Newspaper Pot Maker by jridley

Check out this biodegradable planting pot former by jridley.  Cut a thick strip of newspaper, loosely wrap the tall cylinder leaving two inches of excess newspaper off the end – leaving the notched handle clear, fold the excess paper over the end, squish the excess paper into the shorter plastic piece to form the end of the paper tube, add soil, seeds, water, grow your seedling, and when you’re ready just plant the paper pot in the ground.¹

I’ve never had a green thumb, but I think I might just have a chance at growing something with little paper pots like this.  I especially like the recycling/upcycling aspect of this project.  And, with a little bit of design work, you could personalize this little planting pot former with the initials, image, or logo of your choice.

Untitled by jridley

This thing brought to you by

1. This website has some pretty good photos depicting how the process works. [↩]

Do yourself a favor and check out this fantastic episode of Al Jazeera’s social-sourced web show ‘The Stream.’ Bre joins Maker Faire Africa Co-founder Emeka Okafor and host Derrick Ashong in a lively and inspiring discussion of all things #maker, #hacker, and #DIY – all in the time it takes The Replicator to build the Empire State Building. The panel explores how and why maker culture is shaping the future of industry, development, and humanity itself.

Read the rest of this entry »

As some of you may have noticed, the MakerBot Store is no longer accepting PayPal.  This isn’t a temporary glitch; we’re not going to be accepting PayPal for store purchases as we go forward.

While PayPal is a very convenient way to pay, there are some issues with its connection to our online shopping infrastructure that cause various problems for us…and all of these problems end up costing us money.  We looked at the numbers, and we’ve had to make the call to shut it down.

Thanks for understanding, and we apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause.  As always, you can contact [email protected] for assistance with payment issues.

"Okay" by cyclone

Using the really excellent information over at Sandy Noble’s Polargraph website and with help from John Abella and a few others I’ve built a drawing robot.  While I’m very happy with the printed gondola John designed, I thought that it might be fun to have a gondola in the shape of a hand.  I have no idea if it would work well or terribly, but I do know it would be fun.  Here’s the challenge:

• Design an STL of a printable scanned copy of a human hand in the position of holding a pen for drawing/writing.
• The hand would need to have a way to attach to two lines of thin monofilament on the left and right.
• The hand would need to have a way to hold pens of slightly varying diameter.
• Upload your designs to Thingiverse with an open license and tag it “drawbothand“

The person who uploads a hand gondola gets 9000 internet points and, if they wish, a picture drawn by my robot!

Untitled by cyclone

This thing brought to you by