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November 3, 2009

Dragon skeleton sculpture made from real bones

There are lots of custom knife-makers out there, and plenty that specialize in exotic or fantasy knives, but there is only one I know of who has gone so far as to invent a fictional world, complete with geography, mythology, and history, as a context for his work.

Virgil England installed and photographed this life-size dragon skeleton in Chugach National Forest in Alaska in 1990. In his own words:

The part of the Dragon that is exposed is about 18 feet long. The wing is 15 feet high. The skeleton is carved whale bone and forged mild steel with reindeer rawhide stretched and stitched over the bones. I did it to display a 59 1/2 inch two handed sword called "The Veil of Tears". After the ten hour photo session It went to a three day showing in San Francisco then to the buyers.

Virgil's handmade knives are highly sought after among collectors, and you can view more of his edged work at his personal website. The photos of his "Chugach Draegon" that appear with this post are being published online here for the first time. Click on each to see it at full resolution. [Thanks, Virgil!]

Posted by Sean Michael Ragan | Nov 3, 2009 06:00 AM
Arts, Made On Earth, Makers | Permalink | Comments (0) | Suggest a Site

iPhone 3G and 3GS unlocked with blacksn0w

Master iPhone unlocker George Hotz aka GeoHot has done it again. Apparently the current iPhone 3G/3GS baseband has been successfully cracked and new unlock code titled blacksn0w will soon become available through the blackr1n jailbreak. [via iPhoneSchool]

LED Binary Clock

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Here is an interesting LED binary clock by instructables user ElevenOf9. I really like the single sided PCB, and the way the LEDs are arranged. It just looks cool!

This is the second revision of my PIC based LED binary clock. The original version was the first PIC project I attempted, it used a PIC16F84A to do both the timekeeping and control the display matrix, unfortunately it didn't keep good enough time and gained about a minute every week.

In the Maker Shed:

In the Maker Shed: DIY Design Electronics Kit

Big Head Mode papercraft costume

Eric Testroete, a 3D character artist from Vancouver, sent us this awesome self-portrait costume, an homage to Big Head Mode in videogames.

Papercraft Self Portrait - 2009
Eric's Flickr set

Make: Halloween Contest 2009 - Last call!

Halloween may have come and gone, but there's still 24 hours to get your entries in to our Make: Halloween Contest 2009! We want to see your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects! All you have to do is fill out the form.

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

There's still time left to enter the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Deadline is 11:59 PM PST, November 3rd. Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

Radiohead´s Thom Yorke printed in 3D

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Hey, remember when Radiohead released a bunch of 3D data for their music video "House of cards"? Now someone has used that data to print a 3D model of Thom Yorke's head.

Reanimating a robotic pet as a FrankenDog

Have a broken robotic toy that you want to bring back from the dead? Why not follow the lead of Morten Skogly, and re-animate it with a toy synthesizer? The FrankenDog looks like a good way to get some use out of an old toy, at least until you get around to pulling the motors out of it. I like the control 'switches' built by sticking conductive tape at the edge of the plastic piano keys.

Bicycle handlebar brake lighting

MAKE subscriber Justin Shaw has posted a project on Instructables for a bike brake lighting system that features lights on the ends of a bicycle's handlebars, controlled by an Arduino and a Pololu 3-axis accelerometer. He's even offering a $35 prize to the first person who follows his plans and posts proof of a successful build.

Bar End Brake Light: BEBL

Bandsaw beautification

The first time I saw a circuit board where the board designer had broken through the boundaries of a grid pattern and made traces that curved playfully and made decorative shapes, it was a revelation. You can make a PCB any damn shape you please! (So long as it takes into account the component shapes, circuit design requirements, and doesn't get too confusing.) Too often we get stuck in rigid modes of thinking about the world. I love it when people tweak those tunnel realities a little. This painted saw, spotted on Dinosaurs and Robots, is a perfect example. I've seen a few shop tools maybe painted a non-factory-issued color, or with some bumper stickers and tool company logos, etc. on them, but have never seen one tricked-out painted just for fun and aesthetic pleasure. Why not? This saw was done by custom guitar painter Sarah Ryan, for Creston Lea's bandsaw.

Okay, here's one reason not to paint your shop tools. It apparently attracts snakes! (See story on the link.)

Creston Lea's Bandsaw Painted by Sarah Ryan

Low Resolution

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Add this one to clever makeup-based Halloween costumes.. "Low Resolution"...

A Halloween souvenir

Last Friday night, this piece of "blood"-soaked "meat" (which is, I think, actually some kind of dyed latex product) was smeared roundly about my face and neck by a large man, who may or may not be named "Thor," dressed as a butcher, at the 2009 annual Scare for a Cure haunted house, held ~~each~~ this year at the palatial Austin estate of video-game entrepreneur Richard Garriott, aka Lord British. I paid a couple of extra bucks for the special glowing red chemiluminescent necklace that identified me as amenable to the "extreme," full-contact version of the experience, and I'm so glad that I did.

Scare for a cure 2009 pics.JPG

My friend, Christie, got about a bucket of "blood" "vomited" onto her head by a ceiling-mounted ghoul, and came out looking like Carrie on prom night. I saw it happen, and the moment is frozen for me like a scene from a Dario Argento movie: Christie's blond locks, suffused by a pale, flickering, blue-green backlight, her mouth slightly open as she looks up, laughing, into the torrent of black, sticky ichor that tumbles, in exaggerated slow motion, onto her face. In my mind's eye, I can still see my own gaping mouth reflected in a small, spherical droplet of that blood as it spatters across space and time. I think that droplet will be falling, in my memory, for many years to come.

Thanks to all the volunteers who worked so hard to make this such an incredible event. If you missed it this year, go mark your calendars now.

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

There's still time left to enter the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Deadline is 11:59 PM PDT, November 3rd. Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

Secret knock detector

RFID card readers becoming passé? Maybe what you need to guard the door to your high-tech lair is a secret knock detecting door lock. Using an Arduino and a bunch of parts found around the lab, Steve Hoefer built a device that unlocks your door when it receives a certain knock pattern. It works by counting the time between successive knocks, and can be re-programmed at the touch of a button.

Of course, this system is susceptible to a replay attack, because anyone can listen to the knock pattern and then know how to get in. If you are planning to use something like this, I would recommend either incorporating a timestamp into the message, or using a series of one time knocks, in order to make it harder to break into. Actually, that might make it more secure than a regular lock.

Auto-tracking sentry gun build

The beginnings of an Aliens-style (except, you know, without all the actual bullets and killing and so forth) automatic sentry gun from diederick. The tracking platform is obviously flexible, but I think he intends to mount an AirSoft gun. Build details and code downloads are available from his website.

North Brooklyn Hackerspace opening Friday: Alpha One Labs

A new hackerspace is opening in Williamsburg Brooklyn, NY: Alpha One Labs.

Alpha One Labs hackerspace was founded in the summer of July 2009. Boasting radical inclusivity, Alpha One Labs superb design aims to provide a safe, clean space for users of all ages and interests to work on projects together. We also have weekly classes including the expected soldering and electronic projects along with some exciting additions like popsicle stick projects for kids and "ask a hacker" sessions for seniors.

They're having a grand opening fund-raising party on Friday:

Come "Light Up The Night" at our Grand Opening Fund-Raising Party. We'll have a cash prize raffle (Based on number of foursquare check ins that night. $5 per ticket, winner announced at 12am), a silent auction with various items up for bids and games such as the plug and switch race, 4 player Dreamcast and more throughout the night.

Come dressed in your wearable lights and bring lasers! We have laser controlled lights! Beer and drinks are free. $10 donation at door. RSVP.

Alpha One Labs Grand Opening Fund-Raising Party
Friday, November 6th, 8PM
65 Maspeth Ave #1A
Brooklyn, NY 11211 (Graham Ave. L)

Storing data in waves: Delay line memory

It's the '60s, and you don't have access to a semiconductor fab to make piles of cheap memory for you, so how could you store data on your computer?

Well, MAKE subscriber Steve points us to one possible solution, courtesy of vintagecalcuators.com: delay line memories. Rather than having a bunch of individual units that store a bit each, these memory devices work by storing data in sound (compression) waves. The device consists of a long length of wire, with an actuator on one end to vibrate the wire, and a reader on the other end to pick up vibrations. Because the vibrations don't travel very fast along the wire, you can make a whole bunch of them before the first one reaches the end of the wire, and that becomes the 'size' of the memory. Data can be read back by looking for a vibration at a particular time- if there is one, that corresponds to a '1', and if there isn't, it would be a '0'.

It sounds a bit weird, so I like to think of it like this. If you had a hard time remembering things for very long, and happened to live in a cave, you could just shout out what you didn't want to forget, and a few seconds later you would hear an echo to remind you. Of course, the problem with this is that an echo doesn't stick around for long, so you would have to shout again every time that you heard the echo, so that you could remember again in a few seconds. Assuming you could keep this up, you would never forget your idea. Of course, that would get really tiring after a while, so you would be much better off just writing it down.

The memory shown above is from a Monroe Epic 3000 calculator, which was apparently the first programmable calculator with a printer built in.

Audiocloud

This tangle of corrugated plastic tubes is the Audiocloud, a collaboration between Piotr Adamski and mode:lina. It's got some high-falutin' conceptual roots, but I gotta admit I'm just charmed by the series of tubes. [via Core77]

Large collection of repurposed train cars

Paul Overton calls this great round-up of creatively reused rolling stock from Web Urbanist a "megapost." I like that term. There's railroad-car homes, offices, hotels--even a railroad-car footbridge. [via Dude Craft]

How-To: Light-up camera level

From the MAKE Flickr pool

In need of a more visible level for setting up long exposure night shots, zomie made an LED illuminated level attachment for use with his DSLR + Gorillapod setup. Check out his instructable for the step-by-step.

DIY Arduino dual motor board

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Augustson designed etched and assembled a specialized Arduino board for a new robotics project -

What is ADM 1.0? Basically we built an Arduino, added a Dual Motor Controller to it and a small prototyping area. Hence the name ADM (Arduino Dual Motor). The board works and is programmed just like a normal Arduino. For the science fair, part of the rules stated we could not use an actual Arduino board, but were able to build or modify our own.

Check out the ADM-Robot part 1 page for printable PCB art and more infos.

$40K DARPA "find the balloons" social networking challenge

Starting on December 5, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will award $40,000 to the first registered team to correctly report the location of ten eight-foot-diameter red weather balloons distributed randomly across the continental United States. From the challenge website:

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.

Personally, I think 99 red balloons would've been better, for marketing purposes, than 10. I guess that would take way too long. [via Hack a Day]