Make: Online: Goli Mohammadi Archives

Archives: Goli Mohammadi

MakeShift 19 deadline November 20th

The deadline for submitting your solution to the MakeShift challenge from MAKE Volume 19 is fast approaching. Napping in an ocean kayak is generally never a good idea, but what would you do if you stuck in this predicament? Work your brain, get creative, and win stuff! Here's the MakeShift in its entirety:

The Scenario: You're an experienced and avid open-ocean kayaker, setting off early from your favorite coastal launch point for a restorative and invigorating day on the water. You've checked with the Weather Channel and the National Weather Service, and both have predicted sunny weather, slight clouds, and virtually no wind. So, after donning some sunblock and checking your gear and supplies, you're off.

The launching goes OK, but you take on a little water fighting the breakers. When you finally clear them, you paddle steadily until you're about 1 mile offshore, which you confirm with your GPS. Venturing out a little farther, you paddle parallel to the shore for a few hours. Then, adjusting your life vest and seat cushion to make yourself more comfortable, you stop to relax and enjoy the scenery, but between the warm sunshine, the gentle roll of the ocean, and the hypnotically reflective water, you nod off.

The Challenge: When you wake several hours later, the ocean is choppy and a strong, southerly wind has picked up, which has pushed you at least 3 miles from shore and continues to grow in strength. You dig for your cellphone just in case you need to call for help, only to discover that the saltwater you took on earlier has rendered it useless. You paddle hard for shore, but even after a relentless hour, the winds and currents seem to erase all your progress and the tall beachfront hotels are becoming mere dots on the horizon. You realize more paddling might be fruitless and only exhaust you completely. So what do you do now?

What You've Got: Two gallons of fresh drinking water and a basic survival kit with a compass, a lightweight 6×7-foot survival blanket (silvered on one side and dark on the other, in a pouch), heavy-duty nylon tape, and a coil of thin but strong nylon rope. You've also got a Swiss Army knife (or similar tool), some marine binoculars, a GPS unit, your waterlogged cellphone, some basic medical supplies in their own self-contained marine emergency medical kit, and an extra paddle. You also have a lightweight, waterproof windbreaker and some foul-weather gear stashed in the small but useful front storage compartment.

To Enter: Send a detailed description of your MakeShift solution with sketches and/or photos to makeshift@makezine.com by Nov. 20, 2009. If duplicate solutions are submitted, the winner will be determined by the quality of the explanation and presentation. The most plausible and most creative solutions will each win a MAKE T-shirt and a MAKE Pocket Ref. Think positive and include your shirt size and contact information with your solution. Good luck! For readers' solutions to previous MakeShift challenges, visit makezine.com/makeshift.

Posted by Goli Mohammadi | Nov 19, 2009 06:00 PM
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Flashback: Spinout

Back in August of 2006, on the pages of MAKE Volume 07, Colin Berry shared the story of his maker brother Kevin Berry and the role that the Soap Box Derby played in his short life. This intimate story moved us all. In October of 2006, Colin read the story as part of our Maker Files series, with an introduction by Dale Dougherty, MAKE's editor and publisher. Below is Colin's story in full. To hear him tell the tale, here is the MP3. Or you can get the audio delivered automatically with iTunes.

Spinout
Was building a Soap Box Derby racer my brother's last best chance at escaping his fate?
By Colin Berry

All his life, my brother Kevin was plagued with terrible luck. It began when he was a teenager in the early 70s, in Longmont, Colorado — our hometown — and soon became something of a family legend. If the Trojan theater was giving away free tickets to Planet of the Apes, the kid in front of Kevin in line would get the last one. If Kevin sold enough newspaper subscriptions to win a clock radio, it was broken when he opened the box. If one of his friends shoplifted a pack of Odd Rods bubblegum cards on the way home from school, Kevin got collared for it. It was a pattern. He weathered it well, half-joking about his luck with his shy, gap-toothed grin, but over time it took a terrible toll.

In shop class, however, Kevin seemed to step out from its shadow. He was adept with tools and proved himself a skilled carpenter at an early age. I was seven years younger and remember marveling at the projects he brought home from junior high school: a varnished gun rack; a Newton's Cradle, with its five suspended steel balls; a sturdy set of bedroom shelves for his Revell models. Looking back, it follows that the noisy, meditative setting of the woodshop appealed to Kevin. It was a place where no one shouted at him and where no electronic parts could mysteriously fail.

In our basement, Dad had a woodshop, too, a flagstone-floored, fluorescent-lit grotto with an oversized plank workbench, barrels of wood scraps, and tools hung on a pegboard. It was here, from 1969 to 1972, that my brother built four Soap Box Derby racers. He would start in late winter, when snow still covered the ground outside, transforming a small stack of lumber and paper sacks of hardware into a teen-sized, gravity-propelled vehicle.

Balancing the shell of the car across two sawhorses, he built each the same way: a pine plank floorboard supported several plywood bulkheads, to which he anchored Masonite sides and a top. Each car ran on four red-rimmed Soap Box Derby wheels, controlled by a simple cable steering system and foot-pedal drag brake. Each was painted and then lettered with Kevin's name, number, and sponsor logo (Weicker Moving and Storage). And each one got faster.

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Posted by Goli Mohammadi | Nov 18, 2009 06:00 PM
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SoundCloud's CitySounds.fm

Last month I posted about SoundCloud's slick music sharing site, really the best I've seen. David Noël from SoundCloud posted in the comments about one of their hacks from London Hack Day called CitySounds.fm. I've been tuning into the site a lot for a bit of the unexpected and to gain exposure to artists I may not have discovered on my own. The site pulls tracks and sets uploaded to SoundCloud in real time according to location. The homepage (The Board) looks like the screenshot above and represents the most active cities. Click on a city and hear a stream of the latest music uploaded from that location. Alternately, the popular chart represents the 32 most popular cities according to tweets put out about those cities. If you make music, you can sign up on SoundCloud for free, upload tracks, and see them appear on CitySounds.fm right away. There are also individual city pages, like this one for Chicago, which list stats and most popular genres coming out of that city. Getting bored with your music collection? Check it out.

Posted by Goli Mohammadi | Nov 12, 2009 06:00 PM
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Flashback: Lego Recharger

This week's flashback is as fun as it is useful, brought to you by our own Make: Online contributing writer and the host of Make: television, John Edgar Park. Originally appearing on the pages of MAKE Volume 12, the Lego Recharger helps keep your gadgets all juiced up and stores your keys too. How incredibly convenient! Check it out.

Lego Recharger
By John Edgar Park

On a recent trip to Legoland, I saw a neat product in one of the stores: a Lego key rack with Lego brick keychains. What a great idea, I thought. With this I could come home, empty my pockets, and have a consistent place to hang my keys. But wait, what about all the other devices I just pulled out of my pockets, where do they go? And, for that matter, how will all their batteries stay charged?

Then it dawned on me. If I attached a powered Lego brick to each gadget to provide life-giving juice for their thirsty batteries, I'd solve 3 major problems in my life: lack of gadget organization, lack of battery power, and lack of Legos attached to all my possessions.

The first thing I did was to sift through my Lego Mindstorms and Technic bins. I grabbed some 9V motor wire bricks and a large baseplate to start playing with the design. I wanted to avoid modifying the bricks as much as possible. I also wanted color coding so I'd be less likely to accidentally hang my iPod on the cellphone's brick, thus blowing up the iPod. This is a danger of universal connectors. Since the motor wire bricks come only in black, I needed to use additional bricks for color coding. I considered color-coded tiles on top of the device-end brick, but the smooth tiles always seem to hide a Lego's, well, Lego-ness, so I opted for a 2×2 studded plate instead. Much more geek chic. I placed color-matched bricks below the respective charger-side brick on the base plate.

Next, I needed to splice the motor wire bricks onto my power adapters and gadget plugs. My first attempt involved cutting, stripping, and twisting corresponding wires together, soldering them, and then covering the splice with heat-shrink tubing. This worked great, but wasn't very elegant. I wanted to leave these Lego dongles on my gadgets all the time, even when they were in my pockets, so getting the wire length down to a minimum was important. The splice wasn't helping that.

Looking more closely at the Lego 9V motor wire brick, I noticed 4 pressure tabs on its ends. I grabbed a small screwdriver and pried the bottom off the brick. Inside, the insulated wire pair was pierced onto 2 sharp metal posts. The wire was held in place by the pressure between a small ridge of plastic and the recently pried-off bottom. Excellent. I'd now be able to cut all of my charger wires in half, and simply crimp a Lego motor wire brick onto each end.

For my key chain, I ripped off the original Lego design. I drilled a small hole into a 2×4 brick and then screwed a small screw eye into it. My apologies to Lego purists for all the drilling, but hey, Lego did it first!

The whole system was cheap and easy to build, works great, and keeps my devices organized and charged. I've gotten so used to it that I've installed an unwired counterpart key rack at my office.

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Posted by Goli Mohammadi | Nov 11, 2009 06:00 PM
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The intersection of arts and science: Between the Folds

For folks interested in the intersection of arts and science, the PBS series Independent Lens is presenting a fascinating in-depth look into origami titled Between the Folds. The film documents "a determined group of theoretical scientists and fine artists who have abandoned their careers and scoffed at their graduate degrees to forge new lives as modern-day paper folders."

Featured in the film are MIT's youngest-ever tenured professor Dr. Erik Demaine; mathematician, sculptor, puzzle maker, and self-taught computer scientist Marty Demaine; master free-style folder Vincent Floderer; pioneering Israeli educator Miri Golan; mathematics professor Dr. Tom Hull; trained artist and instructor Paul Jackson; one of the most technically accomplished folders in the world, Eric Joisel; one of only a few handmade origami papermakers in the world, Michael LaFosse; origami "hyper-realist" and physicist Dr. Robert J. Lang (who was profiled in CRAFT Volume 05); material artist with a masterful understanding of patterns and geometry, Chris K. Palmer; and the father of modern origami, Akira Yoshizawa.

Screenings are part of the Independent Television Service's (ITVS) Community Cinema series, which are free, followed by discussion panels and access to resources.

Between the Folds will be showing in the Bay Area in Oakland on Tuesday, November 17 at 6:00 p.m. at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center and in San Francisco on Wednesday, November 18 at 5:45 p.m. at the San Francisco Main Library. For a list of screenings taking place across the country, check out the film site.

Here are a couple of interesting excerpts from the documentary to get a flavor for it. The following clip features Paul Jackson, an origami artists and art teacher living in Tel Aviv, Israel, speaking of the "one fold":

And this clip shows Michael LaFosse, a master artisan who not only makes origami, but is one of the only handmade origami paper makers in the world, providing a window into his workshop and processes:

Posted by Goli Mohammadi | Nov 5, 2009 06:00 PM
Announcements, Paper Crafts | Permalink | Comments (7) | Suggest a Site

Flashback: Disappearing Apple

I love electronic music, but lately looking up on stage at shows seems more and more like a perfect photo op for an Apple ad. I also love my Mac, but in a dark, nightclub setting, that glowing Apple elevated on stage is a distraction. It reminds me of an article in MAKE Volume 09 by Tom Owad where he shared his process for removing the Apple from an iBook. Owad took it a step further and not only got rid of the Apple on the lid, but also used some open source tools to remove the Apples from the operating system. Bear in mind that this article ran in March of 2007; he was working with Mac OS X 10.3 and a couple of the tools no longer seem to be up and running, but I think it's still a good read nonetheless and maybe some folks out there know of current alternatives they can share in the comments below. Now I need to print it out and distribute to some musicians I know. Enjoy.

Disappearing Apple
Removing the logo from an iBook.
By Tom Owad

I am writing a book/TV documentary for Canongate and the BBC called Bonfire of the Brands. The short story is that I am attempting to overcome my addiction to brands by burning all my branded stuff on a great bonfire on 17th September 2006. Afterwards, I will be attempting to live a life brand-free."

This was the introduction to an email I received from Neil Boorman last August. It continued, "I have allowed myself one luxury which will be spared from the fire, which is my iBook. But to keep it, I must de-brand the thing, which is why I'm contacting you."

There's a particular problem with removing the iBook's Apple logo: it leaves an Apple-shaped hole. To circumvent this problem, I considered a number of techniques, from molding an entirely new lid, to simply covering the Apple with a big white sticker. Ultimately, I decided the best way was to cut out the logo on a milling machine, then mill a replacement piece out of another lid. I called PreOwned Electronics and ordered a stack of grade B iBook lids to experiment on, then headed down to the garage.

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Posted by Goli Mohammadi | Nov 4, 2009 06:00 PM
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MAKE 20: Snowboard conversion to DIY splitboard

A couple of winters ago, when some friends and I were slogging up the roughly 2,000 vertical feet of Waterhouse Peak in the South Lake Tahoe area, snowshoes on our feet and snowboards strapped to our packs, we were repeatedly passed up by smiling telemark skiers, smoothly gliding uphill with skins on their skis. The snowboarding answer to this ease and simplicity is known as a splitboard, a snowboard that comes apart into two planks, which you cover with skins for the uphill, and then put back together into snowboard mode for the downhill. The hitch is that I've been drooling over ready-made splitboards for a few years now, but they regularly cost between $600-$1200 for the deck alone. Now, Voilé is offering a kit to split an existing board yourself; the Split Decision kit runs around $160. And in MAKE Volume 20, Damien Scogin gives us a detailed step by step for making your own splitboard. The sketchiest part of the build has got to be taking a saw to your snowboard. It's like DIY surgery on one of my most beloved toys, but Damien shows how to use a table saw and build a quick and dirty jig to keep the cut straight. Is it a coincidence that a friend of mine just gave me a board that would be perfect for this? Nope, I think it's a calling.

If you're a MAKE subscriber, your issue should be arriving any minute now in the mail. If not, look for it on newsstands on November 17th or order yours from the Maker Shed. The issue is dedicated to "Kids of All Ages" and it's jam-packed with nothing but fun.

Posted by Goli Mohammadi | Oct 29, 2009 06:00 PM
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Combo: A collaborative animation by Blu and David Ellis

As part of the summer-long Fame Festival in Italy that culminated in a final show last month, artists Blu and David Ellis spent a long week collaborating to create this amazing animation clip, made by filming morphing hand-painted murals. The video loops twice, in case you are beyond astounded the first time around.

Posted by Goli Mohammadi | Oct 29, 2009 11:30 AM
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Flashback: Halloween Wounds and Prosthetics

If you haven't procured a Halloween costume yet, your best bet might be to just add some gaping wounds to whatever you're wearing and head to the party. Zombie-fy to simplify. With that said, this week's flashback is another gem from from Make: Halloween Special Edition, a 2006 collaboration between the editors of MAKE and CRAFT, our sister publication. Courtney Mault and Max Sparber, experts in horror makeup, wrote an entire Macabre Makeup DIY section for the issue, and this offering will teach you how to work liquid latex into a truly horrific wound. Also check out this week's flashback on Craftzine.com, which covers how to do gory ghoul makeup using bread crumbs. And finally, for tons more Halloween inspiration, pick up the full Make: Halloween Special Edition in the Maker Shed, where it's currently on sale for 5 bucks!

Wounds and Prosthetics
By Courtney Mault and Max Sparber

Liquid latex rubber is great for wound makeup, large and small. Courtney likes to use it to create small flaps of skin for a skinned knuckle, which are convincing enough that when she occasionally wears her makeup to work as a prank, employers have insisted she seek first aid and write a medical report, even after she has explained that her injury is just makeup.

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Posted by Goli Mohammadi | Oct 28, 2009 06:00 PM
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Gabriel Dishaw's junk art Nikes

Metal sculpture artist Gabriel Dishaw uses found objects from typewriters, adding machines, and old computers, held together with fine wire and glue, to create his awesome sculptures. He pays homage to his favorite sneakers by piecing together these replicas. Pictured above is the Junk Dunk (Left), based on the Nike Dunk Low. Here's a side view:

In previous iterations, like the first version shown below, he sacrificed a shoe from his personal collection to harvest the sole as a base to build off of.