Any maker/hackerspaces out there with an embroidery machine: Urban Threads is giving away some of its sweet badge designs for free.
It looks like the company wants to recognize such spaces for their contributions to the community by giving away the designs that are otherwise for sale on their site.
All they need to do is contact us at support@urbanthreads.com with the name & location of their hackerspace and their preferred format for their embroidery machine and we’ll set them up with some awesome designs. We’re happy to support crafty hackerspaces as best we can, because we think machine embroidery is pretty awesome and hope everyone gets a chance to give it a try.
Apple has filed for all sorts of patents related to 3D technologies over the years, sparking speculation that the company will one day bring us 3D-capable Macs and iOS devices. But evidence that it’s about to get serious about 3D technology for iOS devices comes from a recent job listing on its website for a “Computer Vision specialist to strengthen its multi-view stereo research group.”
Killian cautions that it’s not like we’re going to be seeing glasses-free 3D games on the iPhone 5, but gaming is not where my head went. I immediately thought of 3D modeling on a screen.
In The Hunger Games movie, the Gamemakers build and alter the world where the Games are played in virtual 3D. This picture isn’t the best, but you can see some of them manipulating towers and landscapes in real time — all standard sci-fi fare, but how cool would it be to Tinkercad with a 3D interface on your tablet? Even if you couldn’t manipulate the structure with your hands (let’s call that mano-manipulation), seeing it in 3D before you print would be a remarkable improvement, no?
What do you think of this? The Smithsonian Archives has a Wikipedian-in-Residence, whose mission is, in part, to make sure women scientists are duly represented in that crowd-sourced online encyclopedia.
I started to contemplate this a little bit because I could never have posted about Ada Lovelace of Grace Hopper in the past week or so without Wikipedia. It’s gotten to the point that if someone isn’t profiled in Wikipedia I almost conclude that their accomplishments must not have been noteworthy.
But Sarah Stierch is having to host Wikipedia edit-a-thons to correct a big gap:
“One of the biggest complaints we get is that women who are involved in science don’t always have a great chance of having their articles saved on Wikipedia, because people don’t think they’re notable enough….”
Among the edit-a-thon’s targeted scientists were Mary Agnes Chase, a botanist who funded her own research in South America at the turn of the 20th century because it was considered inappropriate for women to do field work, and Mary J. Rathburn, a Smithsonian zoologist from the same time period who described over a thousand new species and subspecies of crustaceans.
Yikes! These scientists were not already documented on Wikipedia? I’ll have to take this into consideration from now on.
Hey, who among you are working on the MakerBot Wikipedia entry? It looks like it could use some information on The Replicator.
I love the title that these guys at South Florida Hack and Tell have given themselves! Looks like they’re doing great work with their Thing-O-Matic. Check out the video from MiamiHerald.com.
You thought I was exaggerating when I said there was a NERF arms race going on? Look here, doubters!
There is an Instructable up for an Arduino-controlled NERF Vulcan. The instructions involve some admittedly crude hacking — like, with a saw — so this should be performed or supervised by a responsible1 adult.
The end product of the tutorial is an automated gun that “will just shoot for 2.5 seconds, stop for 2.5 seconds, and so on,” but worry ye not, as it could “easily be expanded to do whatever you want.” For example, “you could use a proximity sensor to make security system, you could use an ethernet shield to shoot it remotely, the possibilities are endless.”
Endless? I’d much rather the possibilities here be ended. Full of limit. I think it’s an appropriate time to say for the first time on this blog: hide your children.
Lifehacker has a great tip for ensuring that your MakerBot gets to travel comfortably next to you on the plane. If you’re flying with someone else, book the aisle and the window seat, not two seats together.
If you’re booking tickets with a friend or family member, you probably look for two seats together, but a better strategy is to book an aisle and a window seat in the same row. People don’t like to sit in the middle, so that will probably be one of the last seats booked—meaning if the flight isn’t full, you have a chance of having an empty seat next to you, with room to stretch out a bit.
Open Government 2.0 is swinging into effect for several agencies, including NASA. The organization says a new directory online will detail “more than 100 participatory, collaborative and transparent projects, offering citizens opportunities to understand, support and engage with the agency.”
It’s nice to think that kids dreaming with the MakerBot Rocket Playset (above) will also have more outlets through which to interact with NASA and its plans for the future.
Lest you think this is simply a chance to plug the Open Government initiative, remember that MakerBot and Space are longtime friends. We sent Stephen Colbert’s head to space eight months ago.
The team at Autodesk, led by Director of Strategic Research Gonzalo Martinez, did just that, snapping some photos from a bunch of different angles and piecing them together with 123D Catch to build a 3D model.
Is it just me or does it look from the picture below that they took less than 30 pictures to get the highly detailed model that resulted? I’ve heard from several people lately that a successful model may require twice as many pictures. But even if it took 100 pictures to get an accurate model of a giant building, that’s not too shabby!
The copter in the picture above is not on Thingiverse, but this one from swepet is. It’s a quad-copter, and is designed to carry a GOPro, the same type of camera used by Autodesk to get the video you see below, but they can also be triggered remotely to take stills.
What I’m saying is: what awesome building or monument are you going to run out and capture and upload to Thingiverse?
Last week I had a post on Ada Lovelace, a fascinating figure that one of my colleagues brought to my attention. I was so interested to hear that a girl of such prodigious literary pedigree was well ahead of her time with respect to her understanding of the computational capabilities of machines.
Now another great figure in technical history is brought to my attention by none other than the winner of the chess set design contest, Joe Larson. So, hat tip there.
As context, I’ll remind that Ada Lovelace’s translation of Luigi Menabrea’s book regarding Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine – a translation which included her own extensive notes and what would in retrospect be regarded as the first computer program – were not republished until 1953. By that time, today’s heroine Grace Hopper, then 46 years old, had
Attained a Master’s degree and a PhD from Yale, both in Mathematics
Coauthored several papers on the Harvard Mark I computer
Coined the term “debug”, after removing a moth from the hardware
The timing of Grace Hopper’s accomplishments with respect to the republication of Ada Lovelace’s notes is neither here nor there, but if you’re curious about the proportion of PhD’s that went to women in 1934, this graph from the National Science Foundation makes it pretty clear:
It was also right around that time in 1953 that Grace Hopper developed the first ever compiler for a computer programming language. Before Grace Hopper, or I should probably say Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, computer software had to be written in an assembly language. From the Computer History Museum:
In 1952, mathematician Grace Hopper completed what is considered to be the first compiler, a program that allows a computer user to use English-like words instead of numbers. Other compilers based on A-0 followed: ARITH-MATIC, MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC [software].
It doesn’t take a computer scientist to recognize what a fantastic contribution this was to the future of computer programming. A huge salute to the late great Grace Hopper!
The release indicates Reykjavik is going to pilot the transition with a few agencies over the next twelve months, such as the National Hospital.
Nick Clayton blogged at the Wall Street Journal that the move hasn’t been entirely without snags:
“The big public institutions are pretty locked in to some systems,” Bjorgvinsson said. “The government has set up a pretty tightly interwoven set of proprietary software which will be hard to untangle.”
As an example, he noted that in one government ministry, “the mail system is linked to our Oracle databases , which are also linked to our case management system, which is also linked to websites”.
One really nice element of the policy, which Iceland has long espoused, is the country’s insistence that students also be exposed to concepts of open source and collaboration.
