It’s a familiar scenario for small business owners: You want your business to have a mobile presence, ideally native on Android and iOS, but you don’t want to pay a developer an armload to build that presence. You would do it yourself (after all, 12-year-olds can do it), but there’s no point in having a mobile presence if it’s just going to look sloppy. That just hurts your brand.
While a slew… → Read More
We’re so over PowerPoint presentations, right? Well, that’s the common refrain, at least. And we haven’t even been super-enthused about the new-fangled PowerPoint alternatives in a while – not since companies like Prezi, Animoto, and (VMWare-acquired) SlideRocket were making the rounds in the startup scene, that is. Even SlideShare, the service that made presentations social, launched a web… → Read More
If you’re headed away this summer, leave the Knut behind to keep and eye on things. This small, Wi-Fi-capable widget can transmit various measurements to your iPhone anywhere in the world.
The Knut is a Kickstarter project by Richard Pasek and Jay Gondelman in Boston. They’re looking for $80 per Knut and it has various sensors built in as well as functional sensors for various other… → Read More
Hey, Internet. Come over here. You sitting down? Cool.
So anyway, there’s this thing I need to tell you about. No no. Over here. This tab. Stay right here.
So this guy at NYU made something special. Are you listening? Put down your phone. Listen. So they made a machine that prints… no, don’t check Twitter. They made a machine that prints burritos.
It’s called BurritoB0t.
I know… → Read More
This charming man, Todd Harrison, bought a used Apple II and some drives from Ebay and did what any self-respecting geek would do: he gave them the attention and respect they deserved, cleaning all the parts and getting it ready to run some BASIC again.
The machines were in pretty rough shape. He powered the CPU on and it seemed to fry a little and as he dug through the box he found packing… → Read More
WHy ride like the rest of humanity when you can turn your bike into a robo-shifting supermachine? This Instructable by programmer and maker Nabil Tewolde shows us how to create a push-button-controlled electronic derailleur system with parts you can pick up at your local electronics shop. → Read More
DIY website creation service Webs.com is launching an all-new version of its flagship product today with the introduction of the completely revamped SiteBuilder3. The new website designing tool now includes a number of new features allowing for improved drag-and-drop WYSIWYG (i.e., “what you see is what you get”) editing, plus more customization tools, themes, social media integrations…oh, and… → Read More
Teaching kids – especially little girls – about electronics is a hard job. First, there’s the electricity. Then there’s the sense that soldering, wiring, and lining up LEDs is considerably less fun than watching Tangled. This project, called Roominate, aims to change the way girls think about electricity.
The kit consists of a set of tiny furniture with built-in wires and switches. You can wire… → Read More
While, arguably, you’re not going to convince many kids to give up their Topps or Pokemon cards for these things, it’s nice to know they exist. They’re 3D Printer trading cards featuring some of the best 3D printers in the world. You got your Makerbot Replicator, your UP! Printer, and your Printrbot Plus. You got stats on there, a little trivia, some pricing information and then… → Read More
Say you’re a misanthrope and you’re afraid of humans. What to do? Well, you could cower in the dark when people ring your doorbell or you could laugh derisively at their smug faces in the screen of your iPhone. I’m going for the derisive laughter. This DIY Arduino project involves a simple circuit, a webcam, and a few API calls to PushingBox to enable a truly enjoyable derisive… → Read More
If you think the iOS app ecosystem is big now, as it pushes some 600,000 apps available for iPhone and iPad, just imagine how big it could become if Apple made good on this newly filed patent application titled “Content Configuration for Device Platforms.” The application describes a way for non-developers to create iOS apps using a simple, graphical interface.
Whoa. → Read More
Wix.com made its name with a platform that business owners and regular Joes could use to build Flash-enabled websites. Now, as a sign of the times, the company is launching a new platform to let people do the same with HTML5.
This is a significant boost to HTML5, which lets people create sites that work across both PC and mobile browsers, because Wix already has a strong track record in… → Read More
This complete project kit made by Adafruit allows you to print out things from the Internet. Want to print all your Tweets onto receipt paper? You got it. Want to print out your Facebook wall? Why the heck not! The kit uses an Arduino board and thermal printer and offers the opportunity for weekend hackers to pop together a cool little printer thinger and learn Arduino and Twitter programming. → Read More
Theo Jansen is an artist who makes wild animated, wind-powered robots that seem to have a life of their own. Once you set them up on a beach and let them go, they undulate, slide, and coil across the sand like some sort of steampunk gazelle. 3D printing service Shapeways is now offering two Jansen designs for sale, including a propellor-powered motor for getting your beest to move. You can… → Read More
If you want to recreate what it was like for hobbyists before the advent of the integrated circuit, this clock is for you. This thing uses “215 discrete transistors, 518 diodes, 472 resistors and 101 capacitors on a massive 10″ x 14″ printed circuit board” to recreate something that 1960s-era James Bond would shut down at exactly the 007 mark to prevent the world from blowing up. → Read More
This must be the day of Kickstarter projects. This project turns an original Gameboy into a unique music instrument complete with analog controls and a stereo/mono switch. While this may be of use only to hard core knob twiddlers, but for $174 you can get a fully modded Gameboy and 6 volt power supply so you and your band can add some boops and beeps to your latest song. → Read More
If you’re in the market for a stable storage medium for all of your important documents, you might be in luck. The TR-01 paper tape reader allows you to read old (and new) paper tapes right into your PC. The system can read the tape as quickly – or as slowly – as you can pull it through the reader. The video above shows some cute tricks you can play with your tape including counting in binary… → Read More
The Kenbak-1 apparently predates the Altair and is the earliest “personal” microcomputer in existence. To use it you flipped a bunch of switches and watched the lights. A PS3 this definitely wasn’t.
A tinkerer named Mark Wilson recently rebuilt a mini version of the Kenbak using an Arduino board, timing chip, and some memory, allowing him to add realtime clock functions and storage to what… → Read More
Ground Control to Major You: for a mere $300 you, too, can send a satellite into space. How? Well, a young man from Ithaca, New York (it’s gorges) is planning on sending a box of tiny, self-contained, solar-powered radio transmitters into space – about 300 in all – and watch them as they transmit from near orbit. Like a murder of tiny space crows, the Sprite satellites will peep out their location… → Read More
This project on Thingiverse is just about amazing. It’s a complete lock and key set made entirely using open source plans and a printed on a Makerbot. It can only be opened using the right key (or, given it’s made of plastic, a lighter) but it’s the engineering that clearly counts here. → Read More
Doot doo doot doo doo doot! Hacker Retrobrad created a handheld console that displays Super Mario Brother in a very special way: each sprite is reduced to one pixel. The console, called Super Pixel Brothers, includes all 20 levels as well boss fights.
The game is played on an 8×8 mutli-colored LED board and to hit enemies you need to position your single-pixel Mario over their single-pixel… → Read More
An automatic scribbling machine sounds less than useful, admittedly, but it’s really just the style of line created by this motorized drawing machine. It’s reminiscent of ASCII art, in which heavier characters are used to create darker tones; in this case, the more jiggle added to the drawing platform, the more ink is put on the drawing surface. It’s kind of mesmerizing. → Read More
When a man is proud of his hobbies, women notice. Nowhere is that more apparent than in this thread on RCGroups where a dapper young gent, from the comfort of his lounge chair and protected by VR goggles, approached a comely young lass with his RC Tonka truck and, we can only assume, married that same lady in a ceremony held under a sylvan glade alongside her beaming parents.
Or maybe not. → Read More
Mitchell Feinberg is a photographer who specializes in taking beautiful photographs of very expensive things. Cars, luxury goods, wristwatches, that sort of thing. He shoots on 8×10 film, which is expensive enough that you generally want to get it right the first time. So he shoots test shots on instant 8×10 Polaroid film to make sure the exposure and focus are right. At $15 a pop, 7 or 8 test… → Read More
Are you the kind of person who would love to have an animatronic Gary Coleman on your shelf, his little pudgy face cursing like a sailor at your guests while you roller skate around your basement wearing a skin-tight rubber suit and sing reggae-infused Coldplay covers? If you said “Absolutely!” then read on. → Read More
This cool Kickstarter allows you to build a working speaker using plasma energy. It’s a little esoteric, but here’s the deal: this is a little kit that contains everything you need to play music using a plasma arc. If that doesn’t seem like your idea of a good time, you might be reading the wrong post. → Read More
The folks at Makerbot made a bust of Stephen Colbert and gave him a copy when they appeared on his show a month or so ago. Not content to let it just moulder in the shop, they decided to attach it to a weather balloon and send it up over Long Island. The resulting video and images are striking: the Great Eagle himself in flight high over the salty waves of the Atlantic, overtopping the great… → Read More
Matt Richardson created a wild Arduino system that mutes a TV whenever a name or other keyword is broadcast on TV. It uses the closed caption track and an IR blaster to grab what’s currently playing and then mute the TV for 30 seconds – or more – depending on the current topic.
The project uses the Video Experimenter Shield, Lady Ada’s IR tutorial, and some basic code to scan the captions for… → Read More
While I may have created some sweet spaceships in my days constructing LEGO, I never guessed how serious people would get with their blocky creations. Guns, computer cases, even a Tetris-playing device and a robotic hand. So I shouldn’t be surprised that someone has created a CNC mill with their Mindstorms NXT set.
Check out the video inside. → Read More
I tend to think of Defcon as a sort of massive free-for-all, with thousands of hackers all trying to be the one that replaces the speaker’s Powerpoint slide with a skull and crossbones, that sort of thing. In fact, it’s just a bunch of people who like to fiddle with stuff — whether it’s security, hardware, code, or what. It’s the people who tend to not just think “I wonder if…” but who… → Read More
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Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
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