Attention All Steampunks & Booknerds: All 111 Volumes(!!!) of Queen Victoria’s Diary Are Online NOW!

Free for your perusal until the end of July.
Queen Victoria’s Journals – Home Page
The interface is whack, but start browsing–almost at random–and you’ll find some startling and wonderful passages. To wit, this lil bit from page one of volume one, recounting one moment from Victoria’s 1832 journey to Wales via carriage:

It rains very hard. We just passed through a town where all coal mines are and you see the fire glimmer at a distance in the engines in many places. The men, women, children, country and houses are all black. But I can not by any description give an idea of its strange and extraordinary appearance. The country is very desolate ever where; there are coals about, and the grass is quite blasted and black. I just now see an extraordinary building flaming with fire. The country continues black, engines flaming, coals, in abundance, every where, smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children.

This is the world that even the *richest little girl in all of the British Empire* saw and found remarkable, but by no means shocking or foreign. If you’re writing steampunk and this isn’t in there, then you’re doing it wrong.

See You at MAKER FAIRE DETROIT: JULY 28 & 29!

I’ll be at Maker Faire Detroit again this year, braving the searing rays of our terrible and merciless sun and shooting off water rockets like a mad man. I’ll have a “Cheap Thrills” booth outside, where I’ll be showing off under-$10-projects from SNIP, BURN, SOLDER, SHRED (as well as a couple of the new projects from my upcoming book of unconventional musical instruments), signing books, and making free water rockets with all comers (while supplies last). I’ll also be giving a half-hour, air-conditioned presentation on Sunday: “Your First Synthesizer: A Weird Little Noise-Toy You Can Build Tonight.”
My long-time co-conspirator Fritz Swanson will also be at Maker Faire (his first ever!) demoing “Letter-press Printing: Data Distribution the 19th Century Way,” as will my pal Amy Stevenson, teaching at-home artisanal paper making. See you there!
Reduced rate early-bird tickets are still available, or so I’m told (click through the Maker Faire Detroit link for details).

Make a Log into a Stove

This won’t come up often, but it’s one to keep in your vest pocket, just in case:

Cut the log evenly on both sides so it stands up freely. Then cut it into vertical segments most of the way down the length of the log.
Stuff in some newspaper into the cracks as deep as you can get it, leaving a wick at the bottom, and light it up.
That’s all there is to it—the log burns from the inside out, and you have a simple, handmade stove….TA DA
~~ Tonya O’Tinger prostaff.

(via the Homesteading / Survivalism Facebook Page and http://www.homesteadingsurvivalism.com/)

Print-n-Snip Boomerang Template

boomerangs-sm.pngThis PDF includes templates for three boomerangs: a scaled down version of the quad-blade fast-catch boomerang in Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred, plus two new tri-bladers). Each fits on a single sheet of standard 8.5-by-11 paper (and, as a bonus, each of these designs scales pretty well; if you have access to a printer that can handle bigger paper, then you can scale these up and make bigger boomerangs).

To use the Print-n-Snip Boomerang Template:

  1. Print out the boomerang that catches your eye (slightly heavier paper—like resume stock—makes for a slightly easier to trace template)
  2. Trace the design onto light-weight cardboard (such as poster board, a cereal box, a Krispy Kreme donut box, etc.)
  3. Carefully cut it out
  4. Crimp the quarter-line on each blade (as described in step 7 of Project 18 in the book)
  5. Tune and throw!

If you come up with a boomerang design you like and want to add it to the template, drop me a line! (My email is in the “About the Author” box.)

Liz Arum’s 2011 Workshops

I’ve meant to post this for ages, and it somehow kept slipping through the cracks. About a year ago Liz Arum (of Makerbot fame, at least for me) did a summertime DIY/making workshop with a bunch of kids and built a few projects from SnipBurn (as well as others). She posted a bunch of pics that warm the cockles of my heart:

the rest are here)
As it turns out, Liz used 30-gauge winding wire for the pickups in those $10 Electric Guitars–significantly beefier than the 42-gauge I cal for in the book, and also significantly easier to find at RadioShack. This, obviously, takes many more windings than the 42-gauge design, but she reports that the sound is good. I’ve since talked to other SnipBurn makers who’ve likewise used these much thicker gauge wires and had good results, so I’m going to start experimenting with this cheaper/easier wire as I work on projects for my next book (which is all musical instruments). Stay tuned for more details on my findings.
FYI, if you’ve built something cool based on one of the projects in SnipBurn, then totally hit me with some links to pics, audio, or video; I’m happy to add it to the gallery and share your links.

Cork, Wine Bottles, and Food-Grade Wood: Fixing Broken Appliances and Making Them Beautiful

FACT: While many of our home gadgets are complex microcomputers that are basically beyond the ken, let alone skills, of average folk like you and me, the vast bulk of our appliances (even the heavy ones, like your stove or dishwasher) are still simple electromechanical devices heart. If you can replace a fuse, recognize an obviously burned out connection, or re-attached a slipped belt, you can keep that “broken” vacuum or toaster humming for years to come. You can teach a grade schooler to do this safely.
COMPLICATION: While the electrical *guts* of our devices continue to be mid-twentieth century technology, the *cases* are almost invariably customized, injection molded plastic pieces of crap held together with glue, break-away tabs, and funky-ass screws designed to drive average folk *insane.*
PROBLEM: Plenty of devices have perfectly workable guts, but broken cases, and those cases can’t be readily repaired.
SOLUTION: Make your own replacement enclosures.
These are so, so lovely *and* well within the reach of Average Joes and Janes. Yes, this guy is using a fancy CNC, but he’s also planning to roll out this system to the UK equivalent of the Salvation Army. If you’re just fixing your blender or rice cooker, then you can easily work the wood with hand tools. What’s brilliant here is that he’s using *cork.* Cork is *great* for kitchen appliances: You can carve it with a drill and hobby knife, it will put up with lots of knocking about and getting wet, and it can easily mesh with the curved-line aesthetics of modern appliances (i.e., you can replace *parts* of a FUBARed case, instead of having to rebuild the whole thing with food-grade wood from for local lumber yard). I love it!
Short-circuit : Gaspard Tine-Beres

Cheap household appliances such as kettles, coffee makers or toasters, are typical of goods that are thrown away while in perfect working order. But, even when damaged, the electrical components unlike the casing are easily fixable; therefore, landfill sites are increasingly becoming sources of viable and perfectly working complex electrical and electronic components. Moreover, these same components represent a major waste problem, due to their composite and toxic nature.
. . .
My Coffee-maker, kettles and toaster, are made out of re-used components, and factory seconds glassware such as wine bottle and chemistry beakers, in order to take advantage of it’s ubiquity, and standardized dimensions. The main structure is made out of natural cork for it’s waterproof, anti-bacterial and insulation properties. This design required no mould and can be easily adapted, upgraded, or repaired as required.

CNC Routing Is a Lovely Process

A CNC router is a machine that uses a computer to control a spinning bit (“CNC” stands for “computer numerical control”) in order to precisely carve materials (usually wood or metal, although you can basically carve anything that’s rigid-ish: I’ve seen folks route fiberglass, acrylic, styrofoam, ice, and even hunks of melon). Any shape you can map with a computer can be carved by the appropriate CNC router.
In my humble, CNC routers are just lovely to watch, in and of themselves. If robots had to invented ballet, it would look like this. That the process is being used to produce a Möbius strip lends the whole think a little extra cognitive luster. I especially like that they elected to retain–and even accentuate–the milling artifacts of the CNC process; lends just the right touch of wabi-sabi, the degree to which a “perfect” automated process still leaves signs of its having passed this way.
mobiprize | rvtr

OS X Lion DiskMaker for Greater Good!

I’m finally getting around to upgrading my unibody MacBook to OS X 10.7 Lion (mostly because Apple is forcing my hand: I have to join iCloud before the end of this month, or face the consequences).
Since Lion is the first download-only OS upgrade from Apple, I’ve been strongly advised by my computer programming cohort that I really ought to make a bootable recovery OS X disk (actually a USB drive–the damn OS installer is +4Gb!) prior to running the install (just in case–and because making the boot disk *before* installing is *much* easier than trying to do it afterward, as OS X erases the installer disk image when it cleans up post-intallation).
Lots of great instructions cover doing this (here are the ones I followed: How to make a bootable Lion install disc or drive | Macworld); it isn’t really arduous, but it’s far from intuitive, so you’ll want the walk through.
I only discovered *after* purchasing a 8Gb ScanDisk Cruzer thumb drive to use as my bootable recovery disk–and wrestling with it for several hours as my Mac repeatedly failed to be able to finish writing the disk image to the drive–that, for reasons unknown, Cruzer thumb drives are notoriously janky in this application.
Thoroughly frustrated and hopelessly googline, I stumbled across the freeware Lion DiskMaker. It’s really just a shiny wrapper around a few AppleScripts, but it totally automates the process of creating one of these bootable thumb drives *and* can do so even with the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Cruzer thumb drives.
So, consider this lil bundle of magic *Recommended*:
Serial Serveur — Lion DiskMaker (US)