Photographer Glen E. Friedman is best known for iconic images that captured the roots of three truly indigenous American pop cultures: skateboarding, American hardcore, and hip hop. Starting tonight, you can see all three represented at Shepard Fairey's (relatively new) gallery, Subliminal Projects, over in the Silverlake/Echo Park area of Los Angeles. Sean Bonner, who has worked with both Shep and Glen (and exhibited their work at a gallery he co-owned), says:
[Glen's] retrospective exhibition Idealist Propaganda will open at Shepard Fairey’s Subliminal Projects gallery. The gallery is located at 1331 W Sunset Blvd and the opening is at 8PM. It’s going to packed so I suggest getting there earlier rather than later if you can. I was there last night and got a sneak preview (as well as to help film and upcoming episode of BoingBoingTV about the show) and it’s breathtaking. Trust me, you don’t want to miss seeing all these photos in person.I second that, and if anyone wants to make me really happy this holiday? Buy me like one of every print there, please. I cannot WAIT to share the BBtv episode(s) with you all. I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll stop there. But they're gonna be pretty special, and it was an honor and a total kick to tape them (thanks again, Glen, Shepard, and Sean).
More info: Glen E Friedman at Subliminal Projects this weekend (Los Angeles Metblogs).
Also: books of Glen E. Friedman's photography are availble here.
PHOTO: Joseph "DJ Run" Simmons, Darryl "D.M.C." McDaniels, and Jason "Jam-Master Jay" Mizell, collectively known as RUN-DMC. Photographed by Glen E. Friedman in 1985. This image is in the Idealist show, and it's one of my favorites. Mizell was murdered in 2002. To date no one has been prosecuted for his death, despite much evidence and a room full of eyewitnesses.
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Ed. Note: Boing Boing's current guestblogger Clay Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, where he works on the overlap of social and technological networks.
Every now and again, I see a business doing something so sensible and so radical at the same time that I realize I'm seeing a little piece of the future. I had that feeling last week, after visiting my friend Scott Heiferman at Meetup.
On my way out after a meeting, Scott pulled me into a room by the elevators, where a couple of product people were watching a live webcam feed of someone using Meetup. Said user was having a hard time figuring out a new feature, and the product people, riveted, were taking notes. It was the simplest setup I'd ever seen for user feedback, and I asked Scott how often they did that sort of thing. "Every day" came the reply.
Every day. That's not user testing as a task to be checked off on the way to launch. That's learning from users as a way of life.
Andres Glusman and Karina van Schaardenburg designed Meetup's set-up to be simple and cheap: no dedicated room, no two-way mirrors, just a webcam and a volunteer. This goal is to look for obvious improvements continuously, rather than running outsourced, large-N testing every eighteen months. As important, these tests turn into live task lists, not archived reports. As Glusman describes the goal, it's "Have people who build stuff watch others use the stuff they build."
Mark Hurst, the user experience expert, talks about Tesla -- "time elapsed since labs attended" -- a measure of how long it's been since a company's decision-makers (not help desk) last saw a real user dealing with their product or service. Measured in days, Meetup approaches a Tesla of 1.
Glusman and van Schaardenburg have also made it possible to take Jacob Nielsen's user-testing advice -- "Test with five users" -- and add "...every week." Obstacles to getting real feedback are now mainly cultural, not technological; any business that isn't learning from their users doesn't want to learn from their users.
On my way down after seeing the user test, the woman I'd seen on the screen got onto the elevator, and I mentioned I'd seen her trying the new interface. "Oh", she said, surprised. "I didn't realize anyone was actually paying attention to me."
Hurst: Time elapsed since labs attended | Nielsen: Why You Only Need to Test With 5 Users
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His name is Tyrone Stevenson, though most know him by his nickname, "Baby Champ." He is, everyone agrees, the Scraper Bike King. He wants to change the rough, violent world that he and these other boys are growing up in. He thinks he can do it with bikes. "I just want to give them something positive," he says.Here's a YouTube music video showcasing these scraper bikes:
Until recently, most people had never heard of Stevenson or the tricked-out homemade bicycles he invented back when he was a troubled 13-year-old. Stevenson modeled his creations after "scraper" cars, which are popular in east Oakland and feature booming stereos, candy-colored paint jobs, and big wheels with matching rims. The cars' name derives from the rims, which are sometimes so large they scrape against the wheel wells. Stevenson simply borrowed that idea - big wheels, bright colors, loud music - and applied it to bikes.
I hope to get some of Oakland's scraper bikes to Maker Faire in 2009. They'd fit in well with Cyclecide.
Writer Jocelyn Wiener concludes her story: "Among the scraper-bike boys, a light-hearted enthusiasm abounds. At least for tonight, these streets belong to them." Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Remake | Digg this!
ebooks come to the Nintendo DS, Discuss this on Boing Boing OffworldNintendo and HarperCollins are teaming up to turn the Nintendo DS into an eBook reader with their obviously titled 100 Classic Books Collection.
Essentially, twenty quid gets you 100 Project Gutenberg books dumped on a cart and wrapped with a remedial text reading program.
This isn't such a bad idea, but it depends on how well done they make the text reading program wrapper. Something as elegant and flexible as uBook for the Pocket PC would be great, but most of the text reading programs I've seen for the DS in the homebrew scene have had a real hard time displaying text attractively.
Really, I think the DS has promise as an ebook reader: it has the advantage of two screens, after all. But I'd prefer to see it as built-in functionality... perhaps a firmware update to the DSi.
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Even if you've never touched a soldering iron, you can drop by the Hardware Hacking Area and get into doing cool things with microcontrollers! Build something that relaxes your brain, turns off annoying tvs with the click of a button, or just have fun making cool blinky leds!If you're a coder who wants to get into microcontroller hardware, check out the Game Kit Workshop and build your own MIGNON. This open source device is perfect for beginning hardware hackers and is a great platform to write cool games for!
For those of you who have a few speed soldering championships under your belt, why not go for something really big? You'll not only get to see the quadrocopter in action at the 25C3, you'll have a chance to build your own at the Build a Quadrocopter Workshop. A real UAV you can fly outside the bcc only takes five hours to build! Complete kits for for the Microkopters will be available at the workshop.
Here's the list of speakers, and here's video of the Formica swarm robots that'll be in attendance engaged in some type of robot war:
The image above is a 1/6 Scale 1932 Duesenberg SJ by Louis Chenot, Model Engineer. It's just one of hundreds of amazing works on display at the Cabin Fever Expo. It's a great event that features a lot of amazing work and equipment. If you are a machinist or model maker, this is a MUST see event.
CABIN FEVER EXPO 2009Show: January 17th & 18th, 2009
Saturday: 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Sunday: 9:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Consignment Auction:
Friday, January 16th, 2009Location:
Toyota Arena, York Fairgrounds & Expo Center
334 Carlisle Avenue
York, Pennsylvania 17404The Admission Price for the Show and/or Auction is $10, Which is Good for All 3 Days
More about Cabin Fever EXPO 2009
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Blackberry phones at $20 a piece. There were only 10 left. All of the batteries had died. There were no chargers for sale. But people were snatching them up. So, we bought a couple.McCain Campaign Sells Info-Loaded Blackberry to FOX 5 Reporter (via Memex 1.1)And ended up with a lot more than we bargained for.
When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 Blackberry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night.
We traced the Blackberry back to a staffer who worked for “Citizens for McCain,” a group of democrats who threw their support behind the Republican nominee. The emails contain an insider’s look at how grassroots operations work, full of scheduling questions and rallying cries for support.
But most of the numbers were private cell phones for campaign leaders, politicians, lobbyists and journalists.
We called some of the numbers.
“Somebody made a mistake,” one owner told us. “People’s numbers and addresses were supposed to be erased.”
“They should have wiped that stuff out,” another said. But he added, “Given the way the campaign was run, this is not a surprise.”
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'Lost' Dad's Army show back on TV
(Thanks, Mark!)
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Hollender’s foundation is itself the work of art, which is owned by the Malmö museum. Physically it consists of 13 boxes, where visitors can post their applications for a scholarship. A text on the wall outlines the foundation’s constitution. The money the scholarship holders receive is intended “to promote insight or further education among cultural consumers with respect to what is commonly thought of as respectable culture”. Applicants must sign a declaration stating that they feel or have felt offended either ethically or aesthetically by culture.Swedish artist uses “unethical” cash to fund cultural scholarships (via We Make Money Not Art)
Photo credit: h-l-n
If you have ever attended an online seminar or a virtual university lesson you may already know how this works. You join a virtual room, the presenter / teacher shares his screen and his voice with attendees, and you can enjoy a presentation, a course, or a panel without leaving the comfort of your own place.
What is less fascinating about the whole learning-at-a-distance process, is that you usually end up being just a screen name or a still picture, and you can't really interact with other people in the room like in the real world. The opportunities for any interaction among participants are very limited because there's not your whole "persona" sharing its experience with other people.
That's exactly why virtual worlds, and their most popular platform Second Life, can be venues to effective virtual learning approaches. Since in a virtual world the opportunity to interact with other people becomes fully immersive, and it is not just limited to screen-sharing or videoconferencing, a virtual environment constitutes a potentially much better alternative for educators and learners.
In Second Life you have a fully-customizable projection of your "alive self", not just a screen name or a picture. You can perform many actions in a fashion that is very similar to what you normally do in your everyday life. Walking, talking to other people, visiting places, attending events, and more. And it's very easy to understand how the whole thing works.
George Siemens is an educational technologies and media expert who strongly supports the use of virtual worlds for educational purposes.
In this weekly media literacy digest, he strongly disagrees with those academic environments who find the use of Second Life too complex to be considered as a valid resource for online learning.
But, as every week here on MasterNewMedia, Dr. Siemens also provides you with other pointers, facts and resources that can help you and me to make greater sense of new emerging technologies and their impact on the way we learn, understand, and deal with the world in these fast-changing times.
Here all the details:
Intro by Daniele Bazzano
I personally don’t see this project - MIT students build mobile applications in 13 weeks - as being extraordinary (as the post suggests).
Learning with mentorship and oversight from industry is hardly new.
The speaker / researcher is right in suggesting that integrated learning of this type will become more common. Too often, we still teach as if we don’t have tools for distributed collaboration. Old habits die hard.
But, if an educator takes time to reflect on how she / he could teach differently by using freely available technology, numerous opportunities are quickly realized.
How about bringing external presenters, industry researchers, and peer learners from around the world? How about using the numerous high quality learning resources available through Ted Talks, iTunes U, conference proceedings, etc?
The challenge many educators face today in trying to improve learning is not one of technology or information access. The most significant need is to begin envisioning a future reflective of the affordances of technology now broadly available.
In a post expressing ideas similar to Wendy Drexler’s Networked Student video, ed4wb contrasts education as traditionally conceived and as it might develop in the future.
Several useful diagrams emphasize the type of control shift occurring in how learners access content and participate in conversations. I’ve been a bit bothered lately by how networked learning is increasingly being conceived - i.e. a function of external and social networks. This is the most obvious way to explain learning.
For example, I grow my knowledge as I connect to other people and information sources. This is, however, not a complete view of learning. If learning is only about external connections, then how can gradients of understanding be considered? Or how can expertise (yes, it still exists…) be described in relation to novices? If our focus is only on the external act of networking with others, have we moved much beyond behaviourism? We can still use a network metaphor to address this concern, however.
As suggested during CCK08 (slide 8-18), learning can be seen as networked in at least three distinct ways:
Education plays a diverse role in society, ranging from formal research universities to practically focused community colleges.
The method of education is generally structured - based on the assumption that if we have clear goals (i.e. learn this content), then we also need clear / structured approaches (objectives, instruction, evaluation.
Some pockets of innovation exist. For example, during my current trip to Singapore, I heard about Republic Polytechnic, an institution completely based on problem based learning. I don’t know how well the approach is working, but at least they’re experimenting.
But change in education is hard because change disrupts existing power relationships. In some cases that’s necessary, especially when the system is not meeting the needs of the intended audience. As Graham Atwell notes:
It is not just a question that curricula cannot keep pace with the speed of technological and social innovation. It is an issue that the skills and knowledge required by today’s technology cannot be delivered through a rigidly sytematised, market led educational system. Furthermore, globalisation, the rapid turnover in employment and occupations and the implementation of new technologies have led to pressures for continuing learning - what is being called lifelong learning. Present education systems cannot deliver this.
In addition to a delightful array of vehicles, General Motors has given us a great metaphor: a company that once ruled supreme, lost touch with the changing world around it, and, in spite of warnings over a period of three decades, still failed to align itself to the new reality. From royalty to peasantry in less than 30 years.
Can higher education learn lessons from GM? Do colleges and universities share a similar fate? According to a few articles I’ve recently encountered, yes:
“This is a classic unsustainable trend. Higher education prices cannot grow faster than inflation and family income forever. If colleges use productivity gains from technology to restrain prices, they’ll continue to thrive in a world that values their product more than ever. If they don’t, they’ll be hammered simultaneously by a frustrated public and new competitors eager to steal their customers.”
“Obviously higher education will (and should) survive. But there is no reason to think that higher ed will be immune to the shakeouts and reorganizations that have affected so many other institutions in this age of globalization, which has wrought a heightened level of what economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.”"
When I first read Wisdom of the Crowds, I came away with an appreciation of collaboration that starts with individuality. Let me explain. The examples of crowds used throughout the book emphasis personal contribution that adds to the whole, but is not subsumed by the whole.
Collaboration involves individuals contributing their unique perspectives, not a type of faceless mob with an identity all its own. The individual view of collaboration has always been an issue for me in using wikis. Wikis overwrite individual contributions (sure, you can look at the history and find who contributed what, but that’s not very useful).
In For Innovators, There Is Brainpower in Numbers, NYTimes - one of those newspapers not yet filing for bankruptcy - looks at the difficulty in “thinking together”: “Traditionally, brainstorming revolves around the false premise that to get good ideas, a group must generate a large list from which to cherry-pick. But researchers have shown repeatedly that individuals working alone generate more ideas than groups acting in concert… The best innovations occur when you have networks of people with diverse backgrounds gathering around a problem.”
University Affairs looks at Second Life in higher education (within Canada). Results are mixed. Overall, the article presents a negative view of virtual worlds.
I’m a bit baffled by the comment that Second Life takes too long to figure out: “The learning curve that comes with Second Life is a drawback mentioned by all professors, online communications personnel and students, and this is one factor that makes some universities reluctant to use the program”.The technical skills required to communicate, fly around, and generally exist in Second Life are low. Learning how to navigate and communicate takes very little time. More advanced tasks such as customizing your avatar take more time. But it’s like saying “using MS Word is too complicated”. Sure, using the full range of features, tagging, merging documents, etc. takes time to learn. But to type and save an article / paper takes almost no time. The article confuses “requirement to participate” with “becoming proficient”.
To learn more about George Siemens and to access extensive information and resources on elearning check out www.elearnspace.org. Explore also George Siemens connectivism site for resources on the changing nature of learning and check out his new book "Knowing Knowledge".
Brian sends this about The Back Shed, a great site with info about windmills and renewable energy. There is an excellent page about getting started with windmills. Particularly interesting isthe project for converting junker computer parts and pvc into a wind powered battery charger.
Home made wind generators have been around for decades, with designs as varied as the people who build them. But why would you build your own windmill? Why not use solar cells, solar cells are reliable and maintenance free.The answer is simple, cost!
You cant make your own solar cells at home, they need specialized equipment and complicated processes. But you can build your own wind generator, and for a fraction of the cost of a similar power sized solar array. Another advantage of a wind generator is it will generate power whenever there is a breeze, even at night!
Of course, it is always wonderful when people are so willing to share their information!
All information here is free, there are no "windmill plans" for sale. I'm not here to sell anything. The web site does earn a little money from advertising, enough to pay for hosting expenses and some funds towards my hobbies, but that's not why I put so much time into the web site. I do it for the common good, sharing information and helping other people get started in clean power generation.
How are you making electricity these days? add your ideas to the comments, and post your photos and video to the Make Flickr pool.
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If you're giving someone an iPhone for Christmas or Hanukkah, you must also give that person a copy of iPhone Fully Loaded, 2nd Edition, by Chicago Sun Times columnist and MacBreak Weekly co-host Andy Ihnatko. I read the first edition when it came out, and the chapter on iTunes smart filters alone improved my experience with the iPhone.
The other chapters are also very useful. You'll learn the easiest way to get DVDs, internet videos, VHS tapes, broadcast TV episodes, podcasts, e-books, comics, songs from various sources, Office documents, and lots of other kinds of media onto an iPhone. You'll learn how to turn text files into audiobooks, and watch videos hosted on an online dropbox.
Even if you didn't have an iPhone, you could pick up a lot of useful computer and media tips here. As a bonus, Ihnatko's wry sense of humor makes the book a lot of fun to read.
In the digital space, where you don't need to buy shelf space, if you create the right metadata behind what you're doing, and market it in an effective way -- you're not marketing the new album, you're marketing the brand.... Chad [Urmston of State Radio] just played to 2,800 people with a $25 ticket price in New York on the weekend. He's marketing a brand, he's not just marketing intellectual property. Now it all makes sense. He's happy, he owns his future, his audience has grown with him really well.Which brings up the second key theme: growing the audience and having them connect more closely with the musicians, even to the point of having some say in what direction the band goes in. For example, he talks about originally letting fans design the t-shirts the bands would sell. While some band members didn't like the fan-designed shirts, they inevitably sold more than the band-designed shirts. So, they started taking that even further: releasing versions of the bands' music online for fans to remix. And, with the latest K-OS album, even releasing all the musical stems for remixing, months before the actual album is released, with a plan to then release both the artist mix and the best fan mixes as both physical and digital offerings:
You can even take it beyond that. With K-OS, we're thinking about having the audience vote on which 10 to 12 cities he plays in Canada. We might even take it one step further: pay as you go not as you enter. And maybe when you leave you get a copy of the fan mix for your donation, so there's karma pricing on the exit.McBride also talks about where he thinks this is all going to end up, and he discusses a model that might sound sort of like the music tax we've been slamming, but in reality it's quite different:
To me, the future of music is really simple. It's cloud-based servers that have all of the music, TV, movies -- whatever it might be. Very rich application-driven PDAs, whether it's the iPhone or whatever else comes up, that has applications that I have yet to see. Like digital maids or valets, which go out and knows what your musical tastes are and your 20 friends, and finds that music and organizes it -- not the actual music but the metadata so you can pull it when and how you want it. You would have a $5 or $10 per month fee for pulling it down. And that's how it will all end up, because business cannot drive business consumption.I could see this happening to some extent. The difference between this and a music tax is (a) it's totally voluntary (b) it's about adding value beyond "free" that makes it worth paying and (c) what you're really paying for is actual scarcities: convenience and pointers to good music you'll really like. Of course, in the end, my guess is that eventually this would go one step further, where the service itself would be free, because musicians would find so many other benefits from being promoted through such a system (increased ticket sales, fan club subscriptions, etc...) that it would make even more sense for the whole system to be free.
How free loses out is the applications and metadata that makes it really easy. I call it the "hassle factor" -- for $5 to $10 you get all the music you want without the pain of having to find it. So you get the new Killers album without even knowing the new Killers album is out, and it's automatically in your weekend listening folder because your digital valet got it for you. And if you want to know what your buddy Ken's listening to, then the valet checks out his playlist and copies it over for you.
It's a business model and not a consumer model. And it's definitely not a psychological model. This is about monetizing consumer behavior and not about trying to control where they go.He's talking specifically about "ad-supported" music, which I agree is a model that will never get very far, but the same thing pretty much applies to the old record label model, as well. These days, when there are real consumer options out there, you don't succeed by limiting what consumers do, you succeed by enabling them to do more. And, that seems to be exactly what Nettwerk is doing.
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Today on Offworld our weekend gaming edition sees us reaching out to all of you to keep us all together, with the launch of our Facebook page and its repository thread for keeping track of our XBLA/PSN/Steam names (note that we also have soft-launched a Twitter feed as well!).
Before that, we heard with relief that Double Fine's Brütal Legend would be published by the increasingly boutique EA, saw eBooks officially coming to the DS, and watched an Extra Hyper Korg DS-10 performance from the composers behind Ridge Racer and Chrono Trigger.
We also printed and folded an amazing Legend of Zelda papercraft Link hat (and hair [!]), watched ten minutes of Red Fly's upcoming Wii version of Ghostbusters, proved Scott McCloud right with a comparison of console avatars, and, finally, watched an episode of Grip Wrench, a new animated short series from Rex Crowle, the illustrator behind much of Media Molecule and LittleBigPlanet's CMYK design (who also knows how to make a damn fine unicorn).
In a recent column, titled An Upside to the Economic Downside, Ellen Goodman wrote:
Sociologists will tell you that the most powerful impetus to change is not a new discovery. It's when you learn what you already knew. What Americans already knew at some level was that the credit-card-driven, debt-ridden, pay-later economy wasn't sustainable. Not economically. Not environmentally.It wasn't just the Birkenstock crowd or our Depression-era elders who knew this. It's been nestled in our collective subconsciousness among all the critiques against materialism, all the screeds against commercials, all the unease about excess and inequality, all the fear that we've filled our kids' lives and landfills with stuff. But it was as commonly dismissed as a Sunday sermon. Or manipulated into a pitch for diamonds.
It is the time for change and I believe makers were hoping the time would come. We're living in a period of dramatic change that is, as Dickens described Paris during the French Revolution, "the best of times and the worst of times." We hear plenty about how bad it is or how bad it is going to get. However, there's also good news, and it's echoed in Goodman's comments. Many of us have felt that our way of life, our way of living, was not good for us, and not good for the planet. We sought change but we weren't clear how to make change and change the world. So much of society and culture seemed locked-in, finding more reasons not to change.
As I see it, we have a special opportunity now to make change and remake the world we live in. The kind of problems we face won't be solved by the usual approaches nor by the usual people. Albert Einstein said: "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." We can approach these problems differently and propose unusual solutions that might have seemed impossible to achieve not long ago. Education, Energy, Transportation, Healthcare, Construction, Community -- you name it, it's on the table. We need more and more makers engaged in these issues.
As I said in my recent Make column, The Visible Hand, we have "to believe that [change] starts with each of us." As individuals and in groups, we can work together to face tough problems and we can make changes in our lives, our homes and our communities. I am seeing more and more examples of people applying themselves to a wide range of issues, usually involving creative uses of technology and/or social media.
I plan to begin covering these efforts under what I'm calling Remake on the Makezine blog. I invite you to share your ideas and your projects with me (dale at oreilly dot com) and tell others about what you're doing to remake the world. I hope we can create an ongoing dialogue about what remakers are doing and what can be done. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Remake | Digg this!
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The discussion about whether or not an unpowered vehicle can be made to go directly downwind faster than the wind (DWFTTW) is ongoing. I was reading the comments this morning, and came across a link to this intriguing video, titled "Under the ruler faster than the ruler." It's starting to make me think that a DWFTTW cart is feasible.
In the video, I was surprised to see which direction the big wheel turned when the ruler was run across the top. I'm also quite impressed that this fellow and others are making models to conduct experiment, instead of simply speculating. Hooray for amateur science!
As I've requested in previous posts on this subject, if you have something to contribute to the discussion boards, please refrain from insults and name-calling.
Photographer Syl Arena built this oak-framed flash rig for serious light output. The twelve Canon 580 EX II strobes are controlled by RadioPopper wireless triggers. Shooting at 1/8000 sec. in broad daylight makes for an incredible, dramatic, day-for-night photograph. The ambient sunlight barely has a chance!
1/160 exposure
1/8000 exposure
On his blog, Syl says:
Turns out you can stop a motocross rider flying through the air at 40 m.p.h. with enough sharpness so that you can see the individual links on the motorcycle's chain -- look for that Gang Light post soon.
via Wired Gadget Lab
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A wealthy film director is spending £40 million to build an exact replica of the Taj Mahal in Bangladesh, but Indian officials are trying to block its constructing, claiming the Taj Mahal, which was completed in 1653 is protected by copyright.
For their part, Bangladeshi officials are incensed by suggestions that the Taj Mahal - which was built by the Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, and completed in 1653 - is protected by some sort of copyright.India is trying to block Bangladesh's copycat Taj Mahal“I'm not sure what they are talking about,” one said. “Show me where it says that emulating a building like this can be illegal.”
To make his Taj, Mr Moni imported marble and granite from Italy and diamonds from Belgium to add to 160kg (350lb) of bronze. He hopes that his version of the mausoleum will attract tourists to Bangladesh, a country that is well off the beaten track for Western holidaymakers.
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Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.
Thanks to Robin for pointing me to this experiment in winter bicycling with skis:
Here's a downhill-only version by another Maker in action:
Here's Ktrak, the fancy commercial version:
This nifty drum 'n bass robot is built upon the Picaxe-based "How to Build Your First Robot" project we featured in The Best of Instructables.
From the Maker Shed:
Best Of Instructables
Our Price: $34.99
Sale Price: $29.99
Instructables.com has become one of the most popular magnets for makers and DIY enthusiasts of all stripes. Now, with more than 10,000 projects to choose from, the Instructables staff, editors of MAKE: Magazine, and the Instructables community itself have put together a collection of home, craft, food and technology how-to's from the site. The Best of Instructables Volume 1 includes plenty of clear, full-color photographs, complete step-by-step instructions, and tips, tricks, and new build techniques you won't find anywhere else.
Highlights from the book:
* 336 pages, 6-5/8 x 9-3/8, same dimensions as The Best of MAKE and MAKE magazine.
* Over 120 projects!
* Projects cover everything from food hacking and making home furnishings from junk to building robots and CNC milling machines. And in-between you'll find projects on arts, crafts, costume-making, tool tips, themed photo galleries, and tons more.
* There are also the results of the Community Choice contest winners (the best of Instructables as voted by its members) and links to their projects.
* There are key user comments from the site throughout, called User Notes, and even a section in the back for you to keep your own User Notes as you build the projects.
We tried to involve the Instructables community as much as possible in the creation of the book (we were in direct communication with several hundred authors!). We hope the results do this maker community proud. It was a thrill ride to be sure.
Also in the Shed:
The Solarbotics GM9 Gearmotors used for the basic bot this drumbot is built upon. Steal of a deal at $5.50 each.
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