Category: Cool Stuff

A gallery from Worth1000.com of many objects made with unique materials. One of my favorites is this XBox controller. I think I could use one of these.

[tags]Worth1000, Alternate materials[/tags]

This link comes via Bill Harris (at Dubious Quality), who got it from Brian Pilnick.  Head over the Statesman.com and view the awesome dust art done by Scott Wade on the rear window of his Mini Cooper (a car, by the way, which I would love to have for myself).  The images are also available to purchase, but I haven’t followed the link to see exactly what/how you get these.

I have no sample images, because they are all contained in a Flash viewer, and I don’t have a Mozilla extension installed to let me capture Flash output.

[tags]Dust Art[/tags]

Well, I don’t think this idea of nearly instant viewing of your photos will ever catch on, but the folks at Modern Mechanix have a scan from an old article trumpeting this new-fangled camera from Polaroid that gives finished, dried photos in 60 seconds. Why, in my day, we had to wait days – sometimes weeks – to get our photos. All you crazy kids and your instant-this and instant-that.

YOUR present camera performs only one of many steps—developing, fixing, printing, and so on—involved in making a photograph. Edwin H. Land, 38-year-old president of the Polaroid Corporation, has invented a one-step process in which the camera does everything. With his camera, you snap the shutter and turn a knob; 60 seconds later you have a finished, dry print. The Land camera takes its pictures in the conventional way, but inside it, in addition to the film roll, there is a roll of positive paper with a pod of developing chemicals at the top of each frame. Turning the knob forces the exposed negative and the paper together through rollers, breaking the pod and spreading the reagents evenly between the two layers as they emerge from the rear of the camera. Clipped off, they can be peeled apart a minute later.

Ordinary chemicals are used, but the negative is not transparent and light is not required for printing. The unexposed portions of silver halide are transferred from the negative to form the positive image.

Land says that ordinary transparent film can be adapted to one-step photography, but he sees no need for it. If additional prints are desired, the easiest way is to make additional exposures. If necessary, the original print can be rephotographed.

[tags]Polaroid, Instant camera, Modern Mechanix[/tags]

Well, until the company that controls the name comes in and forces a change to the description, Bricksmith is described simply as “virtual Lego modeling for your Macintosh.” And checking out the pictures, you can see that the description pretty well covers it. It’s a legally free application for developing LEGO look-alike buildings on recent model Macs.  After you get done building your virtual world LEGO-style, be sure to download and use L3P to convert the model into a POVray description file.  This will give you some extra-pretty images (after running them through POVray) that look more realistic than non-L3P converted images.

[tags]LEGO, Virtual LEGOs, POVray, L3P[/tags]

(via MAKE ezine blog)

Useless party trick? I don’t know. But this gallery of balloon molecules (at balloonmolecules.com, oddly enough) looks neat to me. The site has a gallery of finished molecules, a brief write-up of what’s behind the build, and links to more instructional bits on how to build some of the molecules.

We would like to show you some of the balloon molecules we have built. The estimated time to build the molecule is given but advanced balloon sculptors will soon need less time. For most of these sculptures we also offer a detailed construction manual.

And so they do. The guides provided start at the basic balloon tying beginning steps, and show how to section things off, separate parts, and all that jazz. There is probably enough information on the site to even learn something about balloong animal/structure building with no previous experience.

And for my favorite:

DNA-Helix

This two-and-a-half-metre-model of the DNA-helix with a diameter of 1 metre shows that a lot is possible. If the PO₄-units and the sugar are adjusted correctly, the helical structure will form without any pressure. For understandable reasons a construction manual is not available.

The motto of the DNA-helix-sculpture is “look and enjoy”. Construction time: the first try (picture) took about ten hours.

Check all the cool (larger) pictures, the mini-guides, and everything else offered there.

[tags]Balloon molecules, Balloon art, Balloons[/tags]