I admit it, I'm lucky - I currently live about an hour away from the Fabric District in LA, and was recently just about ten miles down Pico Boulevard from it. So I'm incredibly spoiled - I'm used to being able to find crushed panne velvet for four dollars a yard, or a rich brocade for six dollars a yard. A friend and I once found some faux fur for about fifty dollars a yard - which sounds expensive until I say that the pile was about two and a half inches long, a rich brown color and 60" wide.
Lori Nix's teeny, tiny, incredibly laborious, detail-oriented dioramas are, in a word, insane. We've seen an amazing diorama or two... but these are eerily obsessive. And creepy- all the spaces are depressed, abandoned, and in terrible disrepair.
Here in Los Angeles, there are a plethora of amazing houses precariously perched on the hillsides of Hollywood, Pacific Palisades and Malibu. Striking to look at, the thought "earthquake" is never far from one's mind, however.
Incredibly bizarre, Mika Satomi and Clemens Pichler have designed a pair of DJ hoodies to theatrically visualize a DJ battle. Unfortunately, for me at least, Human Centipede is evoked (damn, I shouldn't have seen that movie).
Crabfu demonstrates how to mod your iPhone with a microscope for just $5 (UPDATE: the $5 microscope from Amazon is now selling it for $12.50... read more). Incredibly simple to make! Check out the sample images taken below the video.
BangShift forum member John Cerone posts an incredibly exhaustive step-by-step guide to rebuilding an American V-8 carburetor.
Hack N Mod offers an incredibly simple cell phone camera mod that delivers striking results. All you need is a lens from an old DVD player and you can magnify your zoom by five times.
Paul Yperman, you've got some competition (see previous entry, Star Wars LEGO Droid Ship). 15-year old Sven Junga's LEGO Stargate diorama (including a Daedalus from Stargate Atlantis) is nothing to shrug about. Incredibly impressive.
Self proclaimed, "The Worlds Fastest Lego Mindstorms RCX Speedcubing Robot", this little guy is built entirely from LEGOs. Apparently the Cubestormer can solve any 3x3x3 Rubik's cube combination in under 12 seconds, and the last single solve in the video happens in just 4:01 seconds!
The Nexus 9 is the hybrid update to the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10. It's in the sweet-spot for great size and portability, and it'll be one of the first devices to natively run Android's new Lollipop update.
Diamond has the highest hardness and thermal conductivity of any bulk material. It's also considered incredibly beautiful and a symbol of live. Here we take a look at how they stack up against their virtual counterparts.
Originally invented by the Shaker community in the 1700s, clothespins are incredibly useful for hanging wet clothing on a clothesline, but also can be used to organize your cable cords, keep your pair of socks together, hold down the used end of your toothpaste tube, and decrease the possibility of you accidentally hammering your finger while pounding down on a nail.
You can brew your own beer on the stove, in a keg, or even inside a pumpkin, but those all look boring next to The Wobbly Boot Pico Brewery, the most sophisticated home-brewing system you'll ever see. Built by Ben_B, an engineer at National Instruments, the brewery sits on a steel frame with two incredibly shiny kegs. There's an LCD touch-panel PC, and Ben even made his own app to make it fully automated. The app lets him save recipes and also monitors the temperature of the beer. It keeps tr...
Warnings THIS STUNT IS INCREDIBLY ENTERTAINING
Young C. Park, retired dentist of Honolulu, Hawaii, has satisfied a life long interest in model airplanes with his meticulous, incredibly detailed models of the Corsair and P-51 Mustang. Pictured below is Young Park's Corsair.
From Wikipedia, "Falconry is is a sport which involves the use of trained raptors (birds of prey) to hunt or pursue game for humans."
Self proclaimed "Paper Airplane Guy", John Collins, is the master of paper crafted flight. Collins hosts workshops for Corporate America, using the paper airplane as a metaphor for success:
Erik at Not-Me.org is a rare spirit. He's committed to helping people protect themselves. His non-profit studio in Massachusetts focuses on training at-risk individuals in self-defense.
Make your potential boss feel incredibly uncomfortable. That's right. Be completely offensive (yet appear earnest.)
BEST PICTURE, ACTRESS, DIRECTOR, FILM EDITING, CINEMATOGRAPHY: I would go to the ballet all the time if it was this cool!
If you're a musician in need of some lessons, there's no better way to learn than with MusicRadar's so-called "Tuition" instructions. Although the title tuition is misleading, this video class is anything but costly, because it's free, right here. Whether you're looking for help with your voice, bass, electric guitar, drums, guitar effects, piano, Logic Pro or production techniques, Music Radar is here to show you the way.
Make Ghanaian Nut Brittle with the Hairy Bikers In this video diary, the Hairy Bikers - David Myers & Simon King - will recreate one of Ghana’s little known secrets: Peanut Brittle.
Chutney is always at hit when eating Indian food. It goes with practically anything. Use it as a naan dip, a samosa sauce, or anything else. You can really put chutneys on anything! See how to make this coconut-ginger chutney recipe.
Well, why aren't you? They're all the rage in pop culture right now, what with The Avengers blowing away audiences and the finale to the Batman trilogy coming out soon. Not to mention that Marvel is remaking Spider-Man! The original is only like, what, less than ten years old? Jeez. Now, I know what you're saying, "But, Henry! Comics are for nerds! We're waaaay cooler than that!"
When you buy computer parts, it can be a tough decision where you want to put all of your hard earned dollars into. Not only that, but when you buy a top of the line component, 3 months later (at most), your hardware will likely be outdated. This puts consumers like us in a bit of a pickle when it comes to purchasing, especially on a tight budget.
In light of this week's Giveaway Tuesdays Photo Challenge, we've posted a thorough guide to experimenting with bokeh photography. Most of the resources require a DSLR camera, and an intermediate understanding of some of the more technical components of photography.
eBooks are an amazing thing, especially with Amazon's Kindle. What's irrtating about eBooks as that you have an infinite selection of books at your fingertips, but they all cost so much! Well, as always, Null Byte has a trick up our sleeves for nabbing free ebooks from Google.
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.
It's best known as a children's toy, but kids aren't the only ones who can appreciate the unique and marvelous properties of Silly Putty. It's an incredibly fun silicone polymer that almost seems like a scientific anomaly, thanks to its viscoelastic non-Newtonian flow. This amazing dilatant fluid can be stretched, torn and mashed back together, as well as bounce and shatter into pieces with a forceful blow.
German photographer Peter Langenhahn's process is incredibly laborious; similar to photographer Lori Nix, he can spend up to three months on a single photograph. But while Nix spends the time constructing elaborate sets, Langenhahn is anchored to the computer, editing.
The Android Megaminxer is mind-bogglingly elaborate, impressively combining multiple geeky mediums to solve an incredibly complex puzzle. ARM, the genius behind the stunt, uses LEGOs (a Mindstorms NXT kit to be exact) to build a robot responsible for the mechanics; they then employ an Android app as the brain, which solves a Rubik's Cube—oh wait, not a simple Rubik's (that would be too easy), but a Megaminx, which is a dodecahedron with 12 faces, each face containing 5 edges. Like the classic...
Outstanding advancements in medicine and super creepy Androids aren't the only jaw-dropping inventions out there. Every once in a while, an incredibly random—and at first glance, seemingly useless—device comes along and strikes a chord of strangely deep satisfaction. Behold, the SWITL, a mysterious goo-scraper robot hand created by factory equipment manufacturer Furukawa Kikou: From what I can glean from a very rough Google translation, it sounds like the SWITL was developed for food producti...
Kudos to student Tim Wheatley, who came up with this incredibly nifty DIY animation using a bicycle wheel, cardboard cut-outs, and wire to create a magical reinvention of the classic zoetrope, Earth's earliest form of animation (it first surfaced in China around 180 AD!). Simply give it a spin, and the animation comes to life. Inspired to make your own? First, learn the basic principles of the zoetrope here or here. Next, take a little advice from Tim to add the "cyclo" element:
Relax, it's not as messy as it sounds. Pee-on-a-stick, at home STD tests may be available in UK pharmacies soon, complete with an incredibly convenient app that would save you a trip to the clinic. It works like this: if you suspect you may have an STD, you would pee on a device which is then inserted into your mobile phone. The app then "diagnoses" your sample and returns results.
White criminal Conrad Zdzierak has committed the ultimate crime of racial stereotyping, plus multiple counts of aggravated robbery after robbing four banks and a CVS pharmacy. The robberies took place on April 9th of this year, but Zdzierak wasn't caught until now, thanks to an incredibly realistic, $650 silicon mask named “The Player”.
George Yoshitake is one of the remaining living cameramen to have photographed the nuclear bomb. His documentation of the military detonation of hundreds of atom bombs from 1956 to 1962 reveals the truly chilling effect of the weapon. Below, images and explanatory captions via the New York Times. Don't miss the melting school bus. Creepy.
Meet YouTube user kittenandtiger, the mysterious Austrian mouse whisperer. Master of mouse training site Mouse Agility, kittenandtiger has had a love for rodents since a very young age:
Not being much of a video game buff, I haven't been in the loop when it comes to the enormously popular game Red Dead Redemption. Apparently the game is completely dominant in video game sales. Since it's May 18 release, over 5 million units have sold, making it the most popular game since Modern Warfare.
So here's a quick updated list of the biggest stars who are injured and will be missing the World Cup. This list would be incredibly longer if we decided to include players who are missing because of not being called up or their respective countries not qualifying (Zlatan anyone?).
Two research teams, in Turkey and Iran, both recently discovered an incredibly rare species of bees. Coined the Osmia (Ozbekosima) avoseta bee, the insects use colorful flower petals to create papier-mache cocoons for their offspring.
