If you find yourself at a Fry's in California, you might see one of these handsome Maker Shed kiosks. The Make team did a great job coming up with an attractive kiosk that took up just 4 square feet of floor space.

Gareth writes: "We think this is big news, not only for Maker Media, but for all indie makers -- a major retail chain is now giving small kit-makers this level of exposure. And, we think it's particularly cool that we designed and built these kiosks in-house, and even personally delivered them to the stores! What other publisher could claim that?"

Maker Shed kiosks at Fry's

Important note: I had previously announced a couple of readings tomorrow at the Philadelphia Free Library. It turns out that these are not open to the public (they're for school groups, which no one told me until last night). Sorry about this, folks.

Philcon: Nov 20-22
The Crowne Plaza Hotel, Cherry Hill, NJ

US/Canada Tour

In addition to being about half the price of the original chumby, the new device added some features: it has an FM radio, and it has support for a rechargeable lithium ion battery (although it's not included with the device, you have to buy one and install it yourself). There's also a knob so you can easily/quickly adjust the volume. But I don't think those are really the significant new features. What really gets me excited about this one is that it's much more hackable. The most significant improvement is that the firmware is stored on a microSD card.

The microSD card isn't replaceable from the outside -- this is to prevent non-hackers from pulling it out and wondering why the device isn't booting anymore -- but if you take the back panel off (screws this time, no glue seals), it's fairly easy to access. The key here is that no longer do you have to worry about bricking your chumby device: if you screw up the firmware, you just pull it out, mount it on your dev box, and dd a new image onto it. Also, microSD is a "managed" NAND device, unlike our previous generation device which used a raw NAND device. This means that we don't have to rely on a MTD layer for the filesystem, and instead we can directly drop ext3 onto the device. While we still mount the root partition as read-only to harden the device against accidental damage, unlike our original cramfs implementation, you can trivially remount it as read/write and modify the linux on the device. Also, our OS image takes up only a small portion of the total device capacity, so there's actually over a gigabyte of extra space on there for you to load extra applications and libraries.

Chumby Store

Exploded Skull photos

The Evolution Store

Metabots

US/Canada Tour

It was coated with gradoo, so I went to the local hardware store and bought a spanking new socket:

When I got home, I discovered that the wires on the socket weren't long enough to make it to the junction box. I couldn't replace the short wires with longer ones because they were riveted to the socket. This is a crappy, user-hostile design. When the wires go bad, you have to throw the entire thing away.

Fortunately, I still had the old light socket, and I had some extra wire, so I was able to rewire the old light socket. Hurray for repairable stuff of yesteryear!

We've Got Some Work To Do Now by Travis Pitts

Fun with a 2 x 4 electric bass

US/Canada tour

here is the plastic beach ball covered in paint for the inside of the sphere-half mold...

the stand was made from scraps of red oak from a computer table i built...

Ape Lad sez, "I've taken the shape of the default twitter avatar and adapted it to some non-bird characters. I still haven't figured out how to fit Galactus into that shape."

Twitter Avatars (Thanks, Adam!)

The Roomba Pac Man uses indoor location sensors and Unmanned Aerial System software to create a playable (albeit slow) PacMan built on repurposed autonomous vacuum cleaners.

Roomba Pac-Man (via Wonderland)

Books are being sold by Bakka Phoenix, and if you can't make it tonight, they're happy to take your pre-orders for signed, personalized copies -- I'll sign them tonight and they'll ship them out right away. They're at +1 416 963 9993 or inquiries@ bakkaphoenixbooks. com.

Hope to see you there!

US-Canada Tour

What he came up with was three different temporal dimensions - the first moving very fast, at the speed of light, the second very slow and "vibrating slowly back and forth, as if the universe itself were a single string or bubble", the third - antichronos - in reverse. We experience them as one, creating a three-way interference pattern, which accounts for sensations such as foresight, déjà vu, nostalgia and precognition. The compound nature of time, Robinson writes, "creates our perception of both transience and permanence, of being and becoming". He's shown the novel to people who are "much more serious about the time travel stuff" and they're "having a blast". "They immediately map my three strands of time onto their system. They think I've partially discovered the real thing," he says gleefully...

So Galileo makes his telescope. He sees the Seven Sisters constellation, surrounded by "thickets of lesser stars, granulated almost to white dust in places ... No one else in the history of the world had ever seen these stars, until this very night, this very moment". He discovers Jupiter's four moons. He studies acceleration and motion. He observes sunspots. He frequently, frequently rings "like a struck bell" as his genius strikes: "Here it was, the truth of the situation - the cosmos revealed in a single stroke as being one way rather than another. The Earth was spinning under his feet, also rolling around the sun ... Again he rang like a bell. His flesh buzzed like struck bronze, his hair stood on end. How things worked; it had to be; and he rang." He stamps on the ground after he is tried by the Inquisition for supporting Copernicanism: "'It still moves!' he said. 'Eppur si muove!'"

MAKE, Volume 20 is out (and will be on newsstands and in bookstores next week) and it's one of my favorite issues. The special theme of this issue is kid-friendly projects.

Our projects editor, Paul Spinrad, sat down with Adam Savage to talk about his childhood as a maker. Adam is on our cover, which was illustrated by our pal Ape Lad (aka Adam Koford). Here's an excerpt:

Paul: I think of enthusiasm as the opposite of coolness, and adolescence is a turning point for this. Children are all enthusiastic, they're into what they're into, and it's great and they love it. But then something happens, and suddenly some of the kids start looking down on that enthusiasm and seeing it as immature or dorky. So they invent coolness as an alternative. I always gravitated away from that because I was interested in too many things. Adam: Yes, and enthusiasm also makes you vulnerable. When you like something, someone can take it away from you. I once gave a sculpture to some friends as a wedding present, and they turned it down. That was really upsetting to me. And that vulnerability itself is also embarrassing. The two emotions are deeply linked, which is why people try not to cry in public.

Geek Craft: Super Mario knitted flower gloves (via Wonderland)

A man runs. He falls down. He struggles back onto his feet and he runs some more. It's a simple narrative. Even without much detail, you can understand what's going on. Pause the video, though, and the scene isn't nearly as clear. Movement makes up for the lack of other visual information. Your brain can read and understand a video at much lower resolution than it would need to make equal sense of a still frame.

Meet Jim Campbell, a former Silicon Valley engineer turned visual artist. Inspired by early Bell Labs experiments with pixelated images, and by his own engineering work with digital filters, Campbell makes art that toys with the human brain.

Gareth from Make sez, "Here's Collin's latest electronics video tutorial, on induction. He's the David Lynch of DIY The Scorcese of open source education The Tarantino of tutorials And he rocks it all in a natty suit and tie! What's not to love?"

MAKE presents: The Inductor (Thanks, Gareth!)

Those of us who love eating street food, but hate taking lunch back to our desks, have a common problem. Where should we eat? There are a number of indoor pavilions and outdoor seating areas scattered across Midtown, but sometimes I just wish there was a place right next to the carts to just saddle up and tuck in. Well thanks to Pratt Grad Student Ali Pulver, now there is. For her thesis she is developing a couple of tools to make it easier for us to eat on the street. And after testing out the "Lunch Shelf" and the "Hydrantable" last week, I've got to say these could represent the greatest advancements in street food technology since the invention of chicken and lamb over rice!

Pop Up Lunch: NYC

(via Making Light)

Somebody has made the dreamy floating wonderworld from the Oscar-nominated Hayao Miyazaki film Howl's Moving Castle out of Lego. The details are quite impressive, and blogging about this is making me want to watch the movie again.

Imagine's Brickzone's Flickr via Japanator

If you have a model created from several objects or meshes, first make sure that each individual mesh is manifold (water-tight). You can tell this by going into edit mode, pressing A (once if any vertices are selected or twice otherwise) to select none, then hit ctrl-alt-shift-M (on a Mac it's ctrl-opt-shift-M).

Any vertices that get selected when you press that key combination are non-manifold vertices that have to be fixed. Often, fixing these is just a matter of creating new faces (F key) out of sets of 3 or 4 vertices. Sometimes these are stray vertices that are unattached to anything, or are attached to just one vertex by an edge. These can usually be deleted, unless they are intentional (such as those vertices uses to affect the shape while using a subsurf modifier), in which case you want to wait until after you've applied your modifier to delete them. Another possibility are vertices that are part of more than one overlapping faces...

Open the copy of the file, and select each object, one at a time. In object mode, apply all modifiers, then switch to Edit mode, hit A once or twice to select all vertices, then press ctrl-T to triangulate all faces. I don't know why, but Blender does a much better job with Boolean operations if the meshes are triangulated.

To test her idea, she whipped up a channel design in AutoCAD, printed it out on Shrinky Dink material using a laser printer, and stuck the result in a toaster oven. As the plastic shrank, the ink particles on its surface clumped together, forming tiny ridges. That was exactly the effect Khine wanted. When she poured a flexible polymer known as PDMS onto the surface of the cooled Shrinky Dink, the ink ridges created tiny channels in the surface of the polymer as it hardened. She pulled the PDMS away from the Shrinky Dink mold, and voilà: a finished microfluidic device that cost less than a fast-food meal.

Khine began using the chips in her experiments, but she didn't view her toaster-oven hack as a breakthrough right away. "I thought it would be something to hold me over until we got the proper equipment in place," she says. But when she published a short paper about her technique, she was floored by the response she got from scientists all over the world. "I had no idea people were going to be so interested," Khine says.

(Image: Dave Lauridsen)

Putka Pod Possibilities! (Thanks, Ray!)

Mark blogged earlier the very special benefit event for Machine Project taking place on the evening of Saturday, November 7 at Mister Jalopy's personal studio in LA this weekend -- and, well, dammit, I'm blogging about it again.

I stopped by the space a few days ago to see how preparations were going, and HOO BOY, if you can afford the fundraiser tickets (I know times are tough for many), they're really going to great effort to construct what is sure to be an amazing event. And, of course, all proceeds benefit one of the world's coolest independent tech-art institutions. If you love something like that, you have to feed it, and Mister Jalopy's going to feed it lasers and pizza.

For starters, Jalopy's "awe-inspiring Silverlake studio is almost never open to the public," as Mark said, but I saw the stuff they're constructing: laser mazes, fake museum ID creation stations, an industrial pizza oven, all kinds of crazy crafty Maker pranky goodness.

More about the event from Dinosaurs and Robots...

Artist Karen O'Leary of North Carolina cuts paper by hand to create these stunning street maps of world cities. Above, her rendition of New York City. Here's her Etsy store. Blog coverage: The Best Part, Paper Tastebuds, infosthetics (via @stevenleckart)

Update: Looks like The Jailbreak was the first blog to cover this, and they have an interview with the artist in an update post.

Watch: MP4 download, YouTube, Dotsub (with captions/text translations).

In this episode of Boing Boing Video, we test-drive "Sarriugarteis (Odontochile) trilobiteis," also known as The Electrobite.

This trilobite-shaped DIY vehicle was created by "Oilpunk" enthusiasts Kyrsten Mate + Jon Sarriugarte, with help from fellow makers Amy Jenkins and Tansy Brooks.

Pesco previously blogged about the little bugger here -- it's even been to Burning Man, where it no doubt terrified some trippin' hippies.

Dumping auto waste or old auto parts is one of the major problems for most nations across the world. Resurrecting old school buses, sculptor and designer Christopher Fennell has devised a bus shelter that not only looks unique but also helps in reducing the huge piles of auto waste. Made of selective parts and pieces from three iconic school buses, from the years '62, '72 and '77, and old city line seats, the yellow bus shelter is a unique way to attract people toward recycling and adopting a green lifestyle. Check out the video after the jump.

"Unfurling" by Isabel Rucker (Thanks, Rudy!)

Pool, the Australian public broadcaster's Creative Commons repository, has spawned a video cut together from Aussies' shots of the epic Brisbane Zombie Walk.

Video: Outbreak: Brisbane Zombie Walk 2009 (Thanks, Gary!)

Halloween 2009: Making Mario (Thanks, Jim!)

An abandoned bowling alley finds a second life in this beautiful series of furniture by LA-based designer/woodworker William Stranger. Crafted from reclaimed strips of wood salvaged from a local defunct Tava Lanes Bowling alley, the collection springs to life in a variety of forms including a series of wall hangings and a low coffee table.

Head (Flickr) (Thanks, Eric!)

Here are complete instructions (software, source code, build manual, hardware) for an autonomous sentry gun that will shoot anything that moves.

DIY autonomous sentry gun

"MAKE ME A REASONABLE OFFER AND LET'S MAKE A DEAL!," says the seller on Etsy. Looks like that means about a thousand bucks. (thanks, Susannah Breslin)

James sez, "I just completed a working build of Donald Michie's MENACE (Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine), an early (1960) example of machine learning. MENACE uses 304 matchboxes to play Noughts and Crosses (or Tic Tac Toe in the US) - and learns over time to play it better. I built it for a talk at the UK games conference Playful, about Awesomeness and Miracles, particularly focussing on the work of Charles Babbage - and culminating in a surprisingly large version for playing Go..."

MENACE is a machine that plays noughts and crosses, built out of 304 matchboxes. Each matchbox corresponds to one of the 304 board layouts that the opening player might face (there are actually 19,683 possible board layouts, but we only need to calculate the opening player's first four moves, and many are rotationally or reflectively identical). In turn, each matchbox contains a number of glass beads corresponding to each possible next move. When it is MENACE's turn to play, the operator simply selects the matchbox corresponding to the current state of play, shakes it, and opens it to see which move has been chosen. Each matchbox contains a small nook into which one bead falls--and MENACE plays in the square corresponding to that bead.

But what's really clever is that MENACE learns. Every time it wins a game, an additional bead is added to each matchbox played, corresponding to each winning move. Likewise, every time it loses, a bead corresponding to each losing move is removed. As a result, over time, MENACE becomes more likely to play moves that have previously resulted in wins and less likely to play moves that have resulted in losses.

MENACE Flickr set

Sisters and brothers, these are the first days of a new golden age of kipple.

Ban Hammer: 3D printed (Thanks, Chris!)

Sarah sez, "This Halloween my costume was inspired by Longoland's Monster Skin Rug (which I think is just so awesome). I thought you'd get a kick out of seeing some pics -- I called it the Longo Monster and got 3rd place for "Scariest Costume" at the 13th Annual North Halsted Halloween Parade here in Chicago. I spent the whole night getting hugged by strangers who thought it was adorable :) The body is a mechanic's jumpsuit covered in scales cut from white fleece."

Longo Monster -- costume inspired by Longoland rug (Thanks, Sarah!)

Penfold sez, "As a student of medicine and biomedical engineering, I enjoy the chance to make something a little creepy for Hallowe'en. The link shows a homemade anatomically correct latex-moulded mask of the musculature of the human face, as well as an unhappy pumpkin with an exposed brain. Feliz dia de los muertos!"

Hallowe'en 2009 (Thanks, Penfold!)

Two years ago, I blogged Flickr users andibob909's steampunk wedding and now they're about to have a baby! I learned this by admiring the awesome Darth-Vader-and-Death-Star pregosaur costume. That is one lucky foetus and one awesome mom-to-be!

Darth Vader and the Death Star

Kirby sez, "The December 2009 copy of Garden Railways magazine features an article about the Castle Peak & Thunder Railroad, a Disneyland Park themed, 1370 sq. foot, 1:24 scale model backyard railroad. The CPTRR, like its inspiration, is located in Anaheim, CA. It was built by Dave Sheegog, an architect who was a former Cast Member on the Canoes at Disneyland. He built replicas of all 5 Disneyland Steam locomotives and purchased a Casey Jr. locomotive. He scratch built all scenery to match Disneyland including replicas of the Main Street Train Station, Indiana Jones Adventure, and Sleeping Beauty Castle. Parts of Storybook Land, Big Thunder Mountain, Primeval World and the old Skull Rock are also included."

Castle Peak and Thunder Railroad (Thanks, Kirby!)

Ken Pilot's "Sparky" is a haunted house prop of a guy getting fried in an electric chair. It would scare the wits out of my kids.

Electrocution prop par excellence

Mr Fixit Rick built a neat-looking "Spooky Tesla Spirit Radio" that could be used to provide background industrial noises for a Lynch movie. He shows you how to build your own at Instructables.

Spooky Tesla Spirit Radio

Writer Jeroen van Bergeijk lives in The Netherlands but is spending some time in Australia. He's posting his photos and observations on his blog. Today he came across a bike retrofitted with a small one-banger engine.

Saw this awesome - or I should say grouse - looking bicycle today when I went to Port Adelaide to pick up my stuff coming in from Rotterdam. It's a Dunlop Bushranger mountain bike with a small, one cylinder engine fitted on to it. The great thing is that all the original bicycle gears still work. I suppose the owner starts the engine when going uphill or something.

It has sprockets on both sides of the wheel. On the right side the original bicycle gears, on the left side a sprocket driven by the engine.

Forbidden Planet Megastore: Cory Doctorow signing Makers

If you live in Canada or the US, click below for more info:

Today is the launch of my new novel, Makers, a book about people who hack hardware, business-models, and living arrangements to discover ways of staying alive and happy even when the economy is falling down the toilet. Weirdly, I wrote it years before the current econopocalypse, as a parable about the amazing blossoming of creativity and energy that I saw in Silicon Valley after the dotcom crash, after all the money dried up.

As with all my previous novels, the whole book is available as a free, Creative Commons download, under a NonCommercial-ShareAlike license that allows you to remix it to your heart's content and share the book and your mixes noncommercially. And as with my last two books, I've created a unique donations program that connects generous people with schools, universities, libraries, shelters, prisons and other cash-strapped institutions.

Here's how it works: this page has instructions for profs, librarians and similar worthies to list themselves as potential recipients for Makers (please pass this URL around to people who might want a copy!). If you've read the electronic text of Makers and want to reimburse me, but don't want a copy of the print book for yourself, you can buy a copy for the institution of your choice. Everybody wins: you get to settle your karma while supporting your favorite bookseller, a library or university gets a copy of the book without having to divert its budget, my publisher gets the sale and I get the royalty and the sales-figure. I've facilitated the donation of hundreds of books this way, and it works great.

I'm launching Makers in the UK at Forbidden Planet in London tomorrow (Thursday) night at 6PM, and I'll be having the Toronto launch with Bakka Books at the Merril Collection on November 12. You can pre-order inscribed copies from either event, and they'll be shipped after I sign. (There's also a great indie bookseller near my office in London, Clerkenwell Tales, which will take your inscription mail-orders; I'll stop in a couple times a week to sign them for the duration).

There's also a US east-coast tour with stops in NYC, New Jersey, Boston and Philly, but the details are still being finalized. If you think you can make it to any of those places and want to get an email once the details are fixed, drop me an email and I'll send you a note once I have them in hand.

Let's see, what else? Oh yeah, this kick-ass Publishers Weekly starred review:

In this tour de force, Doctorow (Little Brother) uses the contradictions of two overused SF themes--the decline and fall of America and the boundless optimism of open source/hacker culture--to draw one of the most brilliant reimaginings of the near future since cyberpunk wore out its mirror shades. Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks, typical brilliant geeks in a garage, are trash-hackers who find inspiration in the growing pile of technical junk. Attracting the attention of suits and smart reporter Suzanne Church, the duo soon get involved with cheap and easy 3D printing, a cure for obesity and crowd-sourced theme parks. The result is bitingly realistic and miraculously avoids cliché or predictability. While dates and details occasionally contradict one another, Doctorow's combination of business strategy, brilliant product ideas and laugh-out-loud moments of insight will keep readers powering through this quick-moving tale.

Makers

Joe Stockley paced the floor of his office and cursed under his breath. Dammit, he thought, why am I such a brilliant writer that no-one ever understands the depth and complexity of my work? It's almost as if I'm the only real person in the world and all the other people are just automatons! No, that can't be (he thought). Can it...?

Just then, he was interrupted by the ringing of his top of the range iPhone 3GS (32GB).

'Hello?' he said, his voice booming with a timbre which was capable of simultaneously charming his many admirers and intimidating any who dared oppose him.

'Hello Joe,' a mellifluous voice came floating back. 'It's your loving wife here.'

'Hello, my beautiful-beyond-compare, talented and intelligent wife,' said Joe, his laughter reverberating around the expensive fixtures and fittings of his luxurious house.

Now back to your regularly scheduled nifty, blinky things. Like these LED-enhanced false eyelashes designed by artist Soomi Park. They're hooked up to a motion sensor, so as you tilt your head in different directions, they turn on and off.

Gary sez, "ABC News Online (Australia) is going to release footage (photos, video, audio, text) of Sunday's Brisbane Zombie Walk, under a CC license. Content will feature on ABC Pool, for users to create their own mashups/remixes etc. Not sure if this is an Australian first, but it's pretty rare for MSM to release content like this. ABC Pool is also seeking video/audio/text with a zombie theme, either real or imagined."

Project: The Dead Walk! (Thanks, Gary!)