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]

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

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.

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!]

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.

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]

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.

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]

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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]

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]

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I sent this link over to Becky for the CRAFT blog but I got jealous after she put it up and had to post it here, too. Chillingworth may be the coolest stuffed animal I have ever seen. He was made from an antique bodice by Ann Wood of Brooklyn.

Everybody's favorite Xeni recently linked to this cool collection of slayer kits from around the web. Many of these are antiques and have sold for large sums at major auction houses, but I remain dubious as to how serious anyone ever really was about the whole business. [via Boing Boing]

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.

One of the cool things about doing this column is discovering lost technologies myself, things I knew nothing about before bumping into them while poking about the virtual attics and basements of cyberspace, looking for things to write about. For instance, I knew nothing about stick chart navigation before covering it here. And I'd certainly seen timbrel vaulting before, but didn't know that's what it was called, or how it worked.

We got such a great response to my last column on wire-wrapping (which was awhile ago, thanks to a most unwelcomed medical absence). There were site comments, emails, tweets, and Flickr photo pointers of people fondly, or not so fondly, remembering this disappearing art of circuit assembly. Several people mentioned cable lacing and that I should do a column on that next. I had no idea what cable lacing was, but one of the commenters pointed me to the Wikipedia page and another to Impulselabs' amazing photos on Flickr. Impulselabs describes the practice very succinctly:

The bundling is done with a technique called "cable lacing". A series of knots and stitches from a continuous piece of wax impregnated cotton or twine are used to bundle cables together. It takes some practice, but it'll outperform zipties in that it won't crush the insulative jackets on wiring and that it's not going to shift axially on you if it's loose. Likewise, my bundles have a rectangular cross section. Zipties can't conform and keep bundle shapes other than ellipses.

Cable lacing was cable management technique before zipties, used in the telecom industry, aerospace, marine applications, and elsewhere. The thin cord used is traditionally a waxed linen. Modern materials used today in flat "lacing tape" include nylon, polyester, and Nomex. There are different methods of lacing, such as the common marline hitch, seen here:

Here's an illustration from an old ARRL Amateur Radio Handbook, showing the marline hitch:

This one is another common lacing method, the "NASA-style" spot tie. Not nearly as elegant as a marline, but I guess it gets the job done:

Here's a page from "Workmanship and Design Practices for Electronic Equipment," showing different lacing and tying methods.

And here's a how-to on the Historic Naval Ships Association website.

There's not much more out there on the practice. If you do a search, you will find some images on various discussion boards of computer modders and others trying their hand at cable lacing the wiring inside of their computers and between the gear of their home media centers. It's nice to see that at least some folks are keeping the art alive.

• Wire-wrapping
• Lost Knowledge: Stick chart navigation
• Lost Knowledge: Timbrel vaulting
• Lost Knowledge: Online resources
• Lost Knowledge: Homemade electronic components
• Lost Knowledge: Island tricks
• Lost Knowledge: Airships
• Lost Knowledge: The Catalog
• Lost Knowledge: The Antikythera Device
• Lost Knowledge: Village tech in West Papua, Indonesia
• Lost Knowledge: Neon lights
• Lost Knowledge: Reanimating Dead Media
• Lost Knowledge: Manual typewriters

Reader JC just submitted this fantastic haunted house prop to our Make: Halloween Contest 2009. It's a recreation of the always-lovely female lead from 1962's sci-fi camp classic The Brain That Wouldn't Die, immortalized in 1993 as Mystery Science Theater 3000's experiment 513 (and, arguably, before that by Steve Martin's The Man with Two Brains).

"She won't be doing any heavy lifting for awhile..."

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.

Interesting thread over on The Home Shop Machinist describing the use of H.J. Watts' 1918 US patent 1,241,176 drill, based on the Reuleaux triangle (Wikipedia), for drilling a (mostly) square hole.

This instrument is known both as a "glass harmonica" and a "glass armonica," and I personally favor the latter spelling to distinguish it from the better-known free-reed mouth harp also called a "harmonica." The tone of a glass armonica is stunningly beautiful; a great 18th-century myth is that the purity of its sound will eventually drive a virtuoso to madness. Thomas Bloch's website has more info about his work and about the particular custom-built instrument shown here. [via Neatorama]

More:

• Crazy glass armonica

Okay, MichaelLubke is officially my favorite reader ever. In response to my recent post speculating about mechanical gate openers, not only did he run out and snap some photos of a working "Gandy Slide-A-Way" near his ranch, but in response to appreciative comments from our readers he went back and got this video of it in operation. Awesome! Look at it go! Thanks so much Michael!

Continuing a great tradition, the New England Wireless and Steam Museum is hosting the Yankee Steam-Up, where you can see steam engines large and small, stirling engines, running antique engines and vehicles, and much more. There is also a Marconi-era wireless museum with fascinating equipment from the early days of radio, including a Massie Station spark gap transmitter.

Check out some great videos of running steam engines from last year's event here.

The Original Yankee Steam-Up:
For model makers, machinists, engineers & historians
Saturday October 3, 2009
8:30AM-4:00PM

1300 Frenchtown Road, East Greenwich, RI 02818
Steam & Compressed Air for Models.
Licensed Boilers & Licensed Engineers.
New Englands Largest Steam-Up Boiler.
Giant Working Steam Engines & Hot Air & IC.

Admission is $15.00 for adults, children under 12 are $5.00. All Steam-Up proceeds go to upkeep of the museum. Parking is free, and there is food at the event.

That's right, it's a wooden sports car. And although the sexy images shown here look PhotoShop-y to me, the body of the car, which is made fiberglass-style out of wooden fibers woven on a custom-built loom, appears really to be complete. You can follow Joe Harmon's construction of "Splinter" at his site. [via Dude Craft]