is long overdue. If you’re into creating digital music, by now you’ve surely seen the video of a ball bearing sequencer on YouTube. You haven’t? Well watch the above video and you’ll be brought up to speed.
Essentially, you move the metal balls around to different areas of the setup to create beats. It works like a standard 16-step sequencer except that the possibilities for innovation are endless. Building your own will take a lot of time, money and effort, but the payoff will be priceless.
Meet Becky Stern. She’s pretty handy with some felt and a hot glue gun. She also had to have surgery performed on her leg to remove cartilage. Her doctor drilled holes into her bone, which is painful to type let alone experience first-hand. What’s a girl to do while recovering from the painful ordeal? Make a plush model of your very own bones, that’s what. Becky recreated a scale model of her femur, complete with drill holes. Creepily creative!
What time is it? You don’t know? Sir, by all accounts, I noticed the wristwatch on you possess. Surely it can give a man something as simple as the time of day. It can’t? Why not? Ahh, yes! True craftsmanship! Who would even think to embroider a watch? It’s so absurd, it makes perfect sense!
Looking for a way to impress all of the females at your New Years party but not tech savvy enough to make your own robot? Well, there will be plenty of champagne at your party, so why not turn those wasted corks into miniature chairs. The girls will think they’re cute and by showing them your creative side — the girls will think you’re cute, too!
Listen, dude. You’ve never had a better shot of getting laid on New Years than today. Heed my advice: buy a boat load of champagne, get everyone drunk and then make these miniature chairs. Coitus will soon follow.
Here’s a bitchin’ application for Adobe Flash/Flex developers. It’s called MoteDaemon and it’s kind of like Matt Damon except it allows you to create Wiimote-controlled applications for OS X. Now, you too can create your very own sub par Nintendo Wii games for your Mac.
To make your experience of making lousy games for old people and kids even easier, MoteDaemon comes with a test-drive application called WiiCockpit. Bill Byrne of MAKE swears that with one look at WiiCockpit’s code, an experienced Flash developer will quickly figure out how to integrate MoteDaemon. Let’s see if choice software can be developed using the Wii’s controller and OS X. Anything but the Wii at this point.
Anyone interested in DIY, energy or our ecosystem should most definitely check out the Alternative Energy Gift Guide from MAKE. They cover some key issues that we as Americans must confront head on, such as our dependence on foreign energy and oil. There’s a bunch of a kits you can browse through that will have you using the Sun as your new battery pack in no time.
This is about as cheap as it gets when it comes to DIYin’ your own speakers for an iPod. Designer Dmitry Zagga fashioned these together after having his credit card declined at the Apple Store. Look who’s laughing now. They’re just like the clubhouse telephones of days past, where simply attaching a string to two ends of a can fashions together a communication device unlike any other.
These speakers are just as simple to make, too. Get four paper cups. Punch holes in the back of two of them. Place them on top of the other two, linking them together with two tooth picks. Then, stick your earbuds through the holes. It’s ghetto magic!
The team at MAKE dug up a really cool video of Raphael and Max cooking objects with a Jacobs Ladder. Don’t know what a Jacobs Ladder is? Wikipedia has a fine and dandy explanation of it. Watch as these two clowns put a grape in between the current and let it cook. While I prefer to grill my food, this does look insanely fun.
