I love packaging that actually does something—that changes or becomes part of the experience when you use the product. There are three classic examples of packages that I think do this. All were patented in the 1950’s or 1960’s and all are still in use today... 1. Stripe Toothpaste, 2. Jiffy Pop popcorn, and 3. Pillsbury spiral-wound refrigerated dough containers. I know there are other examples I haven’t thought of, but these are three that mean something to me.

Ever since I got myself an Octane, I've got a renewed interest in everything Silicon Graphics. And with that, my old (imaginary) list of things-to-do with such a machine has been dusted off too. One of those things was making some 3D shutter glasses (cheap). And even though I'm tinkering with SGIs for years already, I never took the time to build some stereographic glasses myself, a project which has been online for years already and I've been wanting to do ever since I read it. And now it was time to actually make my own pair. ^_^

One of the official possibilities for these kind of machines is connecting CrystalEyes StereoGraphic glasses to them. Most (if not all) graphic options for SGIs have some kind of stereo capability. Now even though a lot of the SGI related goodies have become cheap (on eBay for instance), I couldn't find the glasses plus the transmitter anywhere. I could find glasses separately, but that would still mean I have to make a transmitter and well, I had these parts around for ages already so I gave it a go to finally connect cheap shutter glasses (instead of the CrystalEyes ones) to the StereoView Port of one of my SGIs.

During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a Japanese air attack. They covered it with camouflage netting and to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.

An "executive desk" with working gears inside of a glass top. The artist also has a coffee table with similar clockwork innards.

The Art of Dale Mathis [via]

These are sold by Domestic Construction, but maybe they'll give you some ideas for your own remade lighting from old china.

[via]

The making of a pinball game.

Pinball hall of fame - MAKE @ Vegas.

HOW TO - Make a Pinball Coffee Table.

Over at the Steampunk Workshop, Jake von Slatt has more pics of the Brass Lion recumbent steampunkified trike.

The Brass Lion - Steampunk Recumbent

Related:

• Brass Lion recumbent tricycle

I can't find any documentation for this, nor can I help posting it. I assume it's a hardware hack that manually controls the floppy drive's stepper motor, but it'd make my day if this was done in software using standard I/O requests. Either way, the 3.5 inch FDD finally serves an important function again.

IF you own an 8 or 16mm movie camera and projector, you can make your own amazingly lifelike three dimensional movies in full color or black and white at a cost of less than $6 for equipment.

The principle of stereoscopic vision is simple. Each eye sees a slightly different aspect of any view. The right eye sees slightly more of the right side of solid objects in the foreground, and the left eye sees slightly more of the left side. In addition, when the eyes are gazing at an object in the foreground, the objects seen by the right eye in the background are displaced to the right, and the objects seen by the left eye in the background are displaced to the left. These two slightly different images that fall on the retinas of the right and left eye are transmitted to the brain and are fused into a scene which enables us to perceive depth.

Alex CF has struck again, this time aging and antiquing his way to this amazing "Lycanthropy Research Case," this one a commissioned piece. One of these days, after I write the great American novel (or the super-successful stinker), I'm going to commission an Alex CF case of my own.

The Art of Alex CF

Based on the lyric (and alternate title) "Big Ideas: Don't get any" I grouped together a collection of old redundant hardware, and placed them in a situation where they're trying their best to do something that they're not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there.

It doesn't sound great, as it's not supposed to.

Sinclair ZX Spectrum - Guitars (rhythm & lead)
Epson LX-81 Dot Matrix Printer - Drums
HP Scanjet 3c - Bass Guitar
Hard Drive array - Act as a collection of bad speakers - Vocals & FX

While poking around on YouTube, I stumbled upon this video of a steam symphony held at the Brighton Fringe Festival in 2005. I don't think we've blogged about it before.

Steam Driven: An audio visual symphony generated through the movements and sound of a 16 tons Corliss steam engine and interactive digital technology.

Eric writes (and from the MAKE Flickr pool):

Someone at the Maker Faire challenged me to turn a working nixie tube into jewelry. Here's a "glowing cross" steampunk-style pendant. It uses a CR2032 coin cell battery to run the high voltage power supply. It uses less power than an LED throwie.

I don't know what's better, this project or the fact that it was conceived at Maker Faire.

Check out this cool steampunk-ified three-wheel recumbent trike. Love the lantern headlights.

Ladies And Gentlemen, I Present The Brass Lion! [Thanks, Jeff!]

Via Gizmodo - Steampunk USB drive

Update:
Check out the comments, it seems there may be an issue with the site. Surf wisely.

Related:

The Steampunk gift guide

Todd Lappin, MAKE contributor and current guest blogger on Dinosaurs and Robots, has a strange collection compulsion that I don't share, but I can totally understand. He has a control panel fetish. Hey, now. Don't judge. Everybody is wired differently. Todd just happens to be wired to toggle switches, panel lights, and needle gauges. And he's not alone. There's an active Control Panel Flickr group, to which Todd just *happens* to be the most active contributor. In his D+R post, he drools all over this Titan 2 missile guidance console some guy found at a surplus store.

ICBM Guidance Panel Found at Surplus Store

We've blogged about analog meter clocks before. This one uses three meters (for hours, minutes, and seconds) and is powered by Adafruit Arduino and an Ethernet Shield.

A month or so ago, a friend of mine introduced me to the Arduino Board. It's an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on a simple microcontroller. Add various peripheral boards called "Shields" and you have a very flexible, very capable, easy to program development platform. I ordered one from Adafruit Industries, along with their Ethernet Shield, and Proto Shield. Together, these modules would be able to log on to a SNTP time server, get the correct time, and display the HOURS digit on one analog panel meter, the MINUTES digit on the next, and the SECONDS digit on the last. What a cool way to display the correct time!

3Meter Clock

Related:

The Net Data Meter from MAKE, Volume 11, page 133.

Incredible retro-futuristic lamps by New York lighting and furniture designer Art Donovan. (Notice how I didn't use the "S" word).

Art Donovan/Steampunk Design [via]

The Curta was a small, hand-cranked mechanical calculator introduced in 1948. It had an extremely compact design, a small cylinder that fit in the palm of the hand. It could be used to perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and, with more difficulty, square roots and other operations. The Curta's design is a descendant of Gottfried Leibniz's Stepped Reckoner and Thomas's Arithmometer, accumulating values on cogs, which are added or complemented by a stepped drum mechanism.

The Enigma variations. The Enigma is one of the most well known devices in the history of gadgets, being responsible for the birth of the computing industry, in attempts to crack it. This has largely overshadowed the plethora of other cryptographic devices, which are often overlooked. Here is a gallery of 20 secret message machines.

Related:

DIY CD-ROM Cipher device.

WHENEVER the members of the halogen family put on an act, you can be sure there will be something doing in the way of entertainment. The nimblest of the family quartet undoubtedly is chlorine. You have seen this actor in several roles before--bleaching dyes, and attacking metals with accompanying pyrotechnics, for example--if you have followed this series of articles. Iodine has made a personal appearance before you as a chemical detective, revealing latent fingerprints on paper. Another member of the family, fluorine, has shown you its remarkable power of etching glass when teamed with hydrogen. The remaining member of the quartet, bromine, is an irritating, rascally sort of character if encountered alone. However, when handcuffed to hydrogen, its behavior is so satisfactory that you should let it enter your home chemical laboratory and allow it to perform for you.

Uniting bromine with hydrogen yields hydrogen bromide, or hydrobromic acid--just as chlorine and hydrogen form hydrogen chloride, or hydrochloric acid. Hydrobromic acid reacts with substances to form bromides, as does its better-known relative, hydrochloric acid, to form chlorides.

Unlike most acids or acid-forming gases, however, hydrogen bromide cannot be prepared for practical purposes by heating corresponding salts with strong sulfuric acid. It is formed in the reaction, to be sure, but it is rapidly decomposed by the oxidizing action of the sulphuric acid. This difficulty is overcome by heating a bromide with strong phosphoric acid, which does not decompose the product.

To make hydrogen bromide, place a half ounce of potassium bromide or sodium bromide in an Erlenmeyer flask or a retort, with a capacity of sixty to 200 cubic centimeters (two to seven fluid ounces). Cover the chemical to a depth of an eighth of an inch or so with strong phosphoric acid, which you can buy at any drug store under the name of eighty-five-percent, or sirupy, phosphoric acid.

The How + Why is an electronic taxidermy installation that is part of the Parsons Design & Technology senior thesis exhibit. I was inspired by vintage How + Why Wonder books to create a fictional natural history museum display with animated creatures. The butterflies flap their wings, the deep sea fish becomes illuminated, and the turtle reveals its second head from within its shell. They are all controlled by hidden arduino boards, it can be seen in person until the 24th at the Chelsea Art Museum (Tues-Sat, 11-6)

Related:


How and why wonder books (amazing!).

Tired of steampunk, you say? Maybe it's time to ditch combustion altogether, kick it really old school, like with pedal-power, home-spun rope, bamboo, and coconuts. Welcome to cocopunk. What ya say, little buddy?

It all started with this post by Mark Frauenfelder on D+R:

In Praise of the Coconut Shell

Although coconut shells do have some well established niche market uses such as novelty tableware and small caged-pet shelters, I can't help but to feel as though too many of them are going to waste.

The New Altoids Tin?

No I don't mean as a mint holder, but as an improvised homebrew electronics project enclosure. The Altoids tin does make a nice project case. It has a hinged lid, giving you easy access to your business, a great pocketable form factor, and of course they are everywhere for free. But despite these merits, I think that the ubiquitous mint tin has been used to excess, and its use may be nearing the saturation point. I have a hunch that the coconut shell might just turn out to be the next big thing.

When I was recently trying find an enclosure for the ukulele amp that I was building, a coconut came to mind, and I don't think that I could have found a better case. In addition to the obvious thematic tie-in with the ukulele, the coconut shell has a number of other redeeming qualities.

The shell is hard and durable, easily machined, has a pleasing organic texture which can be left hairy, sanded smooth, or anything in-between. The little brown dome of a half-shell is cute as a bug, bringing a smile to all who see it. The dome shape is extremely stable and tip resistant. I could go on all day.

Coconuts.

The Cocopunk Chronicles on Dinosaurs + Robots

Related:

• Coconut banjo
• The Bamboo Bike Project
• HOW TO - Make a geodesic dome (with bamboo)

After hugely successful launches in Japan and Europe, Nintendo's Wii Fit exercise game is coming to the United States May on 19th, where it is sure to find sales success. But Wii Fit is hardly the first example of an attempt to meld videogaming and exercise -- it's not even the first fitness offering from Nintendo.

The Phoenix has a nice lifestyle piece on steampunk, centered on those artisans we had at the Maker Faire, especially those that put together the Contraptors' Lounge.

Steam Dream

I wrote a Missile Command clone for the multi-touch wall at Obscura Digital. Just like the original, except you can fire by touching the wall with your fingers. Save the Golden Gate Bridge from ICBMs. Fun for the whole family! Check it out on Patrick’s official Obscura Digital blog entry.

This trio performs the Tetris theme on bottles of various sizes and water levels. They give you some clues to how they made it, one being the clicking metronome in the background and sped up effect; they must have performed it much slower then sped it up. My lips hurt just looking at it, though. Via Geekologie.

The steam mechanics, oilpunks, contraptors, neo-Victorians cosplayers, retro-futurists, post-apocalyptic Playa pirates, New Dandies, and electric cowboys were all out in force at this year's Bay Area Maker Faire. There was the Victorian castle on wheels, the steam-powered runabout, the steam-effects scooter, the fire-spewing bar with vaudeville side-stage, the radio-tubed Theremin, and the outdoor Victorian sitting room with a disgorged cabinet of wonders of brassy computer mods, rayguns, clockwork guitars, and a light-spewing violin covering several tables. There were also at least three airship crews.

One of the coolest things about all this is that many of these artisans were already great virtual friends, even collaborators, but had never actually met in person. Seen above is a drawing, by the amazing Suzanne Forbes, of the inimitable Jake von Slatt (left) and Datamancer (right). This is the first time these two well-known steampunk makers had met in meatspace. Here they're seen building a special Maker Faire Contraptors' Lounge keyboard (which we'll likely give away here on the blog at some point). More of Suzanne's drawings from the Lounge can be seen after the jump.

Sitting in the Lounge: Crewmembers of the HMS Chronabelle, Magpie of Steampunk Magazine. In the background (left) Captain Robert of Abney Park and Jake von Slatt, (center) MAKE photographer Sam Murphy and me (the bald dude -- and I swear I'm NOT picking my nose), (right) David S. Dowling (black vest). Seen on the table is Molly Freidrich's Sinister Device and one of her rayguns.

One of the tables in the Lounge, this one mainly featuring work by Jake von Slatt, including his clockwork guitar, his copper-plated etched mint tins, his telegraph sounders, and a phone project he's currently working on. Also seen is the new Steampunk Anthology edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and a portfolio of Molly Freidrich's work.

Tom Sepe's steam-assisted motorbike.

Jake von Slatt: You've just been "steampunked" (by Meredith Scheff).