the future of books belongs to popups! I just got 2 of them in the mail today and they are FUN.

The one below is called One Red Dot, by David Carter. It’s one of a series of books for kids featuring his fanciful paper sculptures, but I think adults will like it too. In spite of the fact that I love my iPad and do most of my recreational reading on it now, there’s something magical about opening a book and having a 3 dimensional creature or landscape pop up.

He also wrote another great book I got a while ago called The Elements of Popup which shows you how various popup mechanisms work. It’s awesome. You can even download the popup patterns from his website.

The other book that came in the mail is Trail by David Pelham which is lovely and delicate…but not really for kids.

The all white landscapes in this one remind me of an inspiring video I recently saw called The Ice Book – a miniature theatre performance projected behind a pop-up-book stage set.

Lastly, did you know that most popup books are still assembled by hand? (usually in China) It’s true…they are labor intensive and apparently too intricate for machines to deal with.

Filed under: books, crafty, popups · 0 Comments

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

A dad and his son attached a video camera to a balloon, sent it up into space, and made this recording of the earth’s outer reaches.

Filed under: awesome, crafty, diy, spacecraft, video · 0 Comments

Another lovely thing made with a sharp blade and something inexpensive. Betsabee Romero carved these intricate rubber stamps out of old tires.

Filed under: crafty, inspiration, whattodowitholdtires · 0 Comments

Look what can be done with some paper, an xacto knife, and glue! By Helen Musselwhite

Filed under: crafty, inspiration, papercraft · 3 Comments

This site even has stencils so you can make your own! I think it’s time for a TR pumpkin carving party! :-)

Filed under: crafty, halloween, no code, pumpkins, tiki lifestyle · 0 Comments

Web 2.0 companies lined up for a mass start at the Facebook F8 Launch this past Thursday. Facebook has 24 million users, set to have more than MySpace’s 150 million users by the end of the year, and an unprecedented empty application market. Just a few days after launch the dust has yet to settle, but iLike is clearly the shot heard around the Facebook. Less than 72 hours after launch of the F8 platform, iLike has over 200,000 users, almost 1% of the Facebook user base and ten times higher than the second place contender picnik, a Flash-based photo editing widget.

Apparently Facebook users like them some music.

Link to iLike Application on Facebook

Filed under: all talk, crafty · 0 Comments

99 Ways to Cut, Sew, Trim, and Tie Your T-Shirt into Something Special is a neat little book filled with lots of ways to cut up and turn all those random tshirts you have lying in the nether corners of your dresser into something more interesting (since i go to lots of random nerdy tech events – i’ve got lots of random techy tshirts that definitely need some modifying)

Each tshirt project is illustrated with clear instructions – most don’t require anything but a pair of scissors, a pen, and a ruler…and most take between 5-15 minutes. The design on the left is especially good for all those tshirts with annoying logos on the back!

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T-girrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrl is making this table with a pretty ceramic Tiki mosaic! Here is a pic of the work in progress:

Filed under: crafty, tiki lifestyle · 1 Comment

The Tech Shop looks an awful lot like a dreaded office park building from the photo on their website and it’s in Menlo Park…BUT it has a full range of equipment for building just about anything (including a 3d printer that can make ABS plastic thingies from your CAD file) and classes on things like How to Use a Plasmer Cutter, Single-Beam Holography, and Choosing A Microcontroller. Ever since my friend Doria gave me this bracelet that she made with a laser cutter, I’ve been wanting a necklace / choker to go with it, so I think I’m going to check out this class after work!

Filed under: bay area, crafty, tronix · 2 Comments

IBM Researcher Frances Allen won this year’s A. M. Turing Award, the ACM’s “most prestigious technical award.” The mainstream news story here is that Allen is the first woman to win the award although as
The Register notes

As Turing himself was famously gay, there are now relatively few inclusiveness milestones for the prestigious gong to pass.

An annoying property of these types of news stories is their bland and tasteless descriptions of a person’s important contributions to an academic field, to wit:

Her pioneering compiler work culminated in algorithms and technologies that are the basis for the theory of program optimization today and are widely used throughout the industry.

And that’s the detailed version, taken from Allen’s bio page.

Don’t hold back guys … where are the papers? I love seeing old scientific papers, thinking back to a time when techniques that are printed in thousands of textbooks we love to hate were just being invented.

I wish I could tell you what Allen did, but our stupid society keeps that information locked up. After over an hour of search, I found an early Allen paper called Control flow analysis … a hearty fuck you to the ACM (of which I used to be a member) for keeping this and all the rest of the Computer Science corpus locked up behind a password protected for-pay-only website. Scientific knowledge belongs to all of us.

Control flow analysis is my favorite topic from my favorite CS class, Compiling Techniques. Control flow is used by compilers to make my crappy code run faster. The idea is to build graph of the various execution paths that are possible in a given piece of code and then using graph traversal techniques to remove redundant code paths or introduce new paths that exploit hardware features. I also like it because debugging control flow (when you are making a compiler) involves making pretty pictures as in this comparison of three different control flow algorithms.

In Figure 5.5 the three approaches are compared using a method of medium size. The start block is marked dark gray, loop headers are red, blocks with loop depth greater than zero are orange and blocks without successors are drawn green. All other blocks are painted yellow. This way one can easily see the differences between the three algorithms.

Link to Frances Allen Turing Award on CNN

Filed under: code code, crafty · 1 Comment

A few months ago I randomly saw an informercial for Hercules Hooks on a TV somewhere, probably at a bar. It’s a bit like a Molly Bolt that doesn’t require any tools. I love it when this “as-seen-on-tv” schlock is actually useful. So I got a few to see what the deal is. I just noticed you can buy them on amazon instead of the the quaint but lame AsSeenOnTV website.

So the deal is they do work, and I think they work well. It’s got the strength of a Wall Hanger but the wall damage is just slightly more than a thumb tack. The problem is they *only* work on straight-up drywall with at least 3 inches of open space behind it. If you are hanging something and there is a stud behind the drywall, or a solid cement backing is the case for about 50% of my wallspace, you would get better results with scotch tape.

Link to Hercules Hooks on Amazon.com

Filed under: crafty, gadgets · 0 Comments

wow, these are awesome.

Readymechs are free, flatpack toys for you to print and build. They are designed to fit on an 8.5″x11″ page and printed with any printer. You’ll need double-sided tape, thick matte paper, and 10-15 minutes for build time.

I want to make them all! although i’ve noticed they are missing a pineapple readymech. how could that be? maybe that’ll be my project this weekend :-)

Filed under: crafty, gadgets, neat, toys · 3 Comments

It seems my grandma was probably good at math without really knowing she was good at math! (she could simply look at you and knit up a sweater without so much as a pattern) According to this article in Science magazine on the relationship between knitting and math,

Mathematics has long been an essential tool for the fiber arts. Knitters and crocheters use mathematical principles—often without recognizing them as such—to map the pattern of a cable sweater, for instance, or figure out how to space the stitches when adding a sleeve onto a jacket.

The mathematicans featured, Hinke Osinga and Bernd Krauskopf, will be coming out with a book in the spring called Making Mathematics with Needlework which will contain patterns and mathematical discussions of 10 craft projects. (via Boing Boing which also has a few links to some neat projects you can make).

UPDATE: The mathematicians are actually not involved with the book but there’s more info on it here.

Filed under: crafty, science · 2 Comments