Only displaying the 6 posts tagged DIY:
How to do… almost everything. It’s a big page. I never knew that instead of washing, you could just freeze your jeans for a week. Or that you could chill wine by adding salt to the ice bucket (which makes perfect sense now that I recall my Chemistry classes).
Boing Boing linked the Howtoons how-to guides for kids and adults alike. Such as this Visual Communication guide, a godsend for someone as inept at drawing with pen and paper as me.
There should be more things like this. It really pisses me off the fact that despite the exponential growth in access to information, there’s a thorough lack of great explainers in many areas. I wonder, for instance, if I could have learned any degree of programming without the kid-friendly ZX Spectrum programming books I read back in the day. I probably wouldn’t.
Cory Doctorow has a new novel out called Makers, which you can, as usual, download for free from his website.
I have a colossal number of pages to read as part of my Master’s thesis investigations, but I’ll read this as soon as I feel I need a break from those readings.
Perhaps not on the same plateau as Miroslav Tichy, the Czech that builds cameras from stuff found in the trash, but still amazing: Kwanghun Hyun is a Korean designer who builds very functional-looking cameras from scratch. Be sure to check his portfolio.
Invisible flash takes photos without the glare
The Null Device links to the ‘dark flash’, which is an infrared flash that could turn bright flashes in the night obsolete (saving all those people in say, football stadiums, the embarrassement of being seen using a light source with a range of 8 meters to snap a picture of the far side goal). But I started thinking, isn’t this something you can already do. There are plenty of tutorials on how to remove your camera sensor’s infrared filter, and I’m pretty sure you can fit a IR-transmitting filter to a flash to achieve the same effect. Lots of interesting exposure calculations (as you need to compensate exposure in higher wavelenghts) will follow, I’m sure.
Instructables: Car dashboard camera mount
It’s stupid simple. Although I don’t think it’s such a good idea to have the camera’s LCD screen pointing at you while driving. Anyway, speaking of DIY and Instructables.com, they released a ‘Best of’ book, which you can also read online.
