Read about crop circles, make your own temporary tattoos, and take crystal-clear photos with a circular polarizing filter.
TOOLBOX
Tokyo Time Hackers
We geeks love to hack the wetware (aka our brains) as much as the hardware and software. Puzzles, brainteasers, math problems, games with complex rules and devilish stratagem, anything to keep those neurons sparky. So when a propeller-head chooses a watch, if given the choice between one that tells time via mechanical hands or digital readouts versus one that rewrites the very rules of time-telling, displaying it in some unspeakably nerdy way, you know what the choice will likely be.
For many a high-dome and wired hipster, the choice is TokyoFlash, the Japanese chronograph merchant specializing in unique, and some might say, insanely odd, timepieces. Their Morse Code Watch tells time by sounding it out in Morse code, “refracting the sound through your wrist,” as well as displaying the code on the watch’s face. The Scope uses X and Y coordinates and a flashing LED scope-like screen to point and flash out the time. One of TokyoFlash’s more well-known watches is the B Version by Twelve 5-9. It uses a radar-like display to indicate the hours, a row of five LEDs for the 10s and nine lights for the intervening minutes. The High Frequency PU uses LCD technology to display a dance of brilliant blue (or green) lights that spike and die like a graphic equalizer. Eventually, all the lights fade away except for the ones that indicate the current time (or month/day).
If you really want to play Play-Doh with your thought forms, get several of these watches, ones that use very different methods of time-keeping, and switch off wearing them. Just be prepared to get the snot kicked out of you if somebody asks you for the time on the subway and you shove one of these weirdo watches in his face.
—Gareth Branwyn
Staying Power
The problem with most cordless drills is the way the batteries drain even when you aren’t using them. Unless you keep the battery pack in the charger all the time, you never know if the drill is going to work when you need it. Not so with the Skil 2410 10.8V Li Ion Drill. It sat in my closet for a month without a charge and worked like a champ when I pulled it out, unlike the NiCad-powered tools I frequently find myself cursing.
Skil claims the drill can hold a charge for 18 months of non-use, but I haven’t had it long enough to test. (If you don’t trust it, you can store the drill on the charger.) The 2410 has a couple of other handy features, like a quick-change chuck that doesn’t require a key or the coconut-crushing grip of an orangutan to make sure bits don’t slip, and a built-in light to help you see what you’re doing.
—Mark Frauenfelder
Fun with a Fridge
My mother has collected magnets for her fridge as long as I can remember. Whenever we went on trips, all she wanted was a souvenir magnet. So, you can imagine how surprised we were to see the memory slate wiped clean for a game.
Frigits is a great magnet set that lets you build a marble run right on your fridge. Each piece has swiveling magnets on the back, so you can turn them as you’d like. They send you 12 marbles, and you can buy the “Frigits Extension Launcher” so short folks can send the marbles high enough.
I believe that the only real requirement to use it is to understand gravity; I think most Earth residents are familiar with that. Kids love the clicking, clacking, and spinning as the marble makes its way down. We ended up moving the Frigits to the side of the fridge so we would be ready to play at all times. (See my video of Frigits in action at makezine.com/go/frigits.)
—Brian Stucki
The Daily Grail
I’ve savored The Daily Grail for years, and like Boing Boing, its mix is hard to describe except to say that it combines many things I’m interested in — archaeology, anthropology, paranormal phenomena, alternative history, natural science, the occult — and approaches them with the same fascination and skepticism that I have. The links are great, and the comments frequently hilarious. As well as keeping you up-to-date on outlier thought, TDG also follows a pantheon of fringe notables like Graham Hancock and Loren Coleman, and performs due diligence on self-assured authorities such as Egypt’s celebrity minister of antiquities Zahi Hawass and career skeptic James Randi.
At the end of 2003, the long-running TDG became the watered-down “TDG News Briefs” behind the home page of the ill-fated Phenomena magazine. Thankfully the site came back two years later with even more to share. Now it also hosts The Red Pill, a reference wiki that “grew out of Wikipedia’s tendency to avoid ‘fringe’ issues,” and the PDF magazine Sub Rosa, which takes a deeper look at fringe topics with historical features, profiles, interviews, and artist spotlights.
It all just makes me want to kidnap the bloggers so that we can drink wine and talk until dawn, while taking turns choosing the music to put on the stereo. I’m sad that I have only one lifetime to explore all the fun things that TDG covers. Or do I?
—Paul Spinrad
MAKE LOOKS AT KITS
Editors Phillip Torrone and Arwen O’Reilly talk about kits from makezine.com/blog.
Snow Bike Kit
Add a ski to the front of your mountain bike and a tracked rear drive, and you’re set to be James Bond. Not a bad hack either, if you have the time to build it from scratch.
Meet the Beetles!
The flat metal pieces are cool enough, but once assembled you end up with a piece of art: a rhino beetle, scorpion, praying mantis, butterfly, or stag beetle.
Disco Dance Floor Kit
Hey, those craft engineers who did the Disco Dance Floor have a new company and sell kits now. Check ’em out — yay, more ’lectronic kit makers!
Photograph of beetle by Izu Watanabe
LED Cube Kit
Make your own disco with these LED cube kits. Go minimalist with two colors, or go wild with all three!
Hovercraft Kit
Wow, forget those paper plate hovercrafts. This is what you want to make. You know ... for your family.
Power Trips
Exergia has a ton of great kits: Stirling engines, steam engines (including a tiny steam-powered trike), fuel cells, photovoltaics — everything “interested individuals” would want to build. A great way to start understanding more about alternative energy technologies.
Combat Robot Kits
Whoa, BattleKits has combat robot kits ranging from 30 pounds to a massive 340-pounder — all based on the extremely successful “BioHazard” bot.
DIY Temporary Tattoo Kit
Temporary tattoos are always a big hit with kids, but the designs usually aren’t that great. Here’s a temporary tattoo kit for kids so they can make their own (or just use the stencils). It looks like it’s a pen with a motor, so you could make your own, too.
Altair 8800
What a great kit — a fully functional Altair! It’s not cheap, but the parts are all high-quality, you get free tech support and repair, and you end up with a reproduction of one of the early computers.
MAKE LOOKS AT BOOKS
Minds on the Fringe
Worlds of Their Own by Robert Schadewald
Bob Schadewald had a lifelong interest in fringe science. This posthumous collection of his published and unpublished materials (skillfully edited by his sister, Lois) is a highly readable account of several varieties of pseudoscience. The unifying theme is “fringe thinkers” who create their own versions of reality, contemptuous of established mainstream science. Bob treats his subjects with respect and even sympathy (he knew many of them personally), but he clearly reveals why their ideas are flawed and misguided.
His chapter on “The Philosophy of Pseudoscience” reveals the common characteristics of these independent thinkers. Here you’ll find the stories of historian Immanuel Velikovsky, who rewrote the book on solar system astronomy; John Keely, who claimed he could power a freight train coast-to-coast on a gallon of water; and assorted creationists who freely engaged in “lying for God.” This is an informative and entertaining book of continuing relevance, for ideas of this sort never die, perpetually reborn in new clothing.
—Donald Simanek
Roadside Science
Pomegranate Roads: A Soviet Botanist’s Exile from Eden by Dr. Gregory M. Levin
One tidbit to take away from this book is the word punicology, the study of pomegranates. If you were a punicologist, you would call its seeds by the name “arils.” There are far more varieties of pomegranate than you can imagine: the author collected 1,117 varieties from 27 countries.
Levin calls this book a “montage” and it truly is: part science, part history, part gardener’s guide, part autobiography. It’s the life story of a Soviet botanist who left his native Leningrad to work and live at the agricultural station of Garrigala: “I witnessed the prime time and the sunset of this little center of culture at the very edge of Soviet influence.” Using Garrigala as his base, he explored the entire region, finding wild varieties of pomegranate growing in subtropical gorges. In 1991, Turkmenistan became an independent country and Levin was cut off from any funding. He ended up in Israel, where there’s ongoing research. Levin’s life story is about science, not as conducted in a laboratory, but out in the field. “The world should be studied by roaming across it,” he writes.
There is also a nice backstory to this book, whose publisher heard about Levin from a BBC broadcast and decided to go find him. She got him to write this book, which you can pick apart to find sadness among its many arils of sweetness.
—Dale Dougherty
Liberation Psychology
Fate magazine
Fate magazine covers UFOs, ghosts, psychic phenomena, and other topics that you’ll also see in the Weekly World News, but Fate takes a more principled approach. Where the WWN complicates its voice by mixing real reports (largely from the third world) with funny exaggerations and Onion-like fabrications, Fate explores with undistanced curiosity.
Fate is run like a fanzine, and the lively community it has created is evident. A long Letters section serves as a miscellaneous forum, and other sections collect readers’ first-person accounts of mystical experiences, proof of survival beyond the grave, and other topics.
Features range from local ghost legends, UFO contacts, and speculative history to celebrity stories, like an account of the 1973 séance where Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey summoned the ghost of Marilyn Monroe. Through it all, intriguing ads promote books, psychics, and even messiahs.
If you’re more perceiving than judging, and you relish your role as a contributing neuron to the wise hive mind, then you and your pals will have a great time processing Fate’s fascinating supply of edge cases and shades of gray.
—Paul Spinrad
Ground Zero
Overlook by the Center for Land Use Interpretation
The Center for Land Use Interpretation occupies a nondescript building along Venice Boulevard in L.A., but its location takes on meaning when you realize that it is next door to, and shares internal walls with, the Museum of Jurassic Technology (read Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, about the museum’s creative take on history and technology, if you haven’t already). CLUI, as it is popularly known, is basically a vast database of the ways that humans alter landscape — an “inventory of examples,” if you will. They discover the abandoned plutonium dump sites, the covert military installations, the whistle-stop tourist attractions, and the towns flooded by reservoirs (one stunning chapter is devoted to “intentionally drowned” towns). A research institution with a whiff of the art collective about it, CLUI holds exhibitions and runs guided tours, but the book opens our eyes to the spaces we ignore and transforms the way we think about them. A love letter to the outwardly drab outposts of civilization, Overlook gives power to the abandoned, the hidden, the unintentionally beautiful, and the just plain weird.
—Arwen O’Reilly
FAVORITE THINGS
As chosen by John Krewson, an editor at The Onion.
Mechanix Gloves Eye protection is great, but Onion writers are conscientious about preserving their typing fingers while planning the next heist. We’ve found comfortable Mechanix gloves deflect impacts, sharp splinters, and hot weld spatter; they also guard against spreading fingerprints around bank vaults. We especially like the Glove Light, with its small but powerful LED flashlight on the back, good for illuminating cramped air ducts or locating loose alarm-panel bolts before they trip the motion sensors.
Dental Tools and Picks You don’t have to be a lock-picking enthusiast to love these incredibly sharp, durable, and, we should stress, legal-to-own items — although we’re not sure it’s ethical to sell them to dentists. We employ them daily in the imprecise fields of “getting gunk off of things” or “cleaning crud out of crannies.” People with bad teeth and bad memories will hate the distinctive sound they make, but there’s no other downside; they’re even cheap.
High-Powered Angle Grinder Anybody can carve their initials in wet cement, but angle grinders let you put your mark on almost anything. Yes, they’re perhaps the most dangerous handheld power tool there is: they make showers of sparks, they throw chunks of your material everywhere, and the discs tend to … well, “explode” is really the only word for worn discs flying apart at 11,000 rpm. Still, nothing’s better to have around when you need to get through a barred window or demount a security door, or when some idiot locks their bike to yours. We love the Milwaukee Electric Tools 6155, but anything with enough amps works just as terrifyingly well.
Ready Welder II As MAKE has noted before, one must know welding to be truly capable. And if one wishes to be suave and debonair as well, one must arrive at a moment’s notice with one’s welder in a ruggedly handsome briefcase, ready to transform an airport shuttle into a fake armored car that’s guaranteed to fool sleepy night watchmen. Therefore, one needs the Ready Welder II, a fairly forgiving MIG setup that can run off batteries, welds thin steel even without gas, and packs neatly away in its own ABS case.
CruzTOOLS Tool Kits Most hobbyists neglect to get the good basic pieces you need to work on everyday machinery like counterfeit printing presses, getaway cars, and the trap doors on elevator ceilings. Instead, they get the $20 all-in-one checkout-line kit featuring tools made from an alloy of sawdust, soda cans, and rat droppings. CruzTOOLS RoadTech tools absolutely don’t break; every tool in the roll is solid and dependable, from the combination wrenches to the flashlight to the lovely, jewel-like ¼-inch palm-sized ratchet.
The Onion (theonion.com) is a weekly humor magazine and front organization for an intrepid team of international thieves.
MAKE LOOKS AT PHOTOGRAPHY
I’ll Be Your Mirror
The SS (Self Shot) Mirror is something I can get behind, er, in front of. It’s a little silver button you can stick on the front of your camera to aid in taking self-portraits, and it’s a steal at $3.45 for three — and you’ll want one for every device.
It’s a very easy installation since it’s just double-sided sticky, and if it gets scratched or you’re bored of it, it’s easy to remove. I compulsively take self-portraits, and though I’ve gotten good at holding the camera at arm’s length with some idea of what’s in the background, this works like a charm to make sure the camera is at a good angle and everyone’s in the photo.
—Andrea Dunlap
Photograph by Michael Simmons
Power Shot
Holga sounds vaguely Eastern European, but it was created as a budget snapshot camera in China. Then a funny thing happened: a dud at home, it became a hit in the West, for its artfully terrible optics and low-tech approachability.
Yes, it’s the Holga, cult favorite of art students and hipsters everywhere. Search Flickr for “Holga” and you’ll quickly see how its signature vignetting and erratic focus bring an atmospheric mystery to ordinary photo subjects. The Holga shoots on big 120 roll film, with most fans choosing the 6×6 square-format setting.
It’s also a great kid’s camera. No pesky shutter speeds to worry about, and if it tumbles down the concrete steps … hey, it’s $20! (It may even work afterwards.) It’s also a subtle way to encourage your future hacker. The Holga’s technical deficiencies invite (er, require) a certain amount of remedial engineering, like fixing the back latches, plugging light leaks, and finding a use for the nonfunctional “sunny” setting. But no worries: the net is overflowing with tips, mods, and other users to give advice. See holgamods.com/mods/mods.html for inspiration.
—Ross Orr
Circular Logic
A circular polarizing filter is a wonderful tool that gives me an amazing amount of control over my photographs, yet most amateur photographers don’t take advantage of one.
It allows me to eliminate or emphasize reflections on a variety of surfaces including glass, water, many plastics, and even skin, just by rotating the filter on the end of my lens. Amazingly, there’s even a band of the sky that can be darkened using the filter without affecting the rest of the scene.
Don’t think: “I guess I can’t get a shot of the circuit board without a distracting reflection.” Get a circular polarizer.
They come in particularly handy when you don’t have much control over the lighting. They’re sold in sizes that will fit on virtually any SLR lens and can be attached to many non-SLR cameras with an adapter.
A circular polarizer will cost two or three times more than a linear polarizer, but linear polarizers have a nasty habit of interfering with the exposure meter and autofocus system in most cameras, so the extra money is well spent.
—Tanner Beck
Have you used something worth keeping in your toolbox? Let us know at [email protected].