NOT MY HACK BUT COOL: Photo Projecting Ring (almost the coolest jewelry hack EVER)
Found via photojojo:
Inspired by the Stanhope of the 19th century, Luke Jerram designed this Viewmaster-like ring for his wife. It contains tiny slides and a lens for projecting photos of the two!
ADORBS.
Awesome idea!! I’d love to see a tiny LCD stuck in there instead. Then you could project moving images :)
Back in June I came across a post on lifehacker.com featuring this stuff called “Sugru” and posted about how cool this stuff looked. Recently we placed an order and it just arrived today, so I decided to give it a try. Check out Sugru.com to find out the specifics of what Sugru is or just check out the pics below and you should make sense of it just fine.
Sugru comes in 5-gram packets (or “sachets” as they’re called on the official website). Here’s what one looks like:
In the background in the above pic you can see the Kindle 2 cable I decided to test the Sugru on. I hadn’t used my Kindle in a month or two and recently connected it to my MacBook Pro—and as I did, the casing on the cable just beneath each plug had become so brittle it partially shattered.
Here’s what it looks like once you cut it open:
Sugru feels like Play-Doh crossed with Silly Putty—but much more like Play-Doh.
And here’s the Kindle cable once the Sugru has been smeared on:
And here’s the other end of the same Kindle cable:
And here’s my wife’s iPhone cable with the same treatment. Both ends of that cable’s casing had broken, but not as bad as my Kindle cable:
And here’s a before-shot of the other end of my wife’s iPhone cable before I put the Sugru on:
And here’s with the Sugru on:
And finally, I tried it out on a custom Munny toy I’ve been working on for a while, but ran into difficulty on. I cut a hole in his butt for part of the project I no longer want to do, so I thought I’d see how Sugru would do at filling the hole:
UPDATE #1: Here’s a pic of the Munny’s butt before I added the Sugru:
The hacked electronics on the other side of that USB port ended up being to tricky to deal with so I opted to simplify things. Hence, the hole to be plugged…
END UPDATE #1
So, all of the Sugru is curing now and I’ll take more pics tomorrow and post ‘em so you can see how things turned out.
UPDATE #2: The Sugru has cured but I haven’t had time to post new pics, but I will hopefully get to it later today (20100803 ET).
So, after a few months of owning a Kindle 2, I noticed that it was getting a little scuffed up, even though I was wrapping it in a bandanna whenever I’d toss it into my bag to bring it somewhere. So, I decided it needed a cover. I did some browsing on Amazon and quickly discovered that every K2 cover seemed overpriced to me. So, I did what any self-respecting hacker/customizer/DIYer would do and that’s hack together a perfectly reasonable cover from stuff I had laying around.
I also loved the idea of making my Kindle 2 look more like a high school text book than a high tech e-book reader, so I decided it should be made, mostly, from a grocery bag. However, that brown paper feels pretty abrasive to me, so I used a couple of thin sheets of foam I had left over from an unboxing of another cool gadget and added them to the mix.
Have a look at the pics:
Obviously, I added some stickers to dress it up a bit. I had planned to make it look even more high-schooly by drawing on it. But since I’ve decided to give my Kindle 2 to my mom thanks to never using it, myself, (I have too many paperbacks I have yet to read and they take precedence), I’ll be leaving it up to my mom to take the design further if she wants to.
Yep that’s a paperclip that is slipped through a slit in the brown paper cover, itself, so it is never loose (or loseable). The “rope” (paper strand) is just a long, thick strip of brown paper folded in half and then held that way with celo tape (I think I used the glossy Scotch tape because it sticks to the paper better than the transparent kind). The “DISOBEY” sticker comes from fellow-Flickrer Andres Musta. He’s a great artist. Check his stuff out.
Here’s a close up of the edge flap:
And here’s with the edge flap folded back after untying the paper strand:
Here’s the cover open with the Kindle 2’s screen, nav buttons and keyboard exposed:
You can see the foam sheet I folded over and cut so that the screen and keyboard would not have bare grocery-bag-paper rubbing against them when the Kindle 2 was in my bag. I think I folded the foam over twice. Here’s a closer shot of the foam:
Here you can see another type of foam sheeting I used to wrap the Kindle 2 in before slipping it into the brown paper cover:
Here’s the area of the thin foam sheet that I cut away to allow the power switch and the headphone jack to be accessible. It’s a little ghetto looking, but it’s tough foam to cut neatly (or maybe my X-acto blade is finally getting dull?):
And here’s a shot of the exact opposite edge of the Kindle 2—the port for the USB cable and the tiny LED indicator that lights up when the K2 is plugged in:
And here is a shot of the empty brown-paper-case. You can see that I used a Trader Joe’s grocery bag for the project :) and you can see where the paper strand is attached to the cover:
Finally, here’s a close up of the paper strand—I cut two slits, slipped the strand through and then taped it up.
I was pretty happy with how it worked out. So much so that I also made a similar cover for my eee PC 4g netbook. I’ll have to post pics of that at some point.
NOT MINE BUT I WISH IT WAS: iPhone “motion control” (timer control?) tripod
ymrl:
s32:
キッチンタイマーで回すのか！
クララさんに教えないとｗ
My Japanese is not good enough to read what it is, but luckily, the picture is clear enough. Someone took an egg timer, hacked out a chuck of it on top, stuck some foam in there and then slipped his iPhone into the foam. Then, he hits record on his video recording app (or activates his stop-motion photography app) and sets the egg timer for as long as he wants. From there, the top of the egg timer slowly rotates the iPhone, changing its field of view as it goes creating a very stable “motion control” style effect.
I sooooo want to do this!! What a brilliantly simple idea!
Go here or click the pic above for more pics and to see how it was done.
I must learn the Japanese word for jealous…
Last year I first posted about my 1GB Sonic USB Stick, which I had hacked together from a USB thumb drive and a Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver toy, but I had a much more lame name for it. Well, I’ve renamed it (see above) and added some finishing touches to the project, itself, so I thought it would be a good excuse to post about it again, but with more pictures. Check em out:
And now for the howto:
This is how the Sonic USB Stick started out life. It’s a PQi 1GB “Mini I-Stick i810” I picked up from Meritline.com for $14. Get yours here: meritline.com/pqi-1-gb-mini-intelligent-drive.html (they also come in 2GB sizes).
Here’s what it looks like with it’s USB plug open.
Flip this puppy over to access from the bottom end.
I used a Swiss Army knife blade to delicately pry this part off of the main chassis with the hopes of being able to put it back together should my whole project fall apart. (Hey, it’s always a possibility!)
There it is with the bottom part of the frame off and the actual “USB” part of the drive popped out. It came out with almost no effort.
View from above.
Ok, here is the Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver. I picked it up from Amazon for about the same price as the thumbnail drive. Pick up your own Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver here from Amazon: urltea.com/1ivy (Special thanks to my pal Edgyspice for bringing one of these back from the UK for me so I could confidently screw this project up and still have a spare ^_^)
Here it is with the cap off. That ballpoint pen nub is swappable with with a marker nub that writes with ink that only shows up under ultraviolet light—the same light that is produced by the other end of the Sonic Screwdriver. However, this is where we’ll be putting the thumbnail drive.
Got Dremel? I think that’s how you spell it. Anyway, so, don’t cut straight through this thing unless you want ink all over you. The plastic is thicker than it looks, but it’s pretty easy to just pick away at it while rotating the Sonic Screwdriver every so often. Also remember to wear safety goggles—little bits of plastic flew everywhere once I dug in.
See? The pen inside is pretty long and would have made a mess if cut straight through by the dremel tool. Dramel? Dremal? Dremmel? Drill-type thing?
OK, here it is all done. Looks just like it did in the beginning, huh? Well, aside from the little bits of plastic everywhere.
Here it is with the USB plug exposed. Sorry, stupidly forgot to take a picture of me dremeling (??) a hole for the thumbnail drive to fit in. I’ve got a close up later, however.
Here’s a closer shot of the USB plug. Looks pretty sweet from this angle, huh?
Here’s the Sonic USB stick plugged into my MacBook. The MB reads it fine, BTW.
Here’s a different angle on the plugged in SUS.
Here’s the promised close up shot on the USB nub. I dremeled down quite a bit of the pen nub to make it look as good as it does. Sadly, it’s still a bit messy for my tastes, but not bad for less than an hour’s work. Over all, I’m quite happy with it. I decided to use JB Weld to fill in this ugly space and make it look nicer.
So, this was the eventual solution to the rough look of the hole the USB plug was sticking out of. JB Weld. It looks great from this angle, but not so much on the flip side.
As you can see, this came out a bit more messy than the other side. Ah well. :\
If you can see in there, using an X-acto blade, I carved a slot for the USB plug to fit. Then I added some wall-tack which helps the nub-cap stay on a bit better.
So, that’s it! Now you, too can have your own 1GB Sonic USB Stick!! Sweet!!
(reposted from my old blog.)
