- Inkstitch An embroidery extension for Inkscape
- Itty Bitty Sites
- Inkscape Circuit Symbols
- Disney releases digital models: an interesting data set including the Moana island.
- The Big Internet Math-Off
- A clever trick for seeing the orientation of SMD LEDs
- brow.sh: A fully-modern text-based browser, rendering to TTY and browsers
- The Silicon Graphics typeface collection
- Designing and fabricating roll cakes with custom cross-section graphics.
- Chess + Rogue = Chogue
- The COSMAC Elf, a classic micro computer based on the RCA CDP1802.
- Sometimes TLDs go away
- Stencilify: A helper tool for laser cutting, which remove “islands” from text.
- Think everyone died young in ancient societies? Think again
- A 13,235-Mile Road Trip for 70-Degree Weather
- Build a mini pinball machine out of Lego
- Juvenile eastern hognose snake plays dead (YouTube)
- Wensleydale: Cabinet designs for 3D printers and small CNC machines
- Calculator Out of Roller Coasters in RollerCoaster Tycoon
All posts by Windell Oskay
Unboxing a vintage gear set
Editors Note: We previously posted about this on twitter.
At the Electronics Flea Market in Silicon Valley, we recently picked up this vintage spiral bevel gear set.
It’s still sealed up in its original 1950s US navy packaging. Let’s see what’s inside!
Continue reading Unboxing a vintage gear set
Linkdump: May 2018
- The cyanometer, an antique instrument to measure blueness of the sky.
(Here is how to make your own.) - Make a Mini NeXT Raspberry Pi case
- Miss Flyer: A laser cut misprint to paper airplane converter
- Gravitational waves: The first six detections as 3D-printable models
- Gunnel (gunwale) pumping: A way to propel a canoe without paddles
- Buffalo Waterfront Museum of Vintage Label Makers
- Planetary orbits for the Heliocentric and Geocentric systems visualized
- Inside the 76477 Space Invaders sound effect chip by Ken Shirriff
- World Record Stack of Waffles
- What are those crystals in hard cheeses?
- The curious case of the Apollo 4 Earth images
Linkdump: April 2018
- Dynamic Müller-Lyer Illusion
- Could Venus have a bacterial infection?
- How the bones in your hand change as you grow up
- Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? Probing a simulated 6502 and evaluating it like a set of neurons
- A Sinclair Scientific Calculator Emulator that you can build
- A LaTeX package to add coffee stains
- Diffraction gratings, now in chocolate (YouTube, via Hackaday)
- LED Snailies?
- Precise Parts: Custom machined adapters for astronomy
- Sam Zeloof lithographically builds an amplifier IC in his garage
- An Exploration into 3D Printing on Pre-stretched Fabric
Linkdump: February 2018
- How Carob Traumatized a Generation
- How Christine Peterson coined the term ‘open source’
- OpenSC2K: An open source remake of SimCity 2000
- A deep dive into the history of the Automatic Pencil Sharpener Company (via @john_overholt)
- The ReCode Project is a community-driven effort to preserve computer art by translating it into a modern programming language
- Unfamiliar cat petting simulator
- The classic Handbook of Mathematical Functions by Abramowitz and Stegun has become the NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions.
- Fabric linear motor
- Your data, on an 8-inch floppy disk
- A new proposal for distant a space telescope, using the sun as a gravitational lens to observe exoplanets
- System Bus Radio: A program to transit AM radio from computers and phones without radio transmitting hardware
- Photos of the SF Bay Area, taken from a U2 at the edge of space
Evil Mad Scientist Valentines: 2018
Today we are releasing our newest set of “Download and Print” cards for Valentine’s day. This is our sixth year, and sixth set of cards: The 2013 set had six equation-heavy cards, the 2014 set was a set of six symbol-heavy cards, and the 2015 set included love, hearts, and arrows. The 2016 set featured Pluto’s cold heart, and the perfect card for your robotic expression of love, and last year’s set featured atomic orbitals, exponential growth, and an epsilon delta declaration of love.
This year’s set features parallel lines, friction, and activation energy:
What could be more romantic than telling someone that the second derivative of your potential energy is at its minimum when you’re around them?
The perfect card to give to any computer scientist when you want them to both (A) appreciate being given a valentine and (B) secretly wonder whether you don’t quite understand what np completeness means, or whether you do but thought it was funny.
Parallel lines never meet. But we should.
For when you have chemistry with someone.
Why measure? Because it’s generally considered impolite to ask someone what their normal force is.
You can download the full set here, which includes all 36 designs from all six years (a 1.6 MB PDF document).
As usual, print them out on (or otherwise affix to) card stock, personalize, and [some steps omitted] enjoy the resulting lifelong romance.
Update: New cards have been released! Please check out the 2019 set, which contains all 42 cards from 2013 through 2019.
Linkdump: January 2018
- The Idiot’s Loop: Dropping a nuclear bomb with a backflip was a 1950’s US Air Force tactic.
- History of Philips’ Semiconductors in the 1950s
- Terry Gilliam reveals the secrets of Monty Python animation
- Vintage Computing for Trusted Radiation Measurements
- R.I.P. astronaut John Young, the first man to get yelled at for smuggling a sandwich into space
- Xerox Alto zero-day: cracking disk password protection on a 45 year old system
- The GRAY-1, “a homebrew CPU exclusively composed of memory”
- Modern JavaScript Explained For Dinosaurs
- BR9732: A virtual replica of Deckard’s apartment from Blade Runner
- MS Paint Enamel Pin. A Photoshop version is available as well.
- Fruit Tart Cat Bed (via Laughing Squid)
- Your candy wrappers are listening: Extracting audio from high-speed video of ordinary objects
- NASA’s IMAGE satellite — out of contact for 13 years — may have just been found awake by an amateur astronomer.
Linkdump: December 2017
- Computing a world of snowflakes
- 6 Animatronic Eye Mechanisms You Can Download and 3D Print
- Parafilm: What is this thing? (YouTube)
- The colorful modern history of ancient crookneck watermelons
- The Boldport Club is a monthly electronic kit subscription
- The mathematics of the game 2048
- Why do asteroids explode high in the atmosphere?
- Stromatolites found alive, on land
- Here’s The Important Reason We Don’t Get Mad Chemistry Kits For Christmas Any More
- Reading Silicon: How to Reverse Engineer Integrated Circuits, a talk by Ken Shirriff at the 2016 Hackaday SuperConference.
- A Gorgeous—and Unsettling—Video of Evolution in Action
- The Mathematics of Popping Champagne Corks (YouTube)
Linkdump: November 2017
- Fifty-three year old nuclear missile accident revealed
- Racetrack core sample: What 108 Years Of Repaving Looks Like Under Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s Asphalt
- The folks who make Generatively Designed Socks also made a Processing library for use with Google’s Quick, Draw! dataset
- MeatBagPnP – A tool to help you (the MeatBag) act as a pick and place machine
- Drawing from noise, and then making animated loopy GIFs from there.
- Usborne coding books, including some fantastic free-to-download 1980s computer books
- Micro Mouse: High speed robot mice solve mazes — No, the video isn’t sped up (YouTube).
- Kickstarting an all-new Vectrex Game Cartridge
Gravitrack marble machines by Solarbotics
Gravitrack is a fantastic new build-it-yourself desktop-scale marble machine kit from our friends at SolarBotics, and available now at our store.
Gravitrack is available in two versions: A no-soldering battery-powered version (shown above), or a soldering-required solar version. We also still carry the original SolarBotics Marble Machines, in battery and solar flavors.