reduxMore of a spool knitter than a full knitting machine, but no small accomplishment. Photos and video.
[2006 Feb 03] [/games/lego] [#]
Andrew Carol's Lego Difference Engine is a low tech computer after Babbage's nineteenth century mechanical computer designs. This can evaluate any polynomial of the form ax^2 + bx + c, to three digits of precision, with an effort of a hundred or so turns of the crank.
[2006 Feb 03] [/games/lego] [#]
Movie reviews and discussion (not all new releases). Sample sentence: "Hollywood functions on the 'throw enough shit at the movies screen and some of it will stick, slide down, and leave a Vin Diesel-shaped smear' approach to filmmaking, and while it sometimes works, mainly it doesn't."
[2006 Feb 02] [/humor] [#]
Programmers submit and mock the worst code they encounter. Things like comments "Don't know why we need this, but won't compile without it" that let you know someone has no clue about what they are doing.
[2006 Feb 02] [/humor] [#]
Lots of good trivia about Chuck Norris like: "Chuck Norris is the only man to ever defeat a brick wall in a game of tennis" and "Chuck Norris does not hunt because the word hunting implies the probability of failure. Chuck Norris goes killing."
[2006 Feb 02] [/humor] [#]
A nice line of of small tripods with a few stats (price, weight), comparison photos, and reviews.
[2005 Jun 29] [/tools/cameras] [#]
A gallery of derelict buildings, factories, etc, in Russia. Great stuff.
[2005 Jun 22] [/images/photo-sites] [#]
"A community directory of freely available music." From ice-cream truck music to Beethoven.
[2005 Jun 22] [/music] [#]
The Icyball was a commercially sold refridgeration system that had no moving parts and was powered by a heat source. Perfect for on the road cooling, or backwater farms with no electricity. This page discusses a home built modern version.
[2005 Jun 15] [/do-it-yourself/historical-recreation] [#]
Lots of cool goth/Halloweenish paper projects to print and assemble. Files are MS Word documents, rather than PDFs or plain images however.
[2005 Jun 14] [/do-it-yourself/papercraft] [#]
PDF files of various types of graph paper, perfect for running off a few sheets on your own printer.
[2005 May 11] [/tools] [#]
Very accurate sundials with easy adjustments for longitude and latitude. These are much prettier than the "World's Most Accurate" sundials, and much cheaper than the "Precision Sundials".
[2005 May 11] [/tools/time] [#]
Makers of 3-D metal 'printers' such as the one used by Bathsheba Grossman (mentioned elsewhere on QZ Redux).
[2005 May 11] [/tools] [#]
Bathsheba Grossman Geometric Art
This artist creates metal scuplture first on a computer, then 'prints' forms using a 3-D metal printer, these are then impregnated with bronze by wicking, then the sculptures are polished and finished. She (he?) also does some 3-D designs in crystal, but those are not as striking.
[2005 May 11] [/shopping/art] [#]
"A tinker's blog" with projects, product reviews, and comments on the projects of others.
[2005 May 02] [/blogs] [#]
"A tinker's blog" with projects, product reviews, and comments on the projects of others.
[2005 Apr 29] [/blogs] [#]
Rockland Colloid Photographic Materials
Make your own "paper" with Liquid Light emulsion, brush it on any surface, then use that like black and white paper. Plus other photo development fun stuff.
[2005 Apr 20] [/tools/art] [#]
This is a site with a CC logo advocating for rights of the individual to privacy and anonymity. The logo is both a letter I and a stylized person.
[2005 Apr 20] [/info-sites] [#]
SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator
An open source tool to generate random computer science papers, from some MIT students.
[2005 Apr 20] [/computers/software] [#]
This website was set up by the BBC to "access to public service audio and video archives in a way that allows the British public to find, share, watch, listen and re-use the archive as a fuel for their own creative endeavours. In other words, you can rip, mix and share the BBC."
[2005 Apr 20] [/archives] [#]
A group of pranksters create various "scences" around New York, like seting up a bathroom attendant in a McDonalds in Times Square to see how people react.
[2005 Mar 30] [/humor] [#]
When my twelve year old came to me looking for ways to make computer games, I applied my Google-fu and found this free (open source, open license) game development tool, based on the free (some sort of attribution license) Genesis3D modeling components. It runs on Windows XP, doesn't require C or C++ programming, and produces "Quake 2 dungeon crawl clone" games. A far cry from my 8-bit (and lower) youth, but initial impressions are good.
[2005 Mar 14] [/computers/software] [#]
Arther Ganson is an artist who makes elegant machines which do no real work but are fascinating to watch. There are still pictures and movies of his work here.
[2005 Mar 11] [/images/art-sites] [#]
This site provides fairly exacting descriptions of the sexual, violent, and profane content of movies, while being as careful as possible to not give away plot points. Handy way to judge if some movie is over the line or not when watching with younger viewers. Drug use is not well covered, however.
[2005 Mar 04] [/info-sites/media] [#]
Spam subject lines recycled onto t-shirts for ironic effect.
[2005 Mar 04] [/shopping/clothes] [#]
For much of my childhood catalogs from this company, then known as Jerryco, were a favorite. "Cover price half a buck" with a hand drawn smiling half deer, told you everything you needed to know about the product descriptions. The products themselves are a mix of new science toys, assorted surplus often with an eye towards science and technology parts, and silly novelties. The plastic finger shaped coat hooks were probably purchased just so the copywriter could call them "come hither hookers."
I recently hunted them down to buy an assortment of cheap lenses, to try restoring a Magic Lantern I found at a garage sale. And lo and behold, the website has much of the charm of the catalog, plus it has photos of some of the products to boot. (The catalog never had any photos, just drawings.) Maybe now I'll be on the mailing list again.
[2005 Mar 03] [/shopping] [#]
NYC graffiti stickers 1992-1995
From the Nonist, a collection of stickers found on the streets of New York in the early nineties. The image of granny with the tommy gun is one I found and incorporated into a piece of art myself around the same time. I cannot remember where I found that image, though.
[2005 Mar 03] [/images/image-blogs] [#]
Tom Trusky - Student Hectography
A bibliophile teacher has lead his classes through the process of making hectographs, a gelatin printing process, and has put the instructions for this on the web. Basic process is make smooth gelatin sheet, make an ink laden master, put master on gelatin allowing ink to seep in, remove, apply paper and get print. Fun.
[2005 Feb 23] [/do-it-yourself/printmaking] [#]
A Thrill in the Dark - Victorian Magic Lantern Shows
I found this site looking for information about magic lantern optics. Besides having a page devoted to that topic, it has a fair sized gallery of slide images, information about various types of lantern, slide restoration tips, resources and links, etc.
[2005 Feb 10] [/tools/projectors] [#]
A page I made extolling the virtues of the Portable Video Research Group JPEG implementations. This is an old and obscure tool that I feel needs more recognition.
[2005 Feb 10] [/computers/software/jpeg] [#]
A photoblog with weekly pictures of tools (mostly) presented as identification puzzles. Many are old or obscure (a number of typewriter assembly and adjustment tools, for example), some are common but closely cropped or only one part is shown.
[2005 Feb 10] [/blogs] [#]
One man's (Phil Agre's) commentary on inexpensive disposable pens. No pictures, just text. It would be nice to have reference pictures of the pens, but oh well.
[2005 Feb 07] [/tools/art] [#]
The comp.graphics.misc frequently asked questions list, with answers, about JPEG compression and JFIF files. Last modified in 1999, some of the questions are quite dated, but many are still relevant.
[2005 Jan 31] [/computers/software/jpeg] [#]
The W3C page on the image/jpeg file format is brief, but it has links to two PDF files documenting the JPEG FIle Format, the standard way to contain images compressed with the JPEG mechanism.
[2005 Jan 31] [/computers/software/jpeg] [#]
An organization (or individual?) that provides improvements to jpeg manipulation tools, such as tweaking the ILJ 'cjpeg' compressor to allow different compression quality settings on different channels.
[2005 Jan 31] [/computers/software/jpeg] [#]
A good non-mathematically introduction to the technical aspects of JPEG compression, with lots of illustrations of what different settings do to images.
[2005 Jan 31] [/computers/software/jpeg] [#]
All the parts to look like a fancy case mod, without as much work. Clear cases, light-up keyboards, various parts to put lights in and on your computer, plus tools and parts to do case mods, including PC quieting.
[2005 Jan 31] [/shopping/hardware] [#]
A "foundry in every kitchen". Special crucible construction techniques to make microwave smelting and casting workable. An all in one crucible and mold is made, the metal is melted in a very slightly modified (masking tape over vent holes) microwave, about 17 minutes for a third of a kilo of silver, then the crucible/mold is inverted to make the casting. Clever and appealing.
[2005 Jan 24] [/do-it-yourself/metalworking] [#]
Modular origami of a sort. Twenty bills folded in two groups to make a wallet for holding more money. With instructions in a wordless form eerily reminescent of Ikea assembly manuals.
[2005 Jan 11] [/do-it-yourself/papercraft] [#]
Optical toys (some too delicate for children) invented or popularized in the nineteenth century. From the magic lantern to the kinora, twelve exhibits at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics.
[2005 Jan 11] [/info-sites/museums] [#]