DFD.Blog ~ Daily Conglomeration of Interestingness

You know anything fermented in a plastic gallon-jug does not exactly scream classy. And even though I don’t really know what this screams, here is a tutorial for fermenting your own gallon of wine from grape juice concentrate. And did I mention on-the-cheap? $12 for a gallon of wine may be the definition of cheap. I once bought a bottle of wine at the dollar store (…ugh - never again), doing some awesome math, a gallon of dollar-store wine would only cost about $6. If you have some of the necessary tools and materials (funnel, balloon, rubber band, gallon-jug, bleach), and buy non-name-brand grape juice concentrate, I bet a home-brew setup could come down in price. And anything would be better than Dollar Store wine. At any rate, useful if you are industrious and cheap. Or, industrious and under-age. Or, in my case, industrious, bored, and curious.

What else can I say? It’s an electric Kazoo.
Parts list and (not-so-complicated) instructions here.

This is a very neat affect. By following these steps, you can create an image on a geranium plant in much the same way old black-and-white photography was taken. As you may imagine, the image-capture process is slow and requires intense light. Having such an organic object combined with age-old techniques makes the result incredibly interesting to me. From the site:

The chlorophyll in healthy green leaves captures light and uses its energy to join together carbon dioxide and water. The result is the organic compound we call starch. It is the basis of much of the food we eat. Starch is white, but if you drop a small amount of a solution of iodine on it, the starch turns black. So that’s it really. All you have to do is get a plant to produce lots of starch in the right place, then stain the starch with iodine. Don’t let a few details prevent you starting straight away.

The whole process is very clearly explained - such that you can get started straight away… or something.

Hello, Designboom; and Designboom Weblog. You watch a lot of stuff I find interesting, so I will read what you have to say. And, for your inaugural post, I will relate this interesting piece by artist Chris Sollars.

Chris took a Ford Explorer, covered it with paper, and did a rubbing of the whole car with graphite. Pretty cool, huh? This just goes to show something I have always known about doing art. If you are having a hard time coming up with something interesting, pick something that has already been done (rubbing with graphite), and dramatically increase/decrease the normal scale (in this case, SUV sized rubbing). Despite the fact that there seems to be no real message in this artwork, it is just-plain-cool to look at. Snooty art people be damned: I like giant rubbings.

(huh?)

Yes, this is a matchstick airplane powered by four flies. If you have no qualms with cruelty-to-flies, you should head on over to this great tutorial on how to make this airplane. The pictures are really well drawn, despite the strange subject matter. I remember one of my friends doing this when I was, like, in the 3rd grade. Except he sedated a bee, and tied it to a piece of fishing line, kind of like a leash. Yes, both these are very strange things to do; but, if I had to choose, I’d probably make this little plane. I don’t think tethering a bee to you sounds like such a bright idea.

From the site:

…we see that while flies think a lot alike, have a great deal in common, share many of the same hopes and dreams, they never act in concert, as a team, with regard for the worth of other, neighboring flies until forced to by grim circumstance - as, for example, when they are harnessed to fly and either first experience the exhilaration of high-altitude cooperation or die.

Vestal Design has a great little ditty on a now-forgotten piece of interestingness. In the 50’s, Alfred Heineken (yes, the beer guy) had the idea of creating interlocking beer bottles that could be used as bricks once emptied. Said to have been inspired by Jamaica’s impressive amount of beer bottles discarded on the beach, and a need for cheap building materials, Heineken developed what he called “The World Bottle”. The project never saw the light of day, but had it taken off, I think that this kind of anticipatory usefulness for refuse would have had a big impact. I also kind of think it’s funny to correlate beer drinking with low-cost house building. Given that a ten-foot-square house would take around 1,000 bottles to create, a single house would be a sizable undertaking for any liver.

Hajime Emoto makes these incredibly could-be realistic creature remains out of paper, paste, and bamboo. His site is entirely in Japanese, but thanks to this Pink Tentacle blog post, I am able to include direct links to his many picture galleries.

Room 1
Room 2
Room 3
Room 4
Room 5
Room 6
Room 8
Room 9
Room 10

If you can read Japanese, a full bio and history of each of these spectacular creatures is included once you click their thumbnail, as well as more closeup pictures and pictures from different angles. I particularly like these little guys because of the high level of skill and imagination that went into each one. Definitely worth a look.

What does this have to do with anything? Not much. But I am always looking for new peripherals for my Commodore 64. Kick ass.

Okay, really, there is nothing more to say. The original post is in Italian, so I ran it through some Babel Fish web-translation-awesomeness:

Commodity 64: one of those technological stranezze of the past that helps to feel less and less primiti to you (or more primiti to you, to second of the points of view… my point of view is in averse part… and therefore zoppicanti yours technical progresses make me to laugh however, haha!): one machine for the coffee with timer connecting to a ancient Commodore 64, from a number of the review Microcomputer of June 1985.

… and therefore Babel Fish yours technical progress make me to laugh however, haha!

Sometimes a picture really does tell the whole story. Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad of Sydney has, uh, “developed” this cellphone amplifier out of the top of a wine glass. He sites that more and more people are using their cellphones as alarm clocks these days, and this will help give your getyourlazyselfoutofbed noise a decibel boost. I, personally, use an old-fashioned radio-alarm clock. But I could see myself using this because when I get home, my cell phone lives in my bedroom, and sometimes I have a hard time hearing it in the living room with the TV on. Even though this is a very elegant-looking solution, this wineglass would just roll right off the top of my very busy dresser. BoingBoing made the nice suggestion of trying to integrate your charger into the bell. I think I would try to make a sturdier base, in addition to including the charger cord. This would cut down on it’s elegance a bit, but it would increase it’s functionality a ton. At any rate, Bahbak, your broken wine glass sure is getting a lot of press.

YourGreenDream is a DIY type website dedicated to environmentally friendly projects. It seems like they are just beginning to build their content, but right now they have a variety of projects up, like DIY wind and solar powered projects. Probably the best thing about this site, though, is the fact that they assume no prior knowledge about anything - so the instructions are very easy to understand. The other great thing about the site is that all of their pictures use green backgrounds. Awesome! But really, I always thought that it would be cool to have a house that was completely off-the-grid. Even though this is possible now, with advancing technology, this may be DIY easy pretty soon - as is shown by this site. In addition to official articles, users can submit projects that they have documented as well. My favorite article would probably be “Putting Together a Solar System”. Haha, very punny.

I’ve seen gas-powered blenders before (kind of like inverted lawnmowers), but I was never to partial to the idea of exhaust and gasoline next to my margarita. I guess I’m more of a bike blender guy, then. The Byerley Bicycle Blender is “the world’s finest bicycle-driven human powered blender”. From the looks of it, bicycle blending does look pretty fun. I could see it getting some heavy use during bike-camping trips, or just regular ol’ picnicks. It’s too bad that the sets they sell exceed $700 [do a double-take here]. Not including the bike, you need the blender head unit itself, plus an extracycle (the bike trailer), and the stand to put under your back wheel such that you don’t go anywhere while blending. If I had more time, and more picnicks to attend, I would Do This Myself. It would be much more ghetto, but it definitely wouldn’t cost $700. Oh well. It’s probably better, because I would just end up using this for margaritas. I can see a bunch of inebriated people standing around a bike blender now: “Go faster, Joe! Puree! Puree! Right now you’re only Chopping!”

I know office life can be boring, but these guys have taken time wasting to a whole new level. The potentially hazardous level, that is. In a surprising amount of detail, these guys from Norway have documented the building process for about ten Office Guns - and have also figured out average and maximum projectile velocity (with high speed cameras), range, and loading time. Pretty good for a bunch of clips, rubber bands, and pencils. And if this wasn’t enough, they even did CEP accuracy tests, and penetration tests using ballistics gel. Whoa! Their “Super Maul” gun can send a pencil through an empty can of soda, so watch out. I usually encourage people to get out and make whatever it is I happen to be posting about - but in this case, just reading the website will suffice.

This idea is… awesome? I can’t quite tell. I am vaguely familiar with the beer-making process, and the idea of using a coffee maker to do this doesn’t… uh, go against my perception of the process. But it didn’t exactly come to mind before I read this article, either. I guess, at the crux of it, you need to filter water through barley much like you filter water through coffee grounds - and the temperature of the coffee hotplate is a good temperature to condition the wort (barley-sugar water for fermenting). So it works out pretty well, for a small scale operation. You also need a jar, where the actual fermenting takes place. I was going to post this under “What were you thinking?”, but then I realized that I was way too intrigued, and may just end up doing it myself. Nothing like a homebrewed mug of beer to get you going in the morning! Yup-sir! …aw, wait - now I sound like an alcoholic.

Yoav Ziv and Gad Charny currently have an art exhibit, and a DesignBoom article, dedicated to their extensive collection of clothes pegs (or clothes pins, depending where you from). From the DesignBoom article:

…a daily, mundane, banal object, which we all seem to posses, though we rarely look at. the �silent
servants' …an object so basic yet so useful, that has the quality of serving many functions in addition to it’s original one. …an object that crosses cultural and geographical boundaries, we all have the same need, most of us solve the problem in a similar way.

The article has many pictures of their over-300-peg collection, including some antique clothes pegs from over one hundred years ago. Although looking at hundreds of different clothes pins is not that useful, it is surprisingly interesting. Who would have known?

SawStop: The Best Way Not to Cut Stuff - now including *Hot Dogs* and *Your Finger*! Thanks to some fancy detection assembly that includes the blade itself, this table saw can sense when it has stopped cutting wood and has started cutting something conductive (ie whatever bodypart you’ve got in there) - and within 5 milliseconds, shoves an aluminum block into the blade both stopping it and retracting it from the table. SawStop’s website has some cool videos that use a hotdog, and all joking aside, this thing really works. The blade ends up barely nicking the dog, as you can see to the left. Videos are here: (.mov / .mwv). Another company that tested this product says that 50% of the time, the blade is ruined - and 100% of the time the aluminum stop block is ruined (REALLY?). But, the whole detection/stopping mechanism is easily replaceable, and only costs $70. Now, the whole system starts at $2799, which may be a little steep… but just think of it as finger insurance.

One of the coolest Artist/Engineer crossover people I’ve come across is Mr. Crabfu (not sure what his real name is…). He makes robots that run on steam power - many of them with incredibly sophisticated mechanical locomotion techniques - like the LocoCentipede shown here. He also has made other animal-like pieces, like spiders, trilobites, and turtles. Some of his other robots are simply tanks, or steam engines with feet that walk. He even has a small steam boat that rows itself. I highly recommend watching the videos of these guys in action. And, even though he is very modest throughout his site, referring to these ingenious contraptions as “silly”, Mr. Crabfu has (not surprisingly) won several awards for his creations, and has even been interviewed by NBC. Quite an array of robotical ingenuity, and definitely worth taking a look at.

Some people like cars. Some people like stamps. Some people like knitting. And, thanks to the internet, I now know that some people like collecting as many pictures of bamboo-related things as they can. It is the goal of this site to have users submit one thousand pictures of things made out of bamboo. And I didn’t stop to count, but perusing through the site, I think they may be close. They’ve got your normal-ish stuff, like a chair (shown here… *WHOA*), tables, fences, small containers, and baskets. Then they have some more-interesting-er stuff. Sunglasses? yup. Coffin? oh yeah. How about towel racks, race cars, computer cases, surfboards, telephones, or multi-story parking structures? Uh-huh, they got thems too. If anything, this is a great example of how versatile bamboo is as a material. It’s also a great brainstorming-type kick-in-the-pants example that shows, in the more general sense, that objects have far more uses than you will ever think of on your own. So take a look at 1000 things made of bamboo, and get your pants kicked.

So there have been a lot of projects floating around the DIY universe concerning home projectors. Lumenlab has emerged as the foremost resource for obtaining parts and instructions when you want to undertake this sizeable project. I’ve seen projects ranging from overhead projector modifications, all the way to this: PopSci’s projector… just slightly different than your every-day-DIY-projector. The largest difference, in my opinion, is the over $1,000 pricetag - which to me does not scream DIY. But, DIY projects don’t *always* have to be cheap, as they have shown. This thing is decked out, with big wheels to roll easily over your lawn, and a masterfully created curvy-cabinet that allows for easy projection-angle adjustment. It has a standard video-in, which means this could also be used in conjunction with a laptop (they use a portable DVD player). The biggest thing I would add to this is external speakers - they could be blended into the housing, or just attached to the chaise. Hey, if I had a bunch of time on my hands, and extra money laying around, I would make something that closely resembles this. But, unfortunately, I do not - drooling will have to suffice.

Here is a cool idea - a tshirt with many small cells laid out in a grid. Boring? Well, not until you get a black marker and color in some of the cells, resulting in a pixelated image of whatever you want! This site has an interactive version of this concept for you to play around with - they also sell these tshirts, but you have to order them from Japan. And they cost close to 5,000 Yen, which is like $43. A little steep for a tshirt - and all the more reason to make your own. If you took this concept to different colored tshirts, you would have to make sure that you had a pen that matched your tshirt color to effectively hide the pixels. Black is probably the easiest. On the other hand, you could make a tshirt with white pixels, and instead of “erasing” pixels, color them in with different colors for even more flexibility. Most ink would probably come off after a couple of washes, so right when you get bored with one design, you can start all over again. Go crazy!