“Not as clumsy or random as Windows. An elegant terminal, for a more civilized age.” [Ben Kenobi] might well have said that about the Hewlett-Packard 264x-series of serial terminals, in use starting at just about the time the original installment of the Star Wars franchise was released. With their wide-screen CRTs and toaster-oven aesthetic, they […]
[Bithead] wanted to make a prop replica of an Electrostaff from Star Wars, but wasn’t sure how best to create the “crackling arcs of energy” effect at the business ends. After a few false starts, he decided to leverage the persistence of vision effect by spinning LEDs in more than one axis to create helical […]
Have you shopped for an appliance lately? They’re all LEDs, LEDs everywhere. You might say that manufacturers are out of touch with the utility of tactile controls. [Wingletang]’s fancy new washing machine is cut from this modern cloth. While it does have a nice big knob for selecting cycles, the only indication of your selection […]
Light painting is the process of moving a light while taking a long-exposure photograph, which creates a sort of drawing from the path of the light source. It’s been done in one way or another since at least the early-to-mid 1900s, but modern hardware and methods have allowed for all kinds of new spins on […]
Casting is a great way to make your own custom metal parts. However, casting requires some manner of furnace capable of generating high enough temperatures to melt the metal in question. Few of us have these just lying around, but never fear. It’s possible to build a basic gas-powered furnace at home, with commonly available […]
Rotary dial phones have a certain romantic charm about them; something never quite captured in the post-Touch Tone era. With landline phone services less popular than ever, these old workhorses aren’t really cut out for daily use anymore. However, with a modern brain transplant, they can still get the job done just fine. [Xabier Zubizarreta] […]
We’ve seen lots of hacks about capturing weather images from the satellites whizzing over our heads, but this nicely written how-to from [Eric Sorensen] takes a different approach. Rather than capturing images from polar satellites that pass overhead a few times a day, this article looks at capturing images from GOES-17, a geostationary satellite that […]