Bag of Beans

This site has some pretty sweet paper craft PDFs you can download and assemble, including this incredible AT-AT. I know what I’m doing for the next little while.

• Link (via Boing Boing)

Check out this gorgeous reproduction of Minesweeper using PixelBlocks.

Completion of the minesweeper sub-project. 38,240 pixelblocks and over 6 feet tall. Bigger than the window!

• PixelProject set on flickr (via MAKE: Blog)

TechBlog has posted a Top 10 list of some pretty crazy contraptions.  Anyone need a USB Floppy Disk Striped RAID?

• Link (via Digg)

Instructables has a new howto on building a miniature trebuchet out of paperclips, for when you declare war on your coworkers.

• Link (via MAKE: Blog)
  

This is a cool optical illusion you can download, print out and construct yourself. The dragon appears to move its head to follow the observer. Check out the video to see the illusion in action. If you put it together yourself, close one eye and move your head around to see the effect. Wild.

How does it work? If we move around when viewing a solid object, our brain knows how the object we are looking at should behave. However the dragon gives us the wrong clues, because we mis-interpret what its shape is. We assume that the nose of the dragon is pointing out towards us, but in fact the dragon’s head is concave.

• Link (via Digg)

Nathan True has hacked together a wireless music player using a Netgear WGT634U wireless router. It might be hard to locate the Netgear router since it has been discontinued, but still a nice hack.

The Mission

When I began this project, I knew I could not settle for anything less than:

• A small, low-power networked music player, which
• Runs Linux, and
• Can connect either wirelessly or wiredly, that
• Supports MP3, OGG, and FLAC at a minimum, and
• Accepts commands remotely from a PC or PDA, in addition to
• Displaying song info such as Artist/Title on a display local to the device.

Andrew Carol is building a Difference Engine that Charles Babbage designed in the 19th century but was never able to complete. And he’s doing it with LEGO.

Before the day of computers and pocket calculators all mathematics was done by hand. Great effort was expended to compose trigonometric and logarithmic tables for navigation, scientific investigation, and engineering purposes.In the mid-19th century, people began to design machines to automate this error prone process. Many machines of various designs were eventually built. The most famous of these machines is the Babbage Difference Engine.

Because of engineering issues as well as political and personal conflict the Babbage Difference engines construction had to wait until 1991 when the Science Museum in London decided to build the Babbage Difference Engine No.2 for an exhibit on the history of computers.

Babbage’s design could evaluate 7th order polynomials to 31 digits of accuracy. I set out to build a working Difference Engine using LEGO parts which could compute 2nd or 3rd order polynomials to 3 or 4 digits.

Sweet looking new watch from Casio. I definitely wouldn’t mind one of these.

Lovin’ the look of the Casio G-Shock MR-G, and it doesn’t hurt that this rendition is even more shock- and scratch-resistant than its predecessors. Featuring a radio-controlled chronograph and solar dial, the case and the band are made of titanium. And the the glass is pure sapphire—making it fairly indestructible. The watch is also waterproof and features a stopwatch, analog/digital time display, automatic power save mode and 24 month run-time on a single charge in power save mode. They go on sale in February of next year and are running in a limited edition of 1,000. Price is about $1,300.