Guys, it's cold today in Brooklyn. (And, you know, pretty much everywhere else in the US.) So, now seems like a great time to make this handy DIY scarf hanger!
One day, I rested my lizard spiral pattern on my Lack side table and an idea was born. The pattern is laser cut from 3mm plywood and is based on the Escher image “Development II”
I stained 3 sheets of laser plywood with wood dye, Mahogany, Jacobean Oak and Antique Pine. I decided a plain/white border around the edge of the table would look best. Three different sets of lizards were cut, one in each colour and then I mixed and matched the appropriate parts while gluing them onto the top of the table. This does mean I now have three Escher side tables kicking round my house.
I sanded the top of the Lack table to key the surface of the table and help the glue stick to it.
The border was split into four parts, one for each side of the table. The largest lizards interlock nicely with the border and hold it in place while the glue sets.
It’s easiest to build up the lizards in rings working towards the centre. Once you’re at the middle you can fit the centre piece with a little bit of wiggling.
More images and information can be found on my blog.
With today’s announcements, 3D Systems takes the lead in innovative desktop prosumer 3D Printing. Yesterday we covered their announcement of two new FDM printers, the Cube 3 and CubePro. This morning they completely redefined what’s possible on the desktop by unveiling the the most exciting 3D printers to date, the […]
Nearly every computer manufacturer makes a tablet computer. I wanted one based that ran Linux and was based on the Raspberry Pi. They don't sell that. So I made one.
Etsy seller Christopher Genovese made this $190 KRANG belt-buckle that recreates the experience of being a mecha-suit used by a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles villain. It's the perfect thing for holding your pants up on casual Fridays.
It may not be the healthiest of sweet treats, but this self-explanatory Gummy Bear popsicles made with Sprite tutorial that the good folks over at FOODBEAST shared sure does produce some pretty results.
Phillip Burgess posted a fantastic new guide to Adafruit’s Learning System. It walks you through how to make your own custom digital point-and-shoot camera.
Embroidery might not be groundbreaking or new, but the craft is clearly having a moment. We're not talking about the circular pieces you might see your mom working on right before she goes to bed—this embroidery shows up on photographs, metal objects and even human hands.
We've come a long way from grainy photos with splashes of colored embroidery; see more on Design Observer
Embellished photos date back to the turn of the century, originating as a simple method of adding a personal touch to mementos. We've come a long way in terms of art and photography, but this trend is still making appearances in modern art and design—sometimes on photographs, and other times on our own skin.
More recently, artist Diane Meyer has developed a more contemporary take on embroidered photography, effectively 'pixelating' regions of photographs into geometric 'averages' of the colors there. The result is a kind of handcrafted 'artifact,' both in the sense of a meaningful object and the degradation of a compressed digital image file.
Most of us who like building things loved Legos as a kid. There were just a few gripes: Inevitably you'd build something and run out of a particularly-sized piece, or you wished for different colors, or two pieces would become stuck together so badly that scientists at CERN couldn't separate them.
Well folks, the future is here. Google has teamed up with Lego to release Build with Chrome, a free, browser-based version of Lego! (Works in Firefox and Chrome, I've not tried Safari.) You select whatever sized-piece you want and drop it into your construction with mouseclicks. It's 3D, so you can rotate the build platform by dragging. You can change colors at will. And in the tutorials at least, the supply of pieces is unlimited.
Now I know that a large part of Lego's appeal is the tactility, and the empowering feeling a child gets from constructing something with their grubby little mitts. But at least your pops isn't going to step on one of these in the living room, accidentally teaching you, at perhaps too tender an age, words like "#*$&%@!!!"
He's made out of fish, and pink sushi rice, he's gonna get rolled, he's gonna get sliced; Santa Claus will get swallowed down (with this amazing project by YouTube user Make Sushi).
Have your knitted hat and mittens and eat them too (in cake form) with these quirky tutorials from The Cake Girls for making a knitted hat cake along with a pair of matching mittens cookies.
Artist Nandan Ghiya uses all kinds of crafty processes to modify pictures and mashup their frames to create these fascinating works from the deFacebook Project.
From the architect. The basic concept behind the Z Design building, located next to Design Museum Holon (by Ron Arad), is the expression of the basicresidential”aggregate”– the apartment –almost as an independent unit. This articulation is achieved simply as each second floor (containing four apartments) rotatesaround the building core relative to the two floors below or above. Thus also every second apartment gains a large 30 sqm “roof terrace”, as an integral element of building mass.
The rich volumetric composition of the whole building is achieved almost as a by-product of that simple shift. Thus also another feature is gained: no more “main” and “side” facades;each side of the building is as important.
Of course this design may bea renewal of old, quite forgotten ideas, such asSafdie’s1967 Habitat in Montreal, KishoKurokawa’sNakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo (1972) and less known “Patio Building” in Beer-Sheva, Israel, by Lufenfeld-Gamerman, 1965. However most such pioneering experiments somehow have vanished.
The Z Design Building with its “revolving” geometry reproduces this old-new vocabulary, whilesimply and economically constructed as conventional concrete skeleton with on-site prefab walls installed on it.In 30 or 40 story high buildings it will just as well be implemented: we may envision a whole city block designed accordingly with low-rise street buildings surrounding some tall ones in between, around a small open public space.
Exterior finishesare quite basic, consisting mainly of cut white stone, integrated into the on-site cast-in place wall units. Recessed planes are cladded with grey granite while small areas between windows and balcony edges are cladded in aluminum. We may say that the building’s beauty lies in its logic of volumetric formation, almost regardless of any expensive finish materials.
Unsupervised joke generation from big data [PDF], a paper by University of Edinburgh researchers Sasa Petrovic and David Matthews, describes an ingenious and successful method for teaching a computer to make up jokes like "I like my relationships like I like my source, open;" "I like my coffee like I like my war, cold;" and "I like my boys like I like my sectors, bad." The researchers wrote code that called on Google's n-gram database to find noun-attribute pairs, zero in on nouns with ambiguous meaning, and automatically generate jokes.
The problem in implementing such a model is in getting the necessary data. The word frequencies needed were gathered from Google's n-gram database, which was augmented by tagging words with their part of speech using Wordnet. This was then used to work out how often each noun occurred with the same attribute and the other statistics needed to apply the rules given above.
Next some human jokes, harvested from Twitter, were mixed in and a people were asked to rate the set as funny or not funny. Of the human jokes 33% were judged to be funny compared to the computer generated jokes of which 16% were funny. You could say that currently AI is half as funny as a human.
The joking doesn't stop there as the authors also couldn't resist naming their computation of the log likelihood of a joke as the LOcal Log-likelihood or LOL and when ranked according to LOL we get Rank OF Likelihood or ROLF. Hmmm.
Tumblr user Scribble Sketch resolved to stop using paper towels this holiday season and came up with these handy DIY multi-use kitchen towels instead.
Guys, it's cold today in Brooklyn. (And, you know, pretty much everywhere else in the US.) So, now seems like a great time to make this handy DIY scarf hanger! 
All 40,400 stitches of this gorgeous cross-stitch self-portrait takes the idea of a selfie to a glorious new level!
With today’s announcements, 3D Systems takes the lead in innovative desktop prosumer 3D Printing. Yesterday we covered their announcement of two new FDM printers, the Cube 3 and CubePro. This morning they completely redefined what’s possible on the desktop by unveiling the the most exciting 3D printers to date, the […]
Nearly every computer manufacturer makes a tablet computer. I wanted one based that ran Linux and was based on the Raspberry Pi. They don't sell that. So I made one. 
It may not be the healthiest of sweet treats, but this self-explanatory Gummy Bear popsicles made with Sprite tutorial that the good folks over at FOODBEAST shared sure does produce some pretty results.
Phillip Burgess posted a fantastic new guide to Adafruit’s Learning System. It walks you through how to make your own custom digital point-and-shoot camera.
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More on Diane Meyer below
We've come a long way from grainy photos with splashes of colored embroidery; see more on Design Observer
Keep the chill off your shoulders with this beautifully designed and totally functional knitted maple leaf shawl by Ravelry user Natalia @ Elfmoda.
He's made out of fish, and pink sushi rice, he's gonna get rolled, he's gonna get sliced; Santa Claus will get swallowed down (with this amazing project by YouTube user Make Sushi).
Bring your knitting skills to the dinner table with this gorgeous knit pie crust tutorial from Ravelry user KnitsForLife.
Have your knitted hat and mittens and eat them too (in cake form) with these quirky tutorials from The Cake Girls for making a knitted hat cake along with a pair of matching mittens cookies.
Artist Nandan Ghiya uses all kinds of crafty processes to modify pictures and mashup their frames to create these fascinating works from the deFacebook Project.
Rusty Blazenhoff of Laughing Squid reports on a 
