Well, it’s been fun. On Sunday, September 17th I will be flying to Kenya to learn the fine art of Glassblowing. Crazy, huh? I hope you have enjoyed the DFD Blog up until this point. I very well may continue when I return - but that won’t be until early January.

If you are interested, I am going to a place called Kitengela Glass, near Nairobi. I will be periodically updating a travel blog, but for the most part I will be away from civilization, and thusly away from the interweb.

That’s about it for now. May your mods be prosperous, may your hacks be successful, and may your warranties be completely and unequivocally voided.

I am constantly trying to remove the brand name markings off of my various products (tags off of jeans, logos off of backpacks etc). When it comes to electronics, I have usually used some sort of paint thinner. Besides being rather caustic, paint thinner can also corrode some plastics (which is bad, by the way). I haven’t actually tried to use this method, but it looks like a pretty sweet alternative to paint thinner.

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

Link | via Instructables

Go here and watch the video of this automatic fly-swatting machine. It’s awesome!

Link | via BoingBoing

Holy Bajeezus! This thing is awesome! For one, it looks very fun to use. And for Two, do you know how many paper shredders i’ve been through? Do you know how many times I have to fight with paper jam? Maybe it’s because I get the cheap one to begin with… but a manual paper shredder makes so much more sense. If you’re like me, you already have a broken one lying around to hack up! If it ever jams, just get a friend to help you. With your torques combined, there will be no paper you cannot shred (or Voltron forming… something…)

Link | via Instructables

Many times in the endeavor to hack, create, mod, or otherwise get creatively creative with products, you need to account for the possibility of that product being completely obliterated. Hencetofor, being able to obtain items for cheap to free is a great skill to have. If you are anybody that knows anything about this, you probably already use Craigs List for all your free stuff obtaining.

This is all fine and dandy, unless you are the visual type - in which case thumbing through hundreds of Free Stuff posts can get annoying. Enter: ListPic. ListPic goes through the various sections of craigslist and sucks out the entries with pictures. Clicking on the picture will get you the text that comes with the post, and the whole set of pictures is dynamically resizable. Very very handy for the visual free stuff hunter in all of us.

(now, if they could only fix that bug that has those six hangars set at a price of $49,998.00)

Link | via Lifehacker

Here is a Flickr Photo Set to get your mind going. Digitalapollo has used some selective spray painting to give his keyboard a “grunge-hacker” look. Whatever look you go for, anything is better than beige. And while you’re at it, just remove the friggin’ Caps Lock key. CAPS LOCK: YOU ARE MORE ANNOYING THAN USEFUL AND SHOULD DIE. (that whole sentence was written using the Shift key, thankyouverymuch.)

Link | via Make:Blog

This is a great example of how simple musical instruments can be made with a little ingenuity. This guy made a standup base out of a cardboard box, a plank of wood, some weed-whacker string and a piezoelectric buzzer as a pickup. It sounds pretty good for the materials it’s made out of. There is a video and a short description here.

Link | via Make:Blog

This is a great idea from Vegiforms - they are plastic molds that you attach around still-growing vegetables. As the gourd/ zucchini/ pumpkin/ eggplant/ melon/ squash/ cucumber grows, it takes the shape of the mold. If you were very handy, you could create your own mold (maybe out of clay or something?). But the rest of us are stuck with the few patters they have available. You’ve always wanted your cucumber to look like a little person, right?

Link | via BoingBoing

Okay, really? Being a skateboarder, a snowboarder and an engineer, I can think of a bajillion things that won’t work with this. And, a bajillion things that already exist that work better. I guess maybe it is a cool idea, but I am going out on a limb here and predicting that this $50 kit from Flowlab will flop on the market. Blogger David Ponce from OhGizmo! had this to say:

Here's something so useful and groundbreaking, we're surprised it's taken this long to hit the market. See, the Railz Conversion Kit, from Flowlab will allow your everyday, cement-loving skateboard� to carve the ski slopes! It's genius! No one's ever thought of taking the sport of skateboarding, and putting it on snow. Never been done. Genius, I tell you!

Really? I thought that boarding had already been adapted for snow. And, amazingly, it’s called “Snowboarding”. Look it up.

Link | via Make:Blog

It’s a Friday. And whatsmore, a Friday before a long weekend. Time for some office antics in the form of football. Get yr’self 3 sheets of paper. Crumple. Tape inside a cup. Fairly instantly, you have a throwable object that looks like a love child of a Nerf football and a Shuttlecock (allright, teenagers… stop snickering). It’s Friday! It’s Mindless! It’s FUN-O-MATIC!

Link | via Instructables

I’m not exactly sure how functional this is as a foot-cleaner, but this Rock Mat looks pretty cool and is fairly easy to make. It’s for all of those times that you’re just yearning to walk around on smooth river rocks - and you don’t have a river handy. It looks neat, too.

Link | via DIY:happy

Now, I know that hydroponics has gotten a bad rep from Ms. Mary Jane, but it is a damn good way to grow any kind of plant. Here is a guide for setting up your own simple system comprised of a big cheap tub, some aquarium equipment, and other “herbs” of your choosing. Legal-ness, people… it’s the stuff that keeps you out of jail.

HowTo Link | HowTo Flickr set | via Make:Blog

And no, i’m not talking about stencils OF islands. Usually with stenciling you have to be careful not to create “islands” in your design. This is so because once you cut out the stencil, those islands of detail with just fall through and only the outline of your entire piece will persevere, resulting in one large blob. Essentially you have to design a stencil in such a way that it has no areas of (solid) non-color completely surrounded by (cut out) areas of color. But, not so with this method. By using thick cardboard and some thin wire, stencil islands can be held in place and be completely surrounded by color. Cool beans.

Link | via Instructables

Zenstoves.net is a great resource for the Outdoor-Do-It-Yourself type person. They have an extended discussion on the plethora of camping stoves available today, including the pros and cons of each. The bulk of the site, though, is devoted to making your own versions of some of these stoves. Mostly using soda cans as raw materials, there is a ton of instructions and downloadable templates to go along with each of these DIY stove variables. If you are thinking about buying a stove, maybe you should think about making one first!

Link | via del.icio.us - diy

Here is a clever post over at Instructables that shows you how to make your own cheap and easy animations. Using a webcam, a stand, a whiteboard, and some freeware animation program, you too can be making short films about bears that fart. [ze frank voice] Stupid Bears. All the info, including the end results, can be yours this fine Friday afternoon. Or morning, depending on how un-procrastinating you are.

Link | via Instructables

If I ever meet Richard Dean Anderson (that’s MacGyver, for all you non-fanatics), I should either have a large strip of duct tape for him to autograph, or this: The Most Incredible Knife. This “knife” has 85 tools on it, weights about 2lbs, and is over 9 inches long - packing almost every single tool that was ever on a Swiss Army Knife in to one… uh, package. And while this object would probably be fairly useless in any situation (how does one use a knife with a handle that is 9 inches wide?), it does not mean that this thing isn’t COMPLETELY FRIGGIN’ AWESOME. Because it is.

Link | via Engadget

If you mention the summer!

Summer is! It is the sea! It is barbecue!! If you mention the summer, it is the burning meat. Don’t you think? the charcoal fire burning meat how it does not accumulate anymore under the blue sky. Only - it does, actuality is harsh. It cannot go easily, if is, at least with also just feeling�. When of such a thing was thought, humiliation of the 1 years half ago was remembered suddenly. The fried egg did not burn with USB�. and you resolved. Very this time probably roasting the meat with USB, is not or!!

With with the notion that where you say, the meat is roasted [ribenji] had decided to do with USB, or.

Okay, fine. So the original post is in Japanese and this is the Google translation. But it is still pretty ridiculous, bad translation aside. This is a specially built PC to run power from 30 USB ports to a modified coffee mug heater. And, yes, they do cook a piece of meat with it. Silly Japanese people.

Translated Link | via Make:Blog

Really? Are you serious? They say that this awesome product is backed by market research that some people like to sneak drinks from the pickle jar. I like to sneak tastes of peanut butter from the jar, but that doesn’t mean I want to make plain peanut butter a whole meal. In addition to their crackerjack marketing research, Pickle Juice is also touting the health benefits, including “30 times the electrolytes as Powerade and 15 times more than Gatorade”. Great. Now make it taste… not like pickles - and I think you may be on to something.

Link | via Designboom

Here is a great tutorial from everybody’s damn fine favorite photo newsletter - Photojojo. Panographies are like panoramas on crack - and by crack I mean extended not only left and right, but up and down from everywhere. It is possible to create a panography on the inside of a sphere - simulating 360degree vision. That’s a little extreme, but this howto goes over the individual steps involved in making a flat, superwide angle panography. Very cool.

Link | via Life Hacker

Even though this site does not have any kind of DIY info - and even though this guy looks like kind of a gork, Undeniable Facts is a pretty interesting new collection of interestingness. You can learn how to become president if you weren’t born in the US, find out what kangaroos keep in their pouch besides their young, and more. He also claims that camels are the result of a Rhinoceros breeding with a Horse… I’ll have to check on that.

Link | via del.icio.us - interesting