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How To: Make Icosahedral Planet Ornaments

In honor of the new Astronomy World, I thought we should look at a few planetary icosahedrons. The icosahedron is the most round of the Platonic solids with twenty faces, thus has the smallest dihedral angles. This allows it to unfold into a flat map with a reasonably acceptable amount of distortion. In fact, Buckminster Fuller tried to popularize the polyhedral globe/map concept with his Dymaxion Map.

News: The 5 Best iPhone/iPad Apps for Exporting and Importing Your Photos

With so many wireless iOS networking apps for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch available, there’s very little reason to connect any of these devices to iTunes, except to update the software. Besides, importing and exporting photos using iTunes has never been one of the best features of Apple‘s mobile device process. Let me introduce you to 5 useful apps for importing and exporting photos to and from your iOS device(s).

How To: It's How You Play The Game

"Life is difficult." That's how Scott Peck's best-selling book, "The Road Less Travelled", begins. That life is difficult is not news. Over two-thousand years ago the Buddha said it too: Life is suffering. The sanskrit word the Buddha used for suffering is dukkha. Dukkha doesn't refer to physical pain, necessarily. It refers to something more akin to our English word 'dissatisfaction'. Adages abound in our language which attest to the universality of dissatisfaction in our daily lives. "The g...

Modular Origami: How to Make a Cube, Octahedron & Icosahedron from Sonobe Units

Modular origami is a technique that can be used to build some pretty interesting and impressive models of mathematical objects. In modular origami, you combine multiple units folded from single pieces of paper into more complicated forms. The Sonobe unit is a simple example unit from modular origami that is both easy to fold and compatible for constructing a large variety of models. Below are a few models that are easy to make using this unit.

How To: Make a gumpaste plumeria flower for cake decorating

In this tutorial, we learn how to make a gumpaste plumeria flower for cake decorating. These come in different flowers, so you can combine a lot of different colors to make beautiful flowers. First, grab the gum paste and then roll it out. From here, use a cookie cutter in a leaf shape to cut leaves out of it. Then, take your toothpick and roll one edge to make it curved like a real flower. Then, take the petals and add color to the middle and the outsides of them. Connect them together with ...

HowTo: Protect Yourself on Public Wi-Fi Networks

Life is getting more and more convenient. You can pick up a wireless signal at nearly any coffee shop these days (Starbucks is now officially free in every location across the nation), as well as airports, libraries, hotels and more. However, along with this convenience comes the risk of security breach. Passwords. Emails. Account numbers.

News: Flipper Bridge

These Dutch architects fear that those Chinese drivers might get confused! You may think I'm making a cheap joke about Chinese drivers. But I'm not. The Hong Kong-Zhuai-Macau bridge is a 31-mile, $10.7 billion project and this unique design is meant to address a clash of two driving conventions.

News: 2 New LEGO Great Ball Contraptions (GBC)

The concept stems from aRube-Goldberg style contraption, only it is done with Legos. Each module of the the contraption is built so it can connect another. Below is an example of one module and then several connected together. How complicated a way can you transfer Lego soccer balls from basket to another? Can you do it with or without an RCX controller? Its known in LEGO circles as the GBC . The homepage for this HD version.

News: Hide Your Secret Stash with a Completely Invisible Redstone Trigger

Are you looking to hide your chests in a not-so-conspicuous way, but don't know where to start? Do you want to finally have that safe and sacred place to store your diamonds, cake and beloved treasures? This tutorial incorporates this previous week's challenge on transforming houses. If you weren't able to participate in last week's challenge, you will still be able to get a feel for what everyone did!

How To: Build a Simple Redstone Adding Machine in Minecraft

Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our advanced tutorials and come play on our free server. There are many amazing redstone builds, but probably the pinnacle of redstone technology is the redstone calculator. The ability to turn simple game mechanics into a real-life calculator is one of genius, pioneered by some very clever Minecrafters many months ago.

News: Lightweight Programs You Should Use for a Faster Linux

Some people are what is labeled a power user. I am one of these people. No matter how fast I get my system, or how quick of programs I have, it is never good enough. There is always at least one program that I could swap out for a more advanced, text-based counterpart that increases performance just a bit. Luckily, you don't have to use text-based programs without graphical user interfaces to get blazing fast speeds on Linux. There are tons of open source alternatives to the mainstream progra...

How To: Detect Facebook Spam

Spam is everywhere and Facebook is no exception. In fact, spammers are constantly stepping up their game by tricking unsuspecting Facebook users to participate in quizzes, games, apps, or "new features" that are actually dangerous computer viruses, spyware, or other trojan horses in disguise. Their attempts even trick people into unknowingly becoming spammers themselves.

How To: Use Google Voice to Prank Your Friends on April Fool's Day

In this article, I'll show you how to prank your friends on April Fool's Day with the very popular Google Voice, a computer to land/mobile calling feature. Basically, Google allows you to play whatever you like through the microphone port on your computer, and play it right through to your victim's phone. Whether it's Rick Astley ("Never Gonna Give You Up") or a text-to-speech application, general hilarity always follows.

How To: Build Your Own "Pogo Mo Thoin" to Flash Any Xbox 360 DVD Drive for Under $5

The biggest struggle with flashing DVD drives on Xbox 360s has been the price tag of the probe to extract keys on some drives. The probe and kit is required to extract the DVD key, which is needed to perform a drive repair, flash, or backup of any kind. Who wants to pay big bucks for the "pro" kit and then get added to a huge waiting list behind a million other people looking to buy the same product? We can hack the same thing together at home!

News: Mathematical Quilting

I got hooked on origami sometime after Math Craft admin Cory Poole posted instructions for creating modular origami, but I had to take a break to finish a quilt I've been working on for a while now. It's my first quilt, and very simple in its construction (straight up squares, that's about it), but it got me thinking about the simple geometry and how far you could take the design to reflect complex geometries. Below are a few cool examples I found online.

How To: Make a Programmable Piano in Minecraft

There are many impressive accomplishments in Minecraft, too many to name in fact. Sprawling builds, complex machines, and massive servers are the hallmark of Minecraft and things keep getting bigger and better. No one doubts the epic scale Minecraft has reached, but every once in a while something grand comes along that sets a new benchmark in awesomeness. By far the most recent step in this long line of big ideas was an innovation pushed forward by YouTube user Kimundi2. The premise of this ...

News: The Top 32 Authors to Follow on Google+

Google+ isn't filled with just Google workers and tech-obsessed nerds. Many creative people are part of the community, and they're using Google+ to connect with their fans. Authors, especially, love talking to people about their work. We've rounded up the best published authors for you to follow on Google+. We've listed their best known works so that you can get an idea of the topics they write about.