This week, I interviewed the designer and maker Brendan Dawes for my podcast, Looking Sideways. Brendan’s known for early interactive web projects like Psycho Studio, that allows users to remix Hitchcock’s famous shower scene themselves. He’s also known for his physical projects, such as the Moviepeg and Popa iPhone accessories, and devices that cross the [...]

Instructables user vigothecarpathian adapted a holiday decoration to create a fully functional Beaker puppet that can be used as a traditional puppet but also moves his mouth along with the music when a music player is plugged into him. Beaker-bot, for me is both an excellent puppet for someone like me who does not have [...]

Pancakes with personality and the option of chocolate chip eyes. What’s an antidote to too much time spent online? Joe Sandor’s answer was making something with your hands and spending face-to-face time with friends. It was the social aspect of making and eating crepes that originally inspired the Captain Crepe Pan. That success lead this [...]

The magic of Maker Faire is spreading, and the excitement around the maker movement is getting noticed. Today’s example is a piece penned by the LA Times’ Chris O’Brien, who attended the Bay Area Maker Faire this last weekend, and like so many others, came away thrilled and optimistic. Everything is increasingly complex, whether it’s [...]

Most people have to keep track of at least a few keys. The easiest way to do that is to just keep them all on one key ring. But the more keys you have, the more they fan out on the ring. If you have a lot of keys, then your key ring can get [...]

  Brothers Luke and Adam Iseman gave an inspiring talk on Saturday at Maker Faire Bay Area’s Education Stage about how they created a $1,000 micro-scholarship for students at their former high school in Pennsylvania  — and how you can do the same. Their award is called the BEST Award (Butwin Elias Science and Technology Award), [...]

For the Museum of Mathematics Continuing a Math Mondays tradition of building Sierpinski triangles and tetrahedra out of various materials, today we’re going to do it with mailing tubes. The basic unit requires six identical mailing tubes and a piece of cord or twine about 8.5 times as long as the tubes. In my case, [...]

Robot Room’s David Cook shows how an LED and op amp, along with a resistor and cap, can be built into an amplified color sensor. Unfortunately, even under the best conditions, photodiodes (and reversed LEDs) don’t provide a lot of current flow. The output of the photodiode needs to be amplified for the light-detection signal [...]

Brook Drumm of Printrbot with the new Printrbot Simple, in the Maker Shed at Maker Faire. If you were hoping to pick up Brook Drumm’s new Printrbot Simple at Maker Faire Bay Area this year, well…you’re too late. The Printrbot Simple beta edition sold out Saturday afternoon. Still, with alpha availability slate for June, you [...]

Some of the primitive tools on display at Tamara Wilder’s booth. At Maker Faire you’ll find any number of cutting edge technologies—3D printers, CNC routers, flying robots, and gestural interface devices. But the fair is also the place for primitive technologies and tools, the technologies that form the basis for every other technology that followed. [...]

Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson and formed the company Technical Illusions to launch a new product that brings augmented reality to you via a pair of high-tech glasses. The product, called CastAR, was unveiled at Maker Faire Bay Area this weekend. Unlike systems that try to close you off from the real world while immersing you [...]