We're officially seeking Null Byters on a weekly basis who are willing to take the time to educate the community. Contributors will write tutorials, which will be featured on the Null Byte blog, as well as the front page of WonderHowTo (IF up to par, of course). There is no need to be intimidated if you fear you lack the writing skills. I will edit your drafts if necessary and get them looking top-notch! You can write tutorials on any skill level, and about anything you feel like sharing that...
Having bills to pay is one of the worst parts of life, especially around the holidays. And if you're extremely unlucky, you might also have to pay some hefty medical bills. This can put a heavy damper on plans, wants and needs. What's worse? The people that you owe money to are pushy and always bother you to pay in a more timely fashion, or worse, pay bigger premiums.
Are you having problems because the game was released a long time ago and the more experienced players are better than you? Then you should be very excited to find out that I will be giving you some general tips & tricks about the different classes that I have learned the hard way.
Seeing an aurora in person is one of the most amazing spectacles you could witness in the skies above. But what about the skies below?
Hello, fellow Null Byters. Today, with mixed feelings, I want to let you know that this is my last official post as the admin of Null Byte. I've come to the decision that I need to spend more time focusing on my studies. Over the past 5 months, I have enjoyed building this community and teaching people unorthodox methods of doing things, creating things, and hacking them. But I'm also excited to be delving deeper into the studies that brought me here in the first place.
Erik Demaine is a Professor of Electronic Engineering and Comp Sci at MI, but he is also an origami folder who has had work displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. He makes some beautiful models and intricate puzzles, but in my opinion the really inspirational work is the curved creased models. In Erik's own words describing the above models: "Each piece in this series connects together multiple circular pieces of paper (between two and three full circles) to make a large circular ramp ...
Let's face it. Minecraft probably wouldn't exist today if not for LEGOs. They are fundamentally the same; building objects out of blocks. Only Minecraft has expanded on the idea, creating a world where nearly anything can be made. It's probably even more accurate to say that Minecraft is the digital embodiment of LEGO Mindstorms, thanks to all the working, moveable parts and ingenious in-game engineering that make Minecraft a functional, living world.
Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our advanced tutorials and come play on our free server.
The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been widely used by the military for surveillance and reconnaissance missions—even armed combat. But there are other beneficial applications of an unmanned aircraft, such as search and rescue operations, scientific exploration, locating mineral deposits, transporting goods and even filming bikini models. But drone development can be pretty pricey, unless you just happen to have a 3D printer...
While we're waiting for Google to sort out the mess over suspended Google+ accounts, it's a good reminder that you have the option to download much of your Google+ data with Google Takeout. Google Takeout, created by an internal Google engineering team marketed as the Data Liberation Front, is a free service that provides a handy and easy way to download data from your Google+ stream, your contacts and circles, and other information in a zip file.
Just announced by Google's Senior Vice President of Engineering +Vic Gondotra, Google+ has finally arrived for the iPhone! Many people have been waiting for this for a while, and it seemed like it would be held up forever in Apple purgatory, but now it's available for the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, and the iPhone 4. Support for iPad and other Apple iPhone devices is in the work, so be patient. You can download it directly from the iTunes store.
On the same day that Google launched their new social network, Google +, a team of Google engineers calling themselves the Data Liberation Front announced their first service on Tuesday—Google Takeout, a product that allows users to easily move their data in and out of Google products, including Buzz, Contacts and Circles, Picasa Web Albums, Profile and Stream (the equivalent of Facebook’s newsfeed).
Meet DareDroid: sexy nurse, geek couture and mobile bartender, engineered into an all-in-one technologically advanced garment. Created by fashion designer Anouk Wipprecht, hacker Marius Kintel, and sculptor Jane Tingley, the team calls themselves the Modern Nomads (MoNo), and their series of garments fall into Wipprecht's invented family of "Pseudomorphs". Pseudomorphs are tech-couture pieces that transform into fluid displays—which is exactly what DareDroid does.
As I sit in the office surrounded by creators and great imaginative minds I wonder what can I do to make my project an exciting activity and at the same time how to help the Theater I currently intern at. Well it has occurred to me that I am able to do the thing I love the most: Art. I cannot just sit somewhere and do tons of paperwork because that would be horrid and there is no way I could survive one entire year doing it, but I am good at running activities and events, I am good at teachin...
What do you do when you desperately need to put a parking garage into the bottom floor of your Victorian apartment building, but the city's Department of Planning says "No". The simple and expensive answer: Create an elaborate secret garage door. If you own a pretty building, it is well within the jurisdiction of the Landmark Commission to inform you that even though you own the piece of property, you cannot remodel it any way you want. Seems un-American. But in San Francisco, specifically th...
These magical beans can keep your coffee hot for hours. Not blazing hot, burn your tongue on the first sip, and not disappointingly lukewarm, but coffee fit for every baby bear—just right. Genius.
Matt Reed, a web developer at Nashville interactive ad agency Redpepper, built a massive, real life Facebook Like "button" out of Legos, which lights up whenever someone clicks Like on his Facebook page. The programmer loves LEGOs, and draws an affinity between the legendary building blocks and engineering: "[Legos] are great for prototyping physical objects. I don’t manufacture things, but I do click blocks together. Plus, most things I deal with on a daily basis are pixelized. Legos are som...
Meet Newstweek, a hidden device engineered to hack news items being read at public WiFi hotspots (cafes, libraries, airports, etc.). Both nefarious and tech-saavy, the ingenious mechanism wasn't fathered by a group of web hackers, but rather a pair of Berlin artists, Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev. The duo are interested in exploiting the "trustworthiness" of big media outlets in order to demonstrate the vulnerability of relying on just a few dominant networks.
Eric Jacqmain is one smart cookie. Borrowing from the same principles of Archimedes’ mythological death ray, the Indiana teenager used an ordinary fiberglass satellite dish and about 5,800 3/8" mirror tiles to create a solar weapon with the intensity of 5000x normal daylight. The powerful weapon can "melt steel, vaporize aluminum, boil concrete, turn dirt into lava, and obliterate any organic material in an instant."
Yup, that's right! There is a new larp starting up near me, called Cobalt Nightmares, where the theme is Post Apocalyptic Fantasy. I have to admit, I absolutely adore the Post Apocalyptic genre (especially that awesome Fallout LARP in Poland), and I'm interested to see what happens when it becomes a fantasy game instead of a science fiction game.
How would you like to live like Tarzan, except in a sustainable, organic treehouse? Check out TED Fellow and urban designer Mitchell Joachim and his plan for homes of the future. Read the full article here.
25-year-old Chen Jinmiao of rural China dreamt of one day owning his own Lamborghini. But the truth is, it was highly unlikely he would ever be able to afford one. The lorry driver then undertook an impossibly difficult project- figuring out how to build a replica for considerably less cash. A year and approximately $3,000 later, he achieved his goal.
Another example of outstanding resourcefulness and ingenuity in the medical community (see earlier this week: Blood Sucking Plunger Could Heal Millions).
Bad weekend for Apple, or so the New York Times reports. The top secret version of the next iPhone was mistakenly left in a bar, resulting in a complete breakdown of the yet-to-be released product.
LEGO technic builder Sariel presents a mighty impressive weekend project: a motorized LEGO hand that emulates actual human movement. This feat of plastic engineering runs on a combination of electric motors and pneumatic valves.
With an impressive series of viral music videos to their name, it is no surprise that the latest video from indie rockers OK Go is another hit. The video is directed by James Frost, in collaboration with Syyn Labs, a collective of engineers that work on elaborate art projects. A huge Rube Goldberg machine was built in a warehouse, for a one-take video for the song This Too Shall Pass.
Chemical engineers at Cornell have created a small device that may one day turn troops into real life spider-men. The device would cradle in the palm of the hand, allowing troops to scale walls. It uses an adhesive inspired by the Floridian leaf beetle, an insect that "can adhere to leaves with power 100 times stronger than its own body weight".
An iPhone-controlled drone unveiled at the recently held CES is expected to revolutionize the world of video gaming. Called the AR.Drone (AR stands for augmented reality), this new product will literally bring video games to the streets.
Apple announced today at WWDC that Apple Maps is about to get a lot more detailed with its inclusion of floor plans of shopping malls and airports. This will be a welcomed feature to Maps as users will be able to quickly see which stores the malls have and how to get to them easily. The feature will also allow consumers to know exactly where their gates may be to get to their flights faster, or where to grab coffee. These maps will be created for cities such as Boston, New York Chicago, Hong ...
A smartphone is pretty much useless with a dead battery. When you're out and about, it can be hard to find a place to plug in (if you remembered your charger, that is). But this DIY solar panel backpack made by electrical engineer Theodore Protasiewicz will help you use the scorching sun to your advantage and make sure that your gadgets are always ready to go. Theodore started with just a normal backpack, some solar panels, 18 gauge wire, and a USB port and hacked it into a traveling solar ch...
Incredible. A company called Berry Plastics (in partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) has developed a working bomb proof wallpaper. The technology has the ability to protect against both natural disasters and warfare.
Moving a 2000 pound safe isn't easy... I was working as manager for a construction company that was performing an up fit on a century old building in downtown Concord, N.C. The owners wanted us to move a two thousand pound (that's a ton!) safe up to the second story so that it could be displayed in their new office. The safe was located between the first and second floors in a small office that was used for accounting purposes in the old days when said building had been a hardware store.
Form, function and finesse transform seemingly simple stacked retaining walls into works of art and true engineering marvels. We'll show you how to make “rock stars” out of slabs of stone that hold soil from sliding down slippery slopes. Build a retaining wall.
Deadly natural disasters can happen at any moment— earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, fires and especially tornadoes. That's why you have to be prepared.
Watch this video tutorial to learn how to troubleshoot central heating problems. Step 1:
In 2007, Nintendo introduced the world to motion control video games with the Wii. Microsoft and Sony built on Nintendo's phenomenal success and released their own motion control products for the XBox 360 and Playstation 3 late in 2010: the Kinect and the Move. The Move is basically an improved Wiimote that looks like a sci-fi Harry Potter wand, but the Kinect just might be the most important video game peripheral of all time.
Sputnik, Apollo and the Space Race. If you watched the State of the Union address last night, you probably heard President Barack Obama mention those three things.
Collapse At Hand Ever since the beginning of the financial crisis and quantitative easing, the question has been before us: How can the Federal Reserve maintain zero interest rates for banks and negative real interest rates for savers and bond holders when the US government is adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt every year via its budget deficits? Not long ago the Fed announced that it was going to continue this policy for another 2 or 3 years. Indeed, the Fed is locked into the policy.
Mad Science is looking for more hackers, makers, and DIYers to participate in our community madness. If you've recently designed or made a project, we want to see it! Share with the other Mad Scientists out there by posting up a how-to of your pet project on our community corkboard, or even just a few cool, inspiring photos of the build.
You're probably already impressed at some of the photos amateur astrophotographers can capture with their 16-megapixel digital cameras. I know I am. That's why I'm beefing up my camera skills, so I can also take some amazing pictures of our skies above. But if you can take photos this good with a 16-megapixel camera, imagine what you could do with something a little bigger, say, 3.2 billion pixels! That's a whopping 200 times more pixels!
