MAKE is a quarterly publication from O'Reilly for those who just can't stop tinkering, disassembling, re-creating, and inventing cool new uses for the technology in our lives. It's the first do-it-yourself magazine dedicated to the incorrigible and chronically incurable technology enthusiast in all of us. MAKE celebrates your right to tweak, hack, and bend technology any way you want.
A nice letter (and photos) from MAKE reader Evan -
Hi Phil - We've met a few times at MAKE meetings and at the FIRST competition at the Javits center - I taught at NYC public schools for seven years and mentored robotics teams around the city during that time. My wife and I decided to make a big lifestyle change and have been living for the past month in Hangzhou, China, where we are both teaching at an international school for two years.
Given the difficult task of moving across oceans (and the increased difficulty of shipping things TO China), I made the decision to bring primarily clothes, laptop computers, and whatever books and documents we thought might be necessary over here. This meant that I had to go through the very painful process of putting my electronics parts, tools, and projects into deep storage in a facility in the Bronx. While this will mean a lot of fun in a couple years when I get into those boxes again after forgetting what is inside, it was initially frustrating to think I would have to start my collection from scratch. I knew that I would probably find replacements for the tools while over here, but assumed that "browsing" to find parts would be difficult, and finding people that could help me even more so.
During an outing at a computer market (another story to share later), I met a guy that is good at building computers from scratch but that spoke only Chinese. I can count and tell people my name in Chinese, and am learning more daily, but it wasn't even close to the point where we could communicate verbally. In a moment of brilliance, he set up adjacent windows with Google translate loaded, his translating into English and mine into Chinese - instantly the communication barrier was gone - and we were able to chat and joke. After a while of this, I thought to ask him about a local place to buy wires, LEDs, transistors, and circuit boards. He quickly looked something up and printed out an address in Chinese for me to show to a taxi driver. Last weekend I decided to take the trip to see what was there.
After checking out some old ViewMaster slides today, my son and I decided to shoot our own stereoscopic photos. Here's the rig I built and a description of the process from my blog.
I build this simple rig out of chemistry lab equipment. (Yes, it's the same bar stand and clamp set I used to build my Florence Siphon vacuum coffee brewer apparatus.) I pulled my focus and other settings, took a photo, slid it all about 2.5″ to the left and shot a second photo.
Next comes the image processing. What we need to do is paste the left eye image on top of the right one, then line the photos up so that they line up exactly at the point of zero stereo effect. I chose the button protruding from the far side of my typewriter. This is the plane on which the viewer sees the image, and there should be no difference between the left and right images.
To fool the brain we need to show only the right image to the right eye and the left to the left. There are many ways to do this. The ViewMaster displays two images through two lenses, one for each eye. The method I chose here is called an anaglyphic image. To make this I used Photoshop levels command to remove all the blue and green from the left image and all the red from the right image.
I used the screen compositing mode on the left image, and the result is an image where the common pixels are seen by both eyes, while the differences are only seen in the appropriate eye when you wear red/cyan 3D glasses.
The goal of the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) is, given a list of cities, to determine the shortest tour that visits each city exactly once. The ability to solve this problem is important in a variety of fields, from logistics planning to electronics to DNA sequencing. Kaplan and Bosch generate "cities" with a density proportional to the density of an image and then apply the TSP. Two properties of the approximate solution they find make this visualization work -- first, the density of the routing tends to mirror the density of the cities (and thus the density of the original picture), and second, the path never crosses itself (which gives the result a unique look).
Robert Schneider modified a Mindflex EEG toy to become the Teletron, a theremin that plays a Moog analog synth via thought control. The second video shows how to do it. [Via Pitchfork, thanks Jeremy!]
Thing about old folding tables is, the tops (which are usually made of cheap particle board) tend to wear out much faster than the legs (which are usually made of steel). So the world is full of old folding tables with mutilated tops and perfectly serviceable legs. If you know where to look, good-looking hollow-core doors can be had for a song, and make for great replacement tabletops for those old folding legs if you know how to mount them correctly. Here's how I did it, using XRS Molly bolts with expanding adhesive foam blown in for reinforcement.
MAKE
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