QZ redux

Build a "Square Incher" Microkite

Plans for a mylar kite with with a surface area of about one and a half square inches (on each side). Perfect for a kite to fly in the breeze of your computer power-supply fan. (I used mylar from potato chip bag for mine.)

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Blue Moon Camera and Machine

Primarily a camera store, they also sell typewriters. The connection? An affection for old machines. Many used cameras, and not just the 35mm stuff you find everywhere. Large format. Subminature. Half-frame. 6x6. All that's missing is pictures of the cameras. (Flickr seems to have photos of every collectible camera, but sometimes those are hard to find among the pictures FROM the cameras.)

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A4 Paper Cut

Cut and folded A4 (metric equivilent of the US 8.5"x11 sheet) paper making very elaborate models and duality statements. One example is "The Short Distance Between Time and Shadow", where the paper cut resembles a big city skyline and the folded shape is a pagoda.

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Vector Magic

Website that can convert photos and logos in jpeg form to vector images in postscript or SVG format. Very handy for making a photo into a logo.

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Graph paper generator

Generate PDF files with just about any type of graph paper you want: squares, dotted squares, hex, triangle, log, brick, asymetrical, etc.

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Telephone World

History of Telephones and Telephone switches (US focused). Includes MP3 sound samples for various telephone network sounds (busy, automated recordings, etc).

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Bell System Memorial

A whole lot about Ma Bell, the Western Electric phones she built, and other Bell companies.

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Ericofon

All about the quirkly styled one-piece phone designed in the 1950s by Ericsson.

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Western Electric Rotary Prototypes

Guide to development of rotary phones at Western Electric.

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Chess Game Review

Reviewing the game of Chess, as if it were a new board game.

Unfortunately, that gameplay is severely lacking. For one thing, there are only six units in the game. Of those six, two are practically worthless while one is an overpowered "god" unit, the Queen. She's your typical Lara Croft-esque 1990s "me, too" attempt to attract the fabled gaming girl audience[...]

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Ready Mech

Print, cut, fold. Monsters, robots, etc, all from an 8.5"x11" page.

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Mannequin Store

Online shop for your mannequin needs. I'd probably never buy one new, but they make great dress-up toys for kids.

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Steampunk workshop: Keyboard

A standard computer keyboard reworked with typewriter keys and a brass frame to make a very old fashioned looking interface.

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Zarf's Game Money

PDF printable money, an alternative to Monopoly money. Nice design for a science fiction game, but might seem weird with a pirate game.

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Great Game Database

A site devoted to cataloging information about arcade games. Manufacturer, year of release, graphics type, some pictures, some trivia.

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Lego Knitting Machine

More of a spool knitter than a full knitting machine, but no small accomplishment. Photos and video.

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LEGO Difference Engine

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.

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The 16mm Shrine

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."

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The Daily WTF

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.

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Chuck Norris Facts

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."

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Tabletop Tripod Comparison

A nice line of of small tripods with a few stats (price, weight), comparison photos, and reviews.

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Abandoned

A gallery of derelict buildings, factories, etc, in Russia. Great stuff.

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Common Tunes

"A community directory of freely available music." From ice-cream truck music to Beethoven.

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Home Built Icyball

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.

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Haunted Paper Toys

Lots of cool goth/Halloweenish paper projects to print and assemble. Files are MS Word documents, rather than PDFs or plain images however.

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Free Online Graph Paper

PDF files of various types of graph paper, perfect for running off a few sheets on your own printer.

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Aten Heliochronometers

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".

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ProMetal

Makers of 3-D metal 'printers' such as the one used by Bathsheba Grossman (mentioned elsewhere on QZ Redux).

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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.

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Finkbuilt

"A tinker's blog" with projects, product reviews, and comments on the projects of others.

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Finkbuilt

"A tinker's blog" with projects, product reviews, and comments on the projects of others.

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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.

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Individual-i

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.

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SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator

An open source tool to generate random computer science papers, from some MIT students.

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BBC Creative Archive

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."

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Improv Everywhere

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.

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Reality Factory

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.

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Arthur Ganson's Machines

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.

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Kids in Mind

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.

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Spam Shirt

Spam subject lines recycled onto t-shirts for ironic effect.

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