It was a gorgeous day in San Francisco, almost too nice a day to spend indoors. Luckily the time indoors was spent listening to engaged and engaging people talk about interesting things. How to build support for right-to-left languages when coding themes for WordPress, or how an exploratory learning model can be a better approach [...]
April Bagels, originally uploaded by normnode. The Cook’s Illustrated team came up with a very effective bagel recipe for the home kitchen. When I use it, I deviate from the instructions in two ways. I knead the dough by hand since I don’t have a KitchenAid mixer, and I don’t use high gluten flour, instead [...]
Yesterday BoingBoing posted about this set of photos at Flickr – apparently of a home built machine for creating photographic film. The prospect of hobbyists filling in when industries die is intriguing. Is craft-brew 35mm film in our future? The processing of Kodachrome is more complicated, but hopefully someone is on that project, somewhere….
Watching this TED talk made me aware of how rarely I think about the sky. I spend so much time indoors, and even if I go outside at night, it is only to hope in a car and drive somewhere. No looking up. So, I plan to figure out how to make a simple astrolabe, [...]
A delightful device – the Baker Tweet – brought into existence by the clever Wallaces over at Poke. The problem it solves? Letting the followers of your muffins know when fresh ones are ready. All without needing to dust off your hands to approach a computer. Turn a nob, press a button. This video is [...]
Found via LifeHacker. I need to check out this site – if there are more videos like this, I am a new fan. Iphone Paper Dock / Stand from Dessine moi un objet on Vimeo.
Need speakers, but all you have are earbuds for your iPod? A wee bit of tape and two sheets of paper are all the materials you need. It took me about ten minutes to make these, and they are at least as loud as the built in speakers on my iPhone.
Risk: making the mundane appear “paradigmn shifting”
My previous at attempts to use whole wheat flour to bake bread were not exciting. I may have had one or two successes with a recipe from James Beard’s bread book. Wednesday night I decided to give a new recipe a try. Following the recipe for whole wheat sourdough Miche from Daniel Leader’s Local Breads, [...]
“Craft electronics, if I may crib a term from the American brewing industry…” Joel Johnson minted this phrase in an article about the CrunchPad over at boingboing.net. Interesting comparison really. If small manufacturers can create niche products and sustain themselves, what might the future of our gadget use look like? Johnson mentions the Chumby. When [...]