Now this is impressive: It's called the Atlas of True Names, and it reveals the etymological origins and translations of familiar place names whose original meanings we've mostly forgotten. Looking at it, you'd think North America was some sort of fantasy novel.
    
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An international research team has produced the first-ever ultra-high resolution 3D digital reconstruction of a complete human brain. At the astonishingly low resolution of 20-microns, the new scans are providing an unprecedented glimpse into the inner workings of the mind.
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This gentleman is Jeffrey Allen Jones, 56, who was arrested in Sacramento this week for assault with a deadly weapon. He allegedly thew a spear at a passing car. (Sacramento Bee)
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The Art of Manliness has reprinted "37 Conversation Rules for Gentlemen" from a 1875 book entitled, A Gentleman’s Guide to Etiquette by Cecil B. Hartley. The rules are still valid!
33. When asking questions about persons who are not known to you, in a drawing-room, avoid using adjectives; or you may enquire of a mother, “Who is that awkward, ugly girl?” and be answered, “Sir, that is my daughter.”
37 Conversation Rules for Gentlemen
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In last week's MacGyver Challenge, we asked you to hack something using heat shrink tubing. We received some great entries, but the winning hack shows us how to keep those jangling keys silent.
Check out the description of the winning entry below and read about some of our other favorite entries.
Sick of the sound of jangling keys and dog tags, Profound found a clever way to silence them. He fits a piece of heat shrink tubing over the head of the key, heats to shrink, and then trims off the edges. Though you could use the many colors of heat shrink tubing available to color-code keys, we kind of like the transparent look—especially for things like dog tags that you still need to be able to read. Sure beats wrapping them in duct tape!
We got a lot of great entries and we'd be remiss if we didn't share some of our favorites. Here are some of the entries that really impressed us.
Bbaks used heat shrink tubing to create a clever solution to tangled headphone cords. By sectioning off the cables with the stiffer tubing, he created a cable that folds up accordion-style and never gets tangled up. He adds that the solution works best with the thicker cord you find on over-the-ear headphones. When he tried the same trick with the thin cord on a pair of earbuds, the tangling problem actually got worse.
FidesOnus uses a Helping Hand clamp tool to hold parts in position while he works. He found that the bare metal of the clamp often caused damage to delicate components like printed circuit boards. His solution? A bit of heat shrink tubing applied to the tips of the clamps protects those components while retaining full gripping ability.
A big thanks to everyone who took the time to send us entries! Be sure to check back every week for a new challenge.
The mysterious comings and goings of our feline friends just got a little less mysterious. Researchers at the Royal Veterinary College loaded a group of cats in Shamley Green, Surrey, with cameras and GPS trackers to figure out how roaming house cats spend their days.
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The existence of our solar system's innermost planet has been common knowledge since ancient times, but that doesn't actually mean we've always know much about it. Mercury's proximity to the Sun has allowed it to jealously guard its secrets, and so this NASA video offers an unprecedentedly detailed view of the planet's surface.
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One of the best tricks I’ve learned to improve my likelihood of sticking to a habit is so simple it’s sinful.
Stop thinking of a new habit as something you have to do, but as something you are allowed to do.
Let’s say you’re starting a workout. Many people think, “OK, I gotta do this. It’s good for me, I’m way too lazy, I need to burn off my fat, if I do this I’ll feel better about myself.” This is wrong, because then the workout is a chore you have to get through to get the benefits, and so you struggle through this boring, hard, sucky thing in order to get to the goal.
Instead, you can simply think, “I’m allowing myself to do this. It’s a treat.”
And it is. A workout can be a lovely thing, where you feel your body moving, you push against the forces of gravity, you triumph despite the difficulty, you get fresh air and gorgeous nature and you are treating your body and being good to it. This is a rare treat.
Once you shift from “have to” to “allowed to”, you now feel good about the activity. It’s not a chore, but a treat. It’s not something you struggle through to get the benefit — it is the benefit.
Some days...some days it's frustrating to be on the web. We're compiling C++ into JavaScript and running Unreal in the browser but at the same time, here in 2013, we're still making the same mistakes. And by we, I mean, the set of web developers who aren't us, right Dear Reader? Because surely you're not doing any of these things. ;)
All of these are solvable problems. They aren't technically hard, or even technically interesting. I consider these "will-required" problems. You need the knowledge that it's wrong and the will to fix it. As users - and web developers - we need to complain to the right people and help fix it.
Google has decided that the practice of taking perfectly good deep links like foo.com/something/deep, detecting a mobile device, then redirecting to m.foo.com is user-hostile. In fact, the GoogleBot is going to declare these "faulty redirects" and ding sites in the search result ranking. Stated simply:
Avoiding irrelevant redirects is very easy: Simply redirect smartphone users from a desktop page to its equivalent smartphone-optimized page. If the content doesn't exist in a smartphone-friendly format, showing the desktop content is better than redirecting to an irrelevant page.
For example, if I want to go to the http://www.mcmenamins.com/Pubs page, but I do it on mobile, they ALWAYS redirect me to /mobile. Always. Even though I have a quad-processor pocket supercomputer with gigs of space I've still surfing a second-class internet.
That means you Quora. I am in my browser, unless I'm going to the App Store, let's assume if I'm in the browser, I want to be on the web.
I'm looking at you, Forbes.com. I GET IT. YOU HAVE ADS.
Stay classy.
I hate seeing a checkbox and only being able to click on that exact checkbox.
<p>Which fruit would you like for lunch?</p>
<form>
<input type="radio" name="fruit" id="banana" />
<label for="banana">Banana</label>
<input type="radio" name="fruit" id="None" />
<label for="none">None</label>
</form>
It's so easy to just associate a label with an input. Please do it, then we can all have something larger to click on.
We're still doing this. Haven't we learned that Cool URIs Don't Change? It was true in 1998 when that was written and it's true now. The web as we know it was created in 1990 and made truly open in 1993 and the link to the First Web Page (yes, Capital Letters) is still http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. I love that they've done the work to keep that link alive.
There's just no excuse for this. With .htaccess files and web.config files, maintain a list of redirects and do your best to test them. Maintaining deep and complex links can be complex, but if you're companyname.com/about link dies because you switch from PHP to Rails, there's just no excuse for that. I'm your User and I have always typed /about. Don't' give me a To Do like "Update your bookmarks!" I didn't come here for a To-Do, I came her for your damn about page. YOU figure it out.
I've often been asked to "select my language" from a list of country flags, and ended up clicking on the Union Jack to represent "English." I'm sure the actual English don't appreciate an American declaring they speak English. ;)
but I know I'm not the only one who realizes that a Flag is a lousy representation of a language, especially since your browser is announcing what languages you speak with every web request.
Accept:text/html
Accept-Encoding:gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language:en-US,en;q=0.8
There can be a whole list of languages in the Accept-Language header, in the order the user prefers them! Use that data, it's there for you to use.
For folks living in the states, we're always asked to enter our postal code (ZIP code) and our city and state, even though there are dozens of great APIs and Databases that can give you that information.
The meta-point is this: If you can reliably determine something from the user (language, location, country, preference) without invading their privacy, do it! Save them a little time!
Perhaps take a moment and remind your boss that the 6 megapixel photo that he or she took with their new Canon EOS is not a good background image for your corporate site...especially if it's a 4 megabyte JPGs.
Oh, that's OK, we can just <img src="bigassfile.jpg" width="100" height="100"> and that will make it smaller. No, that just downloads the giant file and then makes your browser do the work to resize it on the client.
Resize first, and squish often. Also run all your PNGs through PNGGauntlet or PNGOut.
If you've got example.com/something AND www.example.com/something both serving up the same content, consider "canonicalizing" your URLs. You can do this with rel="canonical" in your META tags, but that only hides the problems and makes the Googlebot happy. Instead, why not PICK ONE and serve a 301 redirect to the other? Did you know that there are rules built into IIS7 that will set this up for you? You can even remove your .aspx extension if that makes you happy. You can do it!
The same is true if you do the same thing for / and /default.html. Pick one if you can, and redirect the other.
<system.webServer>
<rewrite>
<rules>
<rule name="CanonicalHostNameRule1" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="(.*)" />
<conditions>
<add input="{HTTP_HOST}" matchType="Pattern" pattern="^hanselman\.com$" ignoreCase="true" negate="false" />
</conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="http://www.hanselman.com/{R:1}" redirectType="Found" />
</rule>
<match url="blog/default.aspx" />
<action type="Redirect" url="blog/" redirectType="Found" />
</rule>
<rules>
<rewrite>
<system.webServer>
What are some great examples that you think Break The Internet...but that are easily fixed if we have the will?
Sponsor: Big thanks to RedGate for sponsoring the feed this week! Check out Deployment Manager – app deployment without the stress. Deploy .NET code & SQL Server databases in one simple processfrom a web-based UI. Works with local, remote and cloud servers. Try it free.
Photo: Xeni Jardin
"This is the rehearsal, right?" Thom Yorke teased the audience last night inside Club Fais Do Do, renamed for the evening "Club Amok" for a surprise/secret Atoms For Peace performance. "You were the lucky ones who got tickets."
Amok is the title of the new Atoms For Peace album, released in February, and many inside the club got their tickets free from local record shops after buying the record.
I was one of the lucky ones who got in. And man, if this was only a rehearsal, those of you who catch them on their forthcoming world tour which kicks off in Paris on July 6 are fortunate souls indeed.
The performance swayed between trance-y, ethereal, hypnotic grooves and taut, muscular jams; afrobeat-inspired droning rhythm meets electroglitch meets merciless funk. An epiphany I had halfway through the set: "Flea" is an anagram for "Fela."
The show location was secret until late Friday afternoon, and was then revealed to be the 80something-year-old West Adams district building where jazz greats like John Coltrane once played in the 1960s.
The building's brick walls were covered in "Club Amok" flyers, featuring Stanley Donwood's artwork.
Radiohead's Thom Yorke is Atoms for Peace's frontman, and played guitar and piano; the band features Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers) on bass, Radiohead superproducer Nigel Godrich on keyboards, Joey Waronker on drums (Elliott Smith, Beck, REM), and Brazilian percussionist Mauro Refosco (who often tours with RHCP) rocking a bunch of awesome instruments I can't identify (well, one was an electric berimbau).
It may be full of stars, but don't call Atoms For Peace a "supergroup"—or Yorke might "knock your fucking teeth out."
Photo: Xeni Jardin
Writing about music is hard and it's a beautiful sunny Saturday afternoon at the beach in Los Angeles, so I'll link to others' work instead this time: LA Weekly, Rolling Stone, and the Los Angeles Times all had reviewers and photogs at the surprise gig last night. Here's a set list, at LA Weekly.
The final encore included one of my favorite Yorke compositions, "Rabbit in Your Headlights," from the late-1990s UNKLE compilation. Ever seen the Jonathan Glazer video? And you know how certain songs become anthems for certain moments in your life, and take on new meaning? The track was on my "chemo" playlist during infusions, and I remember lying back in the La-Z-Boy from hell, nodding out on the spoken-word interlude.
During the second encore, Yorke soloed an acoustic version of "The Present Tense."
Some (some assholes) in the crowd continued to talk among themselves. Yorke stopped playing.
"Who the fuck is talking?," he demanded to know. "Did you come here just to show up? You can fucking talk when I'm done."
They shut up, and he continued, and it was beautiful.
I agree with Rolling Stone's Steve Appleford: "It was a reasonable question on a night of concentrated beats and passion delivered gratis from a team of sound scientists who were there to be heard and don’t know how to make background music."
Among the attendees who were there to listen: Yorke's sometimes-collaborator Flying Lotus, DJ/multi-instrumentalist Madlib, and The Gaslamp Killer, who performed a smoking turntable set after Atoms for Peace. If you ever have an opportunity to see him live, do it.
There's lots of candid short video on the Atoms for Peace YouTube channel. Nigel Godrich's Vine account is cool to follow, too.
Don't miss Godrich and Yorke's recent set on LA radio station KCRW, during which they debuted new material.
tl;dr: Buy the record, see the tour.
(Inset photo above from Atoms for Peace show: Timothy Norris, LA Weekly)
Photo: Xeni Jardin
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I didn’t know what I was going to write about today. When this happens, normally I grab a coffee to help get the ideas flowing, but for the last few days in Montreal, no one’s been allowed to drink the water due to a bacteria leakage. This also means: no coffee. So instead, I grabbed the next best thing to help me get going: a beer.
This got me wondering about coffee and beer and which one would actually help me be more creative and get work done. Hopefully, what I found out will help you decide when it’s best to have that triple shot of espresso or an ice cold brew.
From a scientific perspective, creativity is your ability to think of something original from connections made between pre-existing ideas in your brain. These connections are controlled by chemicals called neurotransmitters. One of these neurotransmitters is adenosine, which alerts your brain when you’re running out of energy and reacts by slowing down the connections made between neurons by binding to adenosine receptors.
Adenosine is kind of like your brain’s battery status monitor. Once your energy levels get low, adenosine starts to slow your brain function down. This is why after a few hours of intense work, you begin to feel tired, like your brain has run out of juice. The only way to recharge it is to take a break, unless you’ve got a secret weapon handy.
Every coffee drinker is familiar with the feeling after drinking a fresh cup of java. I know after I’ve had a latte or espresso, I feel more focused. If I’m having a conversation with someone, words seem to flow without pauses, ums, or ahs. If I’m writing, my fingers never stop typing. This happens because caffeine blocks adenosine receptors, preventing adenosine from binding to it’s receptors and tricking your brain into thinking you have lots of energy. (Check out The Oatmeal's comic illustration of what caffeine does when it makes it to your brain.)
This effect happens within just five minutes of drinking your coffee. When adenosine receptors are blocked, chemicals that increase the performance of your neural activity—like glucose, dopamine, and glutamate—are allowed to work overtime. So while you may feel that coffee is giving you more energy, it’s simply telling your body that your energy reserves are good to go even when they’re long gone.
The peak effect of caffeine on your body happens between 15 minutes and two hours after you consume it. When caffeine from coffee enters your bloodstream, you become more alert from an increase in the production of the hormones adrenaline and cortisol. The problem is: if this over-stimulation of adrenaline and cortisol occurs too regularly, your adrenal glands— which absorb adrenaline to help make you feel energized—gradually begin to require more adrenaline to give you the same "pick-me-up" feeling as before.
When researchers at Johns Hopkins University looked at low to moderate coffee drinkers (as little as one 14-ounce mug per day), they found that even this little amount of coffee can cause your body to develop a tolerance to caffeine (and require more of it to get the same stimulation). Just like the thrill of lighting a bottle rocket and watching it explode all within a few seconds, the good feelings associated with coffee are short-lived, and pretty soon you need another hit to feel good again.
While caffeine pulls a number on your brain to make you feel like you have more energy, alcohol has it’s own way of influencing your creativity. After you’ve had a couple beers, drinking makes you less focused as it decreases your working memory, and you begin to care less about what’s happening around you. But as researchers at the University of Chicago discovered, this can be a good thing for creativity’s sake.
The researchers devised a game where 40 men were given three words and told to come up with a fourth that could make a two-word combination with all three words. For example, the word “pit” works with “arm”, “peach”, and “tar”:
Half of the men drank two pints of beer before playing the game, while the other half drank nothing. The results showed that men who drank solved 40 percent more of the problems than sober men. It was concluded that a blood alcohol level of 0.07 (about two drinks) made the participants better at creative problem-solving tasks, but not necessarily working memory tasks where they had to pay attention to things happening in their surroundings (like driving a car).
By reducing your ability to pay attention to the world around you, alcohol frees up your brain to think more creatively. It looks like author Ernest Hemingway was on to something when he said:
When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?
In an interesting study on the topic of alcohol and its effects on creativity, author Dave Birss brought together a group of 18 advertising creative directors and split them into two teams based on their amount of career experience. One team was allowed to drink as much alcohol as they wanted while the other team had to stay sober. The groups were given a brief and had to come up with as many ideas as they could in three hours. These ideas were then graded by a collection of top creative directors.
The result? The team of drinkers not only produced the most ideas, but also came up with four of the top five best ideas. While alcohol may not be the drink of choice when you need to be alert and focused on what’s going on around you, it seems that a couple drinks can be helpful when you need to come up with new ideas.
Both coffee and beer (in moderation) have shown to be helpful when you’re working on certain types of tasks; however, you shouldn’t drink either when you need to do detail-oriented or analytical projects like your finances. The increase in adrenaline from caffeine and the inhibition of your working memory from alcohol will make you more prone to make mistakes.
The best time to have a beer (or two) would be when you’re searching for an initial idea. Because alcohol helps decrease your working memory (making you feel relaxed and less worried about what’s going on around you), you’ll have more brain power dedicated to making deeper connections.
Neuroscientists have studied the “eureka moment” and found that in order to produce moments of insight, you need to feel relaxed so that front brain thinking (obvious connections) can move to the back of the brain (where unique, lateral connections are made) and activate the anterior superior temporal gyrus, a small spot above your right ear responsible for moments of insight:
Researchers found that about five seconds before you have a "eureka moment" there is a large increase in alpha waves that activates the anterior superior temporal gyrus. These alpha waves are associated with relaxation—which explains why you often get ideas while you’re on a walk, in the shower, or on the toilet.
Alcohol is a substance that relaxes you, so it produces a similar effect on alpha waves and helping us reach creative insights. Coffee doesn’t necessarily help you access more creative parts of your brain like a couple pints of beer.
If you’ve already got an idea or an outline of where you want to go with your project, a cup of coffee would do wonders compared to having a beer to execute on your idea. The general consensus across caffeine studies is that it can increase quality and performance if the task you are doing seems easy and doesn’t require too much abstract thinking. In other words, after you have an initial idea or a plan laid out, a cup of coffee can help you execute and follow through on your concept faster without compromising quality.
Quick tip: If you drink coffee, do so before noon so it doesn’t affect your sleep. On average, it will take 5-10 hours for the caffeine from a cup of coffee to be removed from your system, and messing up your sleep cycle can have a negative impact on your creative output for days to come.
If you decide to drink coffee and beer while you’re working, you should stick to no more than two cups of coffee or a couple of beers per sitting, and try to do this no more than once or twice per week. Coffee and beer shouldn’t be thought of as magic bullets for creativity. They are ways to create chemical changes that occur naturally in your brain with a healthy lifestyle. (Quality sleep patterns and allowing yourself to take breaks by splitting your day into sprints will do the same trick.)
But, if you have to choose between coffee or beer, think about what type of task you are about to do and make sure you don’t over-drink. Too much of either and you’ll lose the benefits of both.
Coffee vs. beer: Which drink makes you more creative? | Ooomf
Mikael Cho is the co-founder of ooomf, a creative marketplace connecting mobile & web projects with vetted, first class developers and designers from around the world. Mikael writes more posts on psychology, startups, and product marketing over on the ooomf blog. Find him on Twitter @mikaelcho.
Illustration by Tina Mailhot-Roberge.
Want to see your work on Lifehacker? Email Tessa.
Senator Elizabeth Warren has written an open letter to Michael Froma, the nominee to run the US Trade Representative's office, calling on him to release the text and negotiating documents for the secretive, controversial Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), whose sweeping and brutal copyright provisions make it clear that this is the next attempt to pass SOPA and ACTA -- the US law and international treaty that flamed out in 2012.
“I appreciate the willingness of the USTR to make various documents available for review by members of Congress, but I do not believe that is a substitute for more robust public transparency,” Warren wrote to Froman, who is now an assistant to the president. “If transparency would lead to widespread public opposition to a trade agreement, then that trade agreement should not be the policy of the United States.”
Senator Warren Presses White House to Release Pacific Trade Text [Mark Drajem/BusinessWeek] (via Reddit) 
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Now in its fourth revision, this remains the best guide for learning how to draw. I used it with my son, and his progress was remarkable. It has also helped my own drawing skills. I actually looked forward to the exercises which are brilliant and fun. In order to draw you must learn to see, and that’s what this book teaches: how to perceive. Because this perception training relies on strengthening right brain activity, it can be transferred to any kind of creative work. In each edition over the past 30 years, the author has widened the skills she is teaching, so that this current version will improve your perception skills — essential for any kind of innovation — whether or not you ever sketch. And still, it remains the best teacher for anyone — yes, anyone! — learning to how to draw.
-- KK
[Count me as another fan of this book. Like Kevin says, it teaches you to see things as they are. Instead of looking at a tree and thinking "this is a tree," you look at its shapes (and how they relate to each other) and its shading. -- Mark]
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
Betty Edwards
2012, 320 pages
$13
Available from Amazon
Sample Excerpts:
A caution: as all of our students discover, sooner or later, the left hemisphere is the Great Saboteur of endeavors in art. When you draw, it will be set aside–left out of the game. Therefore, it will find endless reasons for you not to draw: you need to go to the market, balance your checkbook, phone your mother, plan your vacation, or do that work you brought home from the office.
What is the strategy to combat that? The same strategy. Present your brain with a job that your left hemisphere will turn down. Copy an upside-down photograph, regard a negative space and draw it, or simply start drawing. Jogging, meditation, games, music, cooking, gardening–countless activities also produce a cognitive shift. The left hemisphere will drop out, again tricked out of its dominance. And oddly, given the great power and force of the left hemisphere, it can be tricked over and over with the same tricks.
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Drawing is a curious process, so intertwined with seeing the that the two can hardly be separated. The ability to draw depends on one’s ability to see the way an artist sees. This kind of seeing, for most people, requires teaching, because the artist’s way of seeing is very specific and very different from the ways we ordinarily use vision to navigate our lives.
Because of this unusual requirement, teaching someone to draw has some special problems. It is very much like teaching someone to ride a bicycle: both skills are difficult to explain in words.
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Drawing as a learning, teachable skill
I firmly believe that given good instruction, drawing is a skill that can be learned by every normal person with average eyesight and average hand-eye coordination. Someone with sufficient ability, for example, to sign a receipt or to type out an e-mail or text message can learn to draw.
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These pre-existing skills have nothing to do with potential to draw well. What the pre-instructions drawings represent is the age at which the person last drew, often coinciding with the age at which the person gave up trying to draw.
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To draw the Picasso upside down, move from line to adjacent line, space to adjacent shape and work your way through the drawing.
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Ideally (in my view), learning in art should proceed as follows: the perception of edges (line) leads to the perception of shapes (negative spaces and positive shapes), drawn in correct proportion and perspective (sighting). These skills lead to the perception of values (light logic), which leads to the perception of colors as values, which leads to painting.
Copyright scholars have long been pretty certain that "Happy Birthday to You" is in the public domain, despite the fact that Warner/Chappell claims copyright on it and charges impressive licensing fees to use it in public performances. Those fees, however, are much lower than a copyright lawsuit would be, so everyone shrugs and pays them. Until now.
A documentary film company working on a movie about "Happy Birthday" has assembled a huge body of evidence showing that the song has been in the public domain since the 1920s, and is suing Warner to get them to return the hundreds of millions they've improperly charged in licensing since. This is gonna be great.
The full lawsuit, embedded below, goes through a detailed history of the song and any possible copyright claims around it. It covers the basic history of "Good Morning to You," but also notes that the "happy birthday" lyrics appeared by 1901 at the latest, citing a January 1901 edition of Inland Educator and Indiana School Journal which describes children singing a song called "happy birthday to you." They also point to a 1907 book that uses a similar structure for a song called "good-bye to you" which also notes that you can sing "happy birthday to you" using the same music. In 1911, the full "lyrics" to Happy Birthday to You were published, with a notation that it's "sung to the same tune as 'Good Morning.'" There's much more in the history basically showing that the eventual copyright that Warner/Chappell holds is almost entirely unrelated to the song Happy Birthday to You.
The detail in the filing is impressive, and I can't wait to see how Warner/Chappell replies. As the filing notes, there are a variety of copyright claims around the song, but all are invalid or expired, and the very, very narrow copyright that Warner/Chappell might hold is not on the song itself. In other words, Warner/Chappell is almost certainly guilty of massive copyfraud -- perhaps the most massive in history -- in claiming a copyright it clearly has no right to.
Lawsuit Filed To Prove Happy Birthday Is In The Public Domain; Demands Warner Pay Back Millions Of License Fees [Mike Masnick/Techdirt]
(Image: 53/365 - 02/22/11 - Happy Birthday, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from shardayyy's photostream) 
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We made these super simple tissue flowers for Emma's bachelorette party and I have recieved SO many requests to share a DIY post about them. They were really easy to make, which is essential when you are party prepping with a to-do list that's a mile long! Here's how we made them...
1. Cut a stack of tissue paper (6 pieces is great!) into a 10x10 inch square.
2. Fold them (or just "eyeball it") and cut your square into a large flower shape. The number of petals isn't important.
3. Twist and stagger the different layers of paper creating a full looking bloom, similar to a real flower. Stitch the middle of the bloom together with a needle and thread and leave the extra thread hanging of the back of the flower. Use the excess thread to tie each bloom to your string or lights cord. If you hang them on a lights cord, like we did, make sure that each bloom is not touching a light so that they are not a fire hazard. :)
It's amazing how much color and atmosphere these simple tissue flowers added to our porch! I'm so excited by the possibilities of adding different tissue elements to our lights strings for parties in the future. So fun!
Cheers to summer parties! xoxo. elsie
Atley
Last week we caught wind of a piece from the Today Show that shows very technically minded thieves stealing cars with a small device. Cops don’t know how they’re doing it, and of course the Today show (and the Hackaday comments) were full of speculation. The top three theories for how these thieves are unlocking car doors are jamming a keyless entry’s ‘lock signal’, a radio transmitter to send an ‘unlock’ code, or a small EMP device touched to the passenger side door to make it unlock.
That last theory – using a small EMP device to unlock a car’s door – got the attention of someone who builds mini EMP devices and has used them to get credits on slot machines. He emailed us under a condition of anonymity, but he says it’s highly unlikely a mini EMP device would be able to activate the solenoid on a car door.
This anonymous electromagnetic wizard would like to open up a challenge to Hackaday readers, though: demonstrate a miniature EMP device able to unlock an unmodified car door, and you’ll earn the respect of high voltage tinkerers the world over. If you’re successful you could always sell your device to a few criminal interests, but let’s keep things above board here.
Remember National Geographic photographer Joe McNally's incredible photograph taken from the top of Dubai's Burj Khalifa? This behind-the-scenes video follows his vertigo-inducing trip up the spire, with plenty of views of the city below.
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The Celestron FirstScope is the best pick for an absolute beginner level telescope. Most entry-level scopes are crap, and most useable scopes start at $300. Since the FirstScope costs only $48, you might be tempted to dismiss it as more useless junk. But I’ve been using the FirstScope, and it is sweet. It needs a sturdy chair or table to perch on, but otherwise is easy to handle. It is compact for storage; it can fit onto a shelf — and it is the perfect size for a small kid. Pretty durable, too. With its 3-inch mirror you can see moons of Jupiter, ring of Saturn, and lunar craters. (I missed that recent comet.) Many other buyers mention that if you substitute decent eyepieces (from another scope) it improves the view tremendously. With one of those you can view a few bright galaxies. It will also focus as close as 30 feet away; we’ve used it as a terrestrial telephoto lens to scan the wildlife on the mountain behind our house.
This is an adequate first telescope to try out sky watching for a small investment. If you want to invest into a higher quality telescope, I recommend Ed Ting’s reviews at ScopeReview. It was Ed Ting’s raves about this little gem that turned me onto the FirstScope in the first place.
-- KK
[This is a Cool Tools Favorite from 2013]
Celestron 21024 FirstScope Telescope ($48)
Available from Amazon
