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djempirical

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Isolt shares:

The Photon Printer is a 3D printable laser engraver made from recycled DVD Drives. This is an entry for the Light It Up contest on the grounds that a laser diode is a specialised form on light emitting diode.

download the files on: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:902826

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Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

SinfoniaSam shares:

Sam prints a VR Headset for most smartphones, and customizes it!

download the files on: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:729029

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Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

zenfonts:

A tiny JavaScript helper to load and pre-load web fonts that are specified via @font-face.

• It’s tiny (793 bytes minimized and gzipped), so it can be easily included in every page.
• It can preload a font before it’s used.
• It can solve the “invisible text” issue (WebKit-based browsers on slow network) by applying a class during font loading.
• It can also solve the Flash Of Unformatted Text, aka FOUT (still happens in Internet Explorer).
• Supports practically all browsers. Tested under the latest browser on Android, iOS, OS X, Windows, as well as under IE6+, Firefox 3.6+.

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kazolar shares:

My daughter is obsessed with Tec The Tractor.
I wanted to get her a Tec The Tractor toy, but the only ones you can get are plush overpriced and far from acceptable. So I spent a couple of weeks with YouTube on one screen and Fusion 360 on the main screen and created a model.

download the files on: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:921465

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Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

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Justice comes in all sizes, so when one five-year-old Batman -- whose secret identity is Zavi Ahmed -- spied a family in trouble, he came to the rescue.

The Lifewise Oregon Berry Festival, running Friday and Saturday, is an opportunity to explore the wonderful diversity of berries in our state. Fresh raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, blueberries, Marionberries, and Ollalieberries will be available, and 40 different booths, including Bull Run Cider, Hotlips Pizza (apparently they have a special blueberry pie), Eastside Distilling, Salt’ n Straw, and Blossom Vinegars will be offering berry foods, products, and gifts.

There’s also a blackberry pie contest for amateurs and pros alike, cooking demonstrations (including a boysenberry glazed chicken recipe), talks (Merc contributor Heather Arndt Anderson will be discussing the history of berries in Oregon on Friday at 4 pm), children’s entertainment, and music. If you really want to indulge your berry obsession, there’s a four-course gala dinner prepared by iconic chef James Dodge at OMSI on Saturday night, too.

LifeWise Oregon Berry Festival, Ecotrust Event Space, 721 NW 9th, Fri 17, noon-6 pm; Sat 18, 11 am-5 pm, free; Gala Berry Dinner, OMSI, Sat 18, 6 pm, $105, tickets available here

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) wants to remove a carving of Confederate generals from Georgia’s Stone Mountain monument. But a local artist has a different idea.

Mack Williams is proposing to add Atlanta-based rap duo Outkast, some of Georgia’s most-loved native sons, to the monument. Outkast’s Big Boi and Andre 3000—preferably in a Cadillac—would be featured alongside Confederate heroes Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, who are all shown on horseback.

Williams sent Quartz an image of his proposed monument addition.

The carving’s current depiction of Confederate leaders “is upholding the white supremacy on which the Confederacy was founded and the war was fought,” said NAACP chapter president Richard Rose at a press conference this week. He told local media they could be sand-blasted off, or removed and sold at an auction.

Rose added that a compromise would be to add other figures to Stone Mountain, some who have been “instrumental in bringing peace between the races” and in “elevating Georgia beyond the Civil War and Jim Crow eras.” Outkast could conceivably qualify—although the group was embroiled in a long-running legal feud with civil rights icon Rosa Parks over their song which bears her name and urges everyone to “move to the back of the bus.”

In his petition on MoveOn.org, Williams argues that Stone Mountain, though “an impressive and historic work of art,” is unacceptable. It “only represents a small, regrettable time in the history of the Peach State. It’s high time we added a bit more of our history and culture to this monument,” he writes in a proposal to Georgia lawmakers:

I believe that Daddy Fat Sacks [Big Boi] and Three Stacks [Andre 3000] should be carved riding in a Cadillac (as is their wont). This will help the new carving blend nicely with the Confederates who are on horseback.

Outkast are two of the greatest Georgians in the history of our state. It’s about time the Empire State of the South paid proper tribute to them, while also improving a great monument and tourist attraction.

As of this writing, the petition has been signed by nearly 5,000 people. Big Boi gave the idea a thumbs-up on Twitter:

The legacy of the Confederacy has been the subject of nation-wide debate after white supremacist Dylann Roof shot and killed nine people at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof appeared holding the Confederate flag, for many a symbol of racism and slavery, in a series of online images. Private companies have removed the flag from stores, and local authorities, including the state of South Carolina, have removed the flag from official grounds.

The ridicule and confusion that accompanied Starbucks’ last act of benevolence has apparently motivated it to do more. The company announced today that it plans to open 15 new stores in low-income and minority-heavy neighborhoods in the US, as part of its goal of creating jobs and expanding further into urban areas.

One of the stores will be in Ferguson, Missouri, where racially-charged protests followed the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer. The initiative coincides with CEO Howard Schultz’s recent pledge give 10,000 young Americans out of work or out of school jobs in the next three years.

The stores will all come with the addition of an onsite training space to bestow employees and other community youth with customer-service skills, with the aim of boosting their future employability.

Other store locations, slated to open in the first half of 2016, will include the south side of Chicago, the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens, New York, Phoenix, Arizona, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The company has not yet finalized the other 10 locations, but Starbucks spokesperson Alisha Damodaran tells Quartz they will all be open by the end of 2016.

The company considered the socioeconomic makeup of cities and consulted with local leaders and nonprofits to find communities in the process of rebuilding, according to Damodaran. “There is a strong network of non-profits and civil leaders in those communities working hard to rebuild and give opportunities to these young people,” she says of the new branch locations.

The question is whether the low-income consumers in these communities will buy Starbucks coffee to keep the stores going. The company has hiked its already high coffee prices in US stores for three summers running, thanks to rising costs for coffee, labor, and rent, among others.

Damodaran says the company plans on turning a profit at the new locations, and that demand for its products is growing in lower-income communities. “We also see a clear opportunity for our business to bring new opportunities to young people,” she adds. The stores will also partner with local businesses, including an agreement with Ferguson baker Natalie DuBose to sell her “signature caramel cake chunks,” both at the Ferguson store and other locations in St. Louis.

Regardless of the outcome, it’s hard to imagine a worse ending to this initiative than its “Race Together” campaign, which involved slapping the slogan “Race Together” on coffee cups and encouraging baristas to awkwardly discuss race with customers. A week after that announcement, the company said it had completed “this phase of the effort.”

•"Cascadia Caskets:" Those old unreinforced brick buildings downtown.
•"Hipster-outines:" The new glass-sided monstrosities that will rain down on you.
•"Vantuck-ugees:" The wankers stranded between the Silicon Forest and their Clark County McMansions.
•“Tsunami Surfers:” The condo sprawl on coastal bluffs.
•“Swingers:” That stupid OHSU tram.
•“Slip ‘n Slide:” The 1-percenters’ new amusement park in the West Hills.
•“Farm to Table:” The rush on your neighbor’s garden/chicken coop.
•“Transferable Development Credit:” Your neighbor’s chimney (now in your living room).
•“Infill:” Your basement.
•“Tiny House:” Rover’s doghouse, which is probably the most resilient structure out there. Also your car, which already has a base-isolated foundation.

IBM is going to make life a little bit easier for its working mothers with babies—the company will launch a program to ship employees’ expressed breast milk home when they’re traveling for work, the company tells Quartz.

An IBM employee will be able to use a smartphone app before she travels to say where she will be. Packages will be waiting for her when she arrives at the hotel, and the delivery service will pick them up and deliver them overnight, IBM spokesperson Laurie Friedman tells Quartz.

The program, which was first reported by Fortune, will launch in September in the US and then be rolled out globally, Friedman says.

Working Mother, a website and magazine that has been putting out a list of the top 100 companies for working mothers for the past 29 years, has included IBM on every one of those lists. It’s currently in the top 10. “In the 100 best companies, 24 companies will reimburse employees for the cost of shipping their breast milk home. Half of the top 10 do,” says Working Mother editorial director Jennifer Owens. None have an app that makes it a seamless, and free, part of the work travel experience, she says.

Women often do the “pump and dump,” wasting breast milk, or they deal with the hassle of arranging their own shipments and asking for reimbursement. It is a specific problem, and not one that most women identify as a barrier to returning to work—they’re mostly looking for flexibility and enough pay to cover the cost of childcare, Owens says. According to a 2011 Working Mother survey (pdf, pg. 11), only 5% of at-home mothers said they stopped working because of travel demands.

 “If the men were dealing with breast milk on the road, this would have been figured out a long time ago.” 

But breast feeding, especially for traveling executives, is one of those issues that is an extreme inconvenience for the women who do it, and one that they have just kind of been dealing with.

“If the men were dealing with breast milk on the road, this would have been figured out a long time ago,” Owens says.

There’s an increasing focus on women’s issues in the public conversation, and on abysmal female representation in the tech industry in particular (especially among its highest ranks). More and more companies are offering more perks to working mothers.

IBM’s initiative stands in contrast to another which got a lot of attention recently: Companies paying for egg freezing. Apple and Facebook both announced that they would pay for egg-freezing for their female employees. IBM also covers egg-freezing for employees, but only if there is a medical need to do so, Friedman says. Facebook does not cover the cost of shipping breast milk, and Apple did not reply to a request for comment.

To be sure, they are very different programs, but they also risk communicating different priorities to employees—one may send the message that children can be delayed in favor of work, which appeals to some women but certainly not all; the other suggests that a company will work to not only accommodate, but anticipate the needs of its working mothers. To be fair, Facebook offers four months paid maternity and paternity leave for new parents, while Apple offers mothers 14 weeks after birth, and fathers 6 weeks, the same as IBM.

“Instead of damage reports, however, Melbournians began to send emails detailing what they loved about individual trees in the city. One writer emailed a golden elm to say keep up the good work, while another was complimented on its beauty.”

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Melbourne city council gave trees email addresses so citizens could report damage to them (via feministjewishblogger)

There is nothing about this I do not love

(via redshoesnblueskies)

“Now that I have a reasonable-resolution global color view of Pluto,” writes Emily Lakdawalla, “I can drop it into one of my trademark scale image montages, to show you how it fits in with the rest of the similar-sized worlds in the solar system: the major moons and the biggest asteroids.”

The solar system contains dozens of objects that are large enough for self-gravity to make them round, and yet are not considered planets. They include the major moons of the planets, one asteroid, and many worlds in the Kuiper belt. The ones that we have visited with spacecraft are shown here to scale with each other. A couple of items on here are not quite round, illustrating the transition to smaller, lumpier objects.

It's just an accident that Pluto wound up next to Iapetus and Triton, which I think are the two best analogs for what we can see on Pluto's surface. Yet Pluto stands out for its uniquely ruddy color. Charon, too, is unique, for its dark pole, but there are similarities to the similar-sized worlds on the left side of the diagram: Ariel and Dione in particular.

These are the not-planets. Their non-planetary status is a handicap because these are the worlds that we need to get Earthlings excited about exploring. Titan's strange hydrology -- Enceladus' geysers -- the subsurface oceans of Europa and Ganymede -- the dynamic surfaces of Triton and Pluto. And beyond all the worlds pictured here, there are hundreds of Kuiper belt objects that I would include on this montage if we had ever visited them up close. But we haven't yet. So much undiscovered country yet to explore -- but they're all worlds that much of the public is not familiar with.

Full size here [PNG].
“The not-planets” [planetary.org]

Montage by Emily Lakdawalla. The Moon: Gari Arrillaga. Other data: NASA/JPL/JHUAPL/SwRI/UCLA/MPS/IDA. Processing by Ted Stryk, Gordan Ugarkovic, Emily Lakdawalla, and Jason Perry.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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buy this print!

OH

Look who made good on a throwaway twitter mashup idea from 2013

It really doesn't make sense but their names sounded good together! I had a little time on this book deadline so I sketched it up quick for you. It was fun anyway!

Bessie

Benkei

I have started selling original art through The Beguiling store. This is new to me!

And as always, The Princess and the Pony is in stores. Here is a link roundup of related articles there! Some cool things in it, like a visit to Time magazine.

I didn't want a pony as a child, but I did want a cat really really bad. Here is a little comic about that cat.

All week, Amazon promoted its Prime Day sale as a “bigger than Black Friday” shopping bonanza. But today, a lot of the discounts look like they fell off a truck headed to a poorly regulated flea market for sad people held in a dumpster.

The new CEO seems to be veering around to Pao's point of view on offensive content and the need to have greater control on what is posted to the website. "We haven't had the tools to enforce policy, but now we're building those tools and reevaluating our policy," he wrote.

He said that Reddit was made great by an overwhelming majority of content on the website that comes from "wonderful, creative, funny, smart, and silly communities." But he pointed out that there was a dark side, consisting of communities "whose purpose is reprehensible, and we don't have any obligation to support them."

Huffman added that he believed some communities currently on the platform should not be there at all.

The remarks by Huffman not unexpectedly met with protests from users, some of whom looked for previous statements by Reddit executives that freedom of speech would be defended on the website. One user pointed to Ohanian describing Reddit as a bastion of free speech in a 2012 interview.
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"You choose what to post. You choose what to read. You choose what kind of subreddit to create and what kind of rules you will enforce. We will try not to interfere....," Reddit's then CEO Yishan Wong had written in September last year, after the issue over the posting of naked images of celebrities to the site, to emphasize that the site was unlikely to change its liberal content policies. On Tuesday, he was one of the persons often quoted by critics of the changes at hand.
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