Conscious Idea Search Results

How To: Make a Self-Watering Greenhouse

I've been hell-bent on complete self sufficiency for a long time now. There was a point where I was living in a self-sustaining community in the mountains in Colorado, and we had a very large greenhouse there. Dragging the hose around to water plants was a real pain, and that stuck in the back of my mind even after I left the place. It would have been much easier to integrate watering into the frame at construction time than doing that hose dance every day.

News: Making an RPG in 14 Days Is Child's Play for Big Block Games

Big Block Games has a pretty good indie track record. They've spent years developing their fun free-roving space game, Black Market, which is still in Beta. And they've spent just as much time with their much simpler, but fully completed physics platformer, Super Goblin War Machine. Their newest endeavor is called Coffee Break Hero. It sets itself apart from the other games, not so much by the game itself, which has only been in development for four days, but by its unique execution. Big Bloc...

News: Massive 30 Foot Tall Shmup Game 'Rocket Bullet Storm' Hits Hungary

Hungarian developer Nemesys Games is best known for making the lighthearted Fortix series, a pair of casual tower defense variants available on Steam. For their latest project, they've decided to expand their horizons, going beyond downloadable sawbuck games. It's called Rocket Bullet Storm, a chaotic old-school shmup similar to the surprising number of others to come out in the last year. The difference is that this one is huge—30 feet tall—and consumes 250 square meters of floorspace, which...

How To: Download Your Data with Google Takeout

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.

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.

The Getty Museum Presents: How to Make Art from Ye Olden Days

Art Babble is a video network for artists and art lovers alike, launched by a group of curators at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The site is divided into channels, series and partners, with a wide variety of top notch videos from institutions far and wide. The Getty Museum has posted some especially fascinating content, most notably their series on modern artisans and craftsmen demonstrating antiquated art techniques.

News: Oops, New York Times... Why Is Your PayWall So Easy to Hack?

When the New York Times paywall first went up, there was a whole lot of balking. The idea seemed egregious to most, and the digerati's overwhelming conclusion was that the system would fail. But interestingly enough, there is speculation that the NYT is actually experiencing an increase in their print subscriptions, which according to Business Insider founder Henry Blodgett, is due to users feeling less guilt over buying the print media if, after all, the digital version is no longer free.

News: Firing Tank Caught at 18,000 FPS Looks Just As Awesome As It Sounds

It's like the H-bomb. In slo-mo, it's stunning. In real life, it's terrifying. The footage below was uploaded by YouTube user NielsBorg, unfortunately lacking in description, but offers the following information via headline: "T90 shot taken by Photron camera at 18000 fps". The T-90 is a brute of a tank, a third-generation battle vehicle used by the Russian Ground Forces and Naval Infantry. The tank contains an autoloader which can carry 22 ready-to-fire rounds, loadable and ready to go in 5-...

News: World's Smallest 3D Printer Makes Super Tiny Solid Objects

If you liked the idea of cutting duplicate keys from a personal 3D printer, then you might be interested to know that researchers at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria have successfully designed the smallest 3D printer to date. The prototype device is smaller than a shoebox and weighs only 3.3 pounds. It uses stereolithography compared to the RepRap's extruding molten plastic, and it's not a self-replicating machine and costs a bit more, at nearly $1,800 each. But compare that to ...

Contest Idea: How to peel an orange in one piece

Over years of almost-daily orange eating, I have developed a 90% effective workflow for removing the peel from an orange in one piece. While this might not seem important, people who see me do it generally ask about it, so I thought it would be cool if you would illustrate the process for the world. Having a nice hand-drawn set of instructions to frame on my wall would save me time explaining it to people as well.

News: Bat Cave in San Francisco

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...

News: Eee Pad Sells Out on First Day—The Biggest iPad Rival to Date?

The iPad has established itself as "the" tablet computer for gadgeteers on the go. But Google is giving Apple a run for their money as Android tablets improve with each new release. Motorola XOOM and Samsung Galaxy are among the top dogs competing against the iPad, along with another from ASUS, which just became available yesterday in the United States—selling out in mere minutes.

Printable Tactile Astronomy: How to "See" Outer Space if You're Blind

Have you ever felt the desire to reach out and touch a galaxy? Or "feel" those stunning nebulas and planets you see in Hubble photos? As alluring as it sounds, it's safe to say the odds of your whim coming true are nonexistent. You'd have to travel about 6 earth years and spend millions of dollars building your own personal spacecraft to get close enough to actually wave your hand through one of Saturn's rings. But in an attempt to help the blind "see" what they're missing, some semblance of ...

MANsaver: The Life-Saving App for Lazy and Incompetent Romeos

Are you a conventional male in a conventional relationship with a conventional female? The majority of the population aged 25+ would likely answer "yes". According to stereotype, many males seem to "genetically" struggle with what many females seem to "genetically" value: the acknowledgment and appropriate appreciation of relationship milestones. If you've answered in the affirmative, worry no more, because there's an app-to-the-rescue for the helpless male: If you include yourself among the ...

News: The Value and Worth of Daily Positive Affirmations

I've been dealing with emotional difficulty for many years. It started when I had surgery for the epilepsy I was dealing, and quite literally, dying with. Since the surgery on March 28, 1990 I have had no seizures, but I have had plenty of emotional difficulty. Along with that, surviving some traumatic events has added some emotional baggage...in other words struggling...along the way.

How To: Get Rid of All that Space Junk

How about a laser? One that is strong enough to nudge debris out of earth orbit. That's what NASA contractor James Mason wants to do, and his lab simulations suggest that the idea is possible. Mason wants to use a 5kW ground-based laser and a ground-based 1.5 meter telescope to spot potentially hazardous space waste and shove it off, by about 200 meters per day of lasering. It's kind-of like air traffic control for near earth orbit.

How To: Ikea Makes Beautiful (Not Quite HowTo) Cooking Videos

When images of a rumored Ikea cookbook surfaced through the blogger grapevine, foodie and graphic design fetishists alike grew ecstatic. The leaked images from the 140 page coffee-table baking book presented pristinely assembled, OCD patterns of ingredients and the resulting desserts for 30 classic Swedish baking recipes. Forsman & Bodenfors, the Swedish agency behind the project took a different approach to the typical organization of the standard baking cookbook.

News: 3D LEGO LikeLight Shows You Facebook Likes in Real Time

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...

How To: Rig a Gulp Shrimp

Gulp shrimp are hands down the most popular soft plastic lures for saltwater fishing today. There are a few different ways to rig gulp shrimp. They can be rigged weedless, with a regular hook or with a jighead. Using a jighead is the most common way to rig these lures.

News: Making Ordinary Objects Extraordinary

Kevin Van Aelst creates witty visual "one-liners" by recontextualizing everyday, ordinary objects. With a few simple tweaks, the viewer recognizes a roll of tape as the ocean or reads gummi worms as chromosomes or understands mitosis through the use of sweet, sugary donuts.

News: Trade in Your Grill for Japanese LED Teeth

In the far away land of Japan, gold is out, glow-in-the-dark is in. LED "grills" were recently conceived of by two Japanese designers/hackers for a winter advertising event at clothing store Laforet Harajuku. The LED teeth attachments quickly became a hot item. Foreseeably, one of the two designers demonstrating the teeth in the video above is the familiar Daito Manabe (our favorite "self-electrocuting" mad hacker). Manabe's partner, Motoi Ishibashi, came up with the idea when "he saw a video...