Make: Online: Retro Archives

Retro Archive: Retro

November 4, 2009

Beached submarine home theater

Kiwi businessman Wayne Eyre dropped a pretty penny on this fantasy home theater build, but the results are impressive. Many have suggested that it's supposed to be Captain Nemo's Nautilus, but there's no mention of deliberate Verne overtones in the original article. The last photograph above, for instance, shows leaking "plutonium torpedoes" in part of the installation, but plutonium wasn't even discovered until 50 years after 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was published. [via Dude Craft]

November 3, 2009

Steampunk exhibition documentary

Here's a very nice bit of video documenting the recent Steampunk exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford.

Steampunk Art @ Oxford

October 23, 2009

Musical Go boards

Some years ago, a conversation with my old friend Billy Baque turned to the subject of adapting board games for sightless play. When it came round to Go, Billy mentioned having read of an antique Korean board, hollow inside and strung with wires along the lines of the grid, the wires being tuned such that each intersection produced a unique musical interval when a stone was placed upon it. Whether this was simply an aesthetic embellishment or a means to make the game more accessible to sightless players, he did not know.

I was fascinated, and made every effort to run down Billy's original reference, which I eventually determined was R.C. Bell's Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations, Revised Edition. From p.100:

Traditional Japanese boards are made of a solid block of wood about eighteen inches long and sixteen broad, and some five inches thick, fitted with four detachable feet about three inches high. The board and feet are stained yellow. A square depression is cut into the underside of the board to lighten it, and also to increase its resonance; the pieces making a pleasant click when placed upon it. The Koreans have gone a stage further and some of their boards have wires stretched beneath to produce a musical note when the stones are played.

"A musical note" tends to suggest that the board as a whole played a single tone, interval, or chord, rather than a unique tone or interval for each playing position. Still, it seemed worthwhile to try to run down Bell's original reference, which, thanks to his meticulous bibliography, I eventually found was Stewart Culin's 1895 Korean Games with Notes on the Corresponding Games of China and Japan, which is out of copyright and available in its entirety on Google Books. From p. 91:

The Korean board, pa tok hpan, differs from that of Japan, in being made in the form of a small hollow table, while the Japanese board consists of a solid block of wood. The Korean board is resonant and by an arrangement of wires stretched within emits a musical note when a piece is played. A specimen in the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania (Fig. 96) is eleven inches high and about sixteen inches square.

Again, "a musical note," but the language in both cases is ambiguous.

Culin's Figure 96 is reproduced at the top of this post. I've contacted The Penn Museum to see if collection number 16,431 still exists and/or if they have any record of it. I was hoping, at least, to show you all a photograph. Can't seem to get anyone to respond, however. If anyone has any information about this artifact or about musical go boards in general, I would love to have it. Please drop us all a comment or e-mail me directly.

October 22, 2009

Retro futuristic classroom enforcer robots

As an unruly second grader I often endured the chalk-throwing rage of Mrs. Seaman (*giggle*). Not much fun, but at least I wasn't being corporally punished by these "watchful robots that rap students on the head if they lose focus or act up."

This vision of the future, ominously entitled "The Rise of the Computerized School", was illustrated by Shigeru Komatsuzaki for an article in a 1969 Shōnen Sunday magazine. The "Computopia" feature predicted that by 1989 our lives would be equal parts carefree and terrifying thanks to the pervasiveness of computers, telecommuting teachers, and pugilistic enforcer robots.

[via Pink Tentacle] [Thanks, Contorto!]

Orrery based on Ferguson's "mechanical paradox"

Beautiful photographs by Tina Buescher of Jim Donnelly's orrery based on the mechanism known as "Ferguson's mechanical paradox." Good information about the orrery is provided by Ian Coote's page. As for the "paradox," well, it boils down to this: the three apparently-identical stacked gears on the end are driven by a single gear, yet move at different rates, which, of course, would be impossible if they were truly identical. News flash: They're not. But I'm sure it was harder to fight boredom in the 18th century than it is now, and the build is undeniably gorgeous.

October 21, 2009

"The joy of sex don't last like the fun of shootin' anvils"

To "shoot," an anvil, for the record, is to blast it several hundred feet into the air using a charge of black powder. This delightful man, Gay Wilkinson, is apparently the world's champion anvil-shooter. The fireworks start at 1:30. [via Boing Boing]

Amazing fantasy armor leatherwork

I'm not sure exactly what it means to be "hell bent for leather," but I am sure that this is the outfit you want to be wearing while you're thusly engaged. Prince Armory is (mostly) Samuel Lee, who goes by *Azmal on deviantART. Beautiful craftsmanship. [via Geekologie]

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

Steampunk leather masks and helmets

Tom Banwell is one of the artists featured in the currently-ongoing Steampunk exhibition at Oxford's Old Ashmolean building. Shown here is "Sentinel." [via Propnomicon]

October 19, 2009

Harmony Generator vintage kit

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Matt the modulator picked this rather sweet 80's Maplin Harmony Generator kit on ebay. Though nonfunctional after the initial assembly, a bit of rewiring got things up and running for the above-seen demo processing a Gameboy/LSDJ sequence. He was also kind enough to post the relevant schematics/article for those interested.

October 18, 2009

Steampunkin!

Hans Scharler just submitted this cool hack-'o-lantern to our Make: Halloween Contest 2009. It includes a motion detector, some LEDs, and a fog machine, and when someone approaches it lights up and shoots "steam" out of its ears.

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

October 15, 2009

Custom case for Chumby Guts

My friend Joe Bowers bought a Chumby Guts kit. Step one: get it up and running. Step two: give the poor, naked thing some clothes. Joe designed a case for it and asked me to laser cut it for him. It reminds me of an old television set. This is an early prototype; we plan to refine the design, add some etched graphics, and more. Maybe some rabbit ear antennae?

Clever trick alert: Joe put the Chumby on a scanner and traced the rounded-cornered bezel in CorelDraw to get an exact fit. It pops in there beautifully!

In the Maker Shed:

Chumby Guts

Joe's blog

How-To: Corpsified faerie

Cobwebs of The Art of Darkness shows how to turn a tiny plastic skeleton into a mummified pixie for Halloween purposes or for hoaxing gullible Britons. She calls it a "doom it yourself" project.

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

October 14, 2009

Keef's teef

UT Austin student/librarian/artist Keef calls this project "Professor Teeth." It incorporates a dental mannequin with the jaws fixed up to chatter like that thing from Hellraiser that chatters? I think it's called "The Chatterer?" Also it tells fortunes and stuff. There's video here. [Thanks, Keef!]

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

Gorgeous antique pocketwatch LED retrofit

So, you may think, somebody took an old pocketwatch and fit it with a PCB and some LEDs. Ho-hum, perhaps? Seen it? Done it? Got the T-shirt? My response: there's concept, and there's execution. The concept here may be of the non-earth-shattering variety, but the execution is exquisite. Must. Watch. Video. To appreciate just how cool this thing really is. It ticks, for one thing, and when the minute and hour "hands" advance they sweep around the face in a visual gesture reminiscent of John Taylor's Corpus Clock. And besides flawless aesthetics and stellar workmanship, the watch has a great story, too. Its maker, Paul Pounds, explains:

My grandfather was a horologist. When he passed away in 2005 I inherited from him a collection of broken pocketwatches. As my skills are in microelectronics, rather than micromechanics, I felt it would be a fitting tribute to him to produce an electronic movement in place of one of the broken ones he'd never had the time to fix.
I never knew my grandfather very well, on account of our living some distance away from him all of my life. He struck me as a quiet, unassuming sort of man, but this fit very well with his astonishing skill as a horologist. In his heyday, he was among the best watchmakers in Australia. His steady and patient hand able to finely adjust the most diminutive gears and escapements of a clockwork mechanism. He was particularly recognised for his ability to perform delicate work in the smallest of mechanical movements, the lady's wristwatch.
During the Second World War, his expertise was considered too valuable to allow him to go and fight, and instead he was sent to fabricate precision mechanical systems at the Toowoomba Foundry. He was told that if he tried to enlist he would be arrested and sent back!
Such was his skill that when the Australian Horologist journal issued a challenge to drill a pin from end to end, he achieved it by boring a hole by hand, using tiny drills he made from sewing needles. Not one to let it rest there, he topped this feat by filing and turning down another pin on a minature lathe, and threading it through the hole. Then he raised the bar again with a three-penny piece drilled and threaded through the edge of the coin. He produced a small number of these pins and coins to amaze his clients.
Although he never got to see it, I'd like to think he would have enjoyed seeing one of his old broken watches turned into something new and useful. This project is dedicated to his memory.

[via Hack a Day]

howard pounds master horologist 1914-2005.jpg

October 13, 2009

100 years of technophobia

Ars Technica has an awesome piece detailing 100 years worth of "Big Content's" reaction to emerging media technologies (in its own words). Here's John Philip Sousa, writing in Appleton's Magazine, on "The Menace of Mechanical Music" (aka the gramophone):

"From the days when the mathematical and mechanical were paramount in music, the struggle has been bitter and incessant for the sway of the emotional and the soulful," he wrote. "And now in this the twentieth century come these talking and playing machines and offer again to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things which are as like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful living breathing daughters."

Also beware the copy machine, the VCR, cassette recorders, MP3, the DVR... for that way lies the ruin of the marketplace. Or not.

100 years of Big Content fearing technology--in its own words [via Tim O'Reilly's Twitter feed]

Dental training mannequins

These impossibly creepy artifacts are just the tip of the iceberg of awesometasticness that is Steve Erenberg's Radio Guy. Be warned, Steve's site is chockablock with incredible medical, scientific, and industrial antiques he's collected, mostly from the 19th and early 20th centuries, and is a major click-trap.

Steampunk art exhibit opens today in Oxford

Here's by way of a can-we-still-be-friends for those annoyed by yesterday's steampunk toilet post. The Museum of the History of Science at Oxford's Old Ashmolean building is hosting an exhibit of contemporary steampunk art curated by Art Donovan. It runs from today until February 21, 2010. If you're interested in steampunk and you're anywhere near the UK during that time it's probably worth checking out.

October 12, 2009

"At The Mountains of Madness" prop set

new at the mountains of madness patch large.jpg

Propnomicon has an ongoing project to assemble a set of props from the fictional Miskatonic University expedition to Antarctica from Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness.

Steampunk has jumped the shark

I stole this post title and all from Tiffany of Curious Goods.

October 8, 2009

Atlas-F missile silo converted to ultimate survival mansion

Be ready when the zombies come! From silohome.com:

NY's Adirondack State Park - During the late 1950's and early 1960's when the Cold War was escalating, the U.S. government built hundreds of Atlas-F missile silos (each for 18 million in 1961, with the rising cost of construction today one could barely fund the excavation.) to prepare the country for an attack that never came. Today, most of these silos lie abandoned and filled with water, monuments to a bygone era of American history and left to waste. But now, thanks to two entrepreneurial cousins, Bruce Francisco and Gregory Gibbons, one of these silos located in beautiful Adirondack State Park near Lake Placid is finding new life as a luxury home safe haven getaway complex accessible by plane or car. The real estate includes 20 acres of land with approximately 78 acres available as 10 approved building lots. The home is conveniently located to Montreal, Lake Placid and Plattsburgh and boast such outstanding year round activities as golfing, hunting, fishing, boating, hiking and world class skiing.

The price, regrettably, is north of two megabucks. But when I finally marry that wealthy heiress this place is at the top of my shopping list. Bruce was nice enough to provide us with a high-resolution scan of the plan view, above, which (for the time being anyway) is exclusive to Make: Online. You can click on the image above to see it at 1000 pixels wide.