What a great way to fancy up a broken car key fob. Here is how he did it. Read the rest

IMGUrian Syn9 made this wonderful cyberpunk face shield helmet blinky thing. Read the rest

“They are the pets of a friend of mine and he wanted to give them as a gift to someone who loved them but could not have their own budgies.” Read the rest

This video shows remote-controlled miniature diggers being used to escavate basement. It's taken quite a while, according to one source, though it seems more like a growing hobby than an explicit construction project.

You'll be struck by how incredible the "toys" are. Find out more at rctruckandconstruction.com.

On our forum you will find many gifted builders of both trucks and construction equip of all levels of skill and everyone is friendly, outgoing & enjoys helping out newcomers wanting to get involved with the hobby. There's a Vendor's Section of private hobbyists who are willing to put up their skills for hire at a fee that is driven moreso to help others in the hobby, rather than lining their pockets for maxium profit..don't get me wrong, they don't give away their time, but they are priced very reasonably and the quality of their work is carefully monitored by myself & others who are leaders of the forum.

The detailed perfection of the custom-built mini-diggers makes screenshots and some of the videos disorienting, as if we had discovered and begun unearthing vast mysterious monuments that perfectly resembled dingy basements.

Here's another:

Read the rest

“Take that, Petsmart, with your overly expensive cat toys!” Read the rest

The finished piece he makes is such a delight, but so is watching it come together from spare scraps of wood. Read the rest

[This post is sponsored by Glowforge. To get $100 off a Glowforge Basic, $250 off a Glowforge Plus, or $500 off a Glowforge Pro use the link glowforge.com/boingboing.]

My 15-year-old daughter and I love retro video games. We often go a retro video game arcade in Pasadena, California, and we also play a lot of computer games from the 1980s and 1990s. We thought it would be fun to build a dedicated machine at home that we could use to play these retro games.

After a bit of online searching, we found out it’s easy to use a Raspberry Pi, which is a $35 single board computer the size of a credit card, along with a free Linux based operating system called RetroPie that has emulators for every arcade and console imaginable. We could use a Raspberry Pi and RetroPie to play every arcade game we want. And with our Glowforge laser cutter, we could easily make an arcade cabinet for ourselves as well quickly make them for friends and family.

In this 2-part video series, which was underwritten by our friends at Glowforge, I’m going to show you how we did it.

Parts and Materials

First, we bought all the parts and materials we needed to make the cabinet. We got a Raspberry Pi Model 3 B+, a 32GB MicroSD card, a power supply, a 10-inch HDMI monitor, a set of arcade buttons and a joystick, a pair of speakers, some cables and a box of various machine screws and nuts and standoffs. Read the rest

'Bobs Burgers' fans and stitching crafters, get ready to flip out. Read the rest

On April 29, 1961, Dr. Leonid Rogozov was in Antarctica in a blizzard when his stomach began to hurt. Badly. The only physician on the Soviet Antarctic Expedition, Rogozov realized his appendix needed to come out before it burst and killed him. Rogozov's only choice was to take the matter into his hands. He roped in a meteorologist and a driver to assist. From MDLinx:

Dr. Rogozov assumed a semi-reclined position designed to allow him to perform the operation with minimal use of a mirror...

“It was frequently necessary to raise my head in order to see better, and sometimes I had to work entirely by feel,” Dr. Rogozov wrote. “General weakness became severe after 30 to 40 minutes, and vertigo developed, so that short pauses for rest were necessary.”

Toward the end of the operation, Dr. Rogozov nearly lost consciousness and he feared he would not survive....

After resection of the severely diseased vermiform appendix (including a 2 × 2 cm perforation at the base), antibiotics were introduced into the peritoneal cavity, and he closed the wound...

Understandably, he described his postoperative condition as “moderately poor,” although signs of peritonitis resolved during the next 4 days. At 5 days post-surgery, his fever diminished, and the sutures were removed by day 7. After 2 weeks, he was back to work.

(via Historic) Read the rest

Editor's Note: Richard Metzger is a connoisseur of cannabis, and recently started growing his own. He's test-driving high-end rig good for small-scale grows from Cloudponics. This is not a sponsored post, Boing Boing is not getting anything from Cloudponics. Metzger's just really *that* enthusiastic about weed, and spoiler alert, so far he likes the Cloudponics setup. Here's an early photo from the grow, and the first installment of Richard's ongoing lab notes. — Xeni

I am a 53-year-old wake-n-bake stoner and I've been high since 1979.

Leaving much of that, er, loaded statement aside (and yes, as a definitive study of one, I do plan to leave my body to science) think of all the money I've spent staying massively stoned since I was fourteen. At approximately $20 a day over 365 days per annum ($7300) for 39 years that comes to $284,700 but do consider that I had to make nearly twice that and pay tax on that income before I could spend it on herb. Money doesn't grow on trees, of course, but there was a time not all that long ago when an ounce of pot and an ounce of gold were the exact same price, for a little perspective. Read the rest

Flyjumper crafted this magnificent Stratocaster-shaped guitar from 1,200 colored pencils and a lot of grit. He's posted many more photos and GIFs of the build here.

"I saw a lot of people online making bowls out of colored pencils and I wanted to take it up a notch and make something that I can actually utilize and enjoy more so than a bowl," he writes.

Read the rest

Adam Savage keeps mining deeper and deeper strata of nerdly obsessions, with recent Tested projects including collaborating with other prop makers to create a spot-on ACES NASA astronaut suit for cosplay, building a 3D-printed hand cannon from Mortal Engines, and another pilgrimage to Middle Earth, aka Weta Workshop in New Zealand. Read the rest

Reddit user marc_urzz posted this photo of the fantastic sink in his step-uncle's bathroom. A little web searching then led me to the tenor horn urinals below. It would also be fun to use a trumpet as a shower head! What instrument would make a good toilet?

Read the rest

Why waste paper, tape and ribbons to wrap gifts when you can just use fabric, or furoshiki cloth?

Furoshiki is the art of wrapping something in fabric, and it's also the word used for the cloth itself. In Japan you can buy "furoshiki cloth," but really you can use any square or rectangle piece of fabric you have lying around.

From Lifehacker:

The word furoshiki (風呂敷) refers to the craft in addition to the cloth itself, which is usually decorated with a colorful design. It roughly translates to “bath (furo) spread (shiki)” because the cloths were originally used to carry items to the public bath house and then used as a kind of bath mat. Nowadays, it’s just a clever way to wrap up and carry bottles, food, gifts, and other items.

Here are more furoshiki 101 videos to check out:

Read the rest

“Added some epic wings to accompany my previous Perler Bead Armor set,” says Cosplay Amy. Holy cow this is beautiful and extremely committed. It's so gorgeous. Read the rest

Steve of Miller Knives found an extremely rusty old Estwing hammer at a flea market and restored it beautifully. The process is the product. Read the rest

Boing Boing pal and maker superhero Mitch Altman, creator of the amazing TV-B-Gone, spent several years designing a simple-yet-powerful DIY music synthesizer that he could use to teach creative electronics and also digital signal processing to kids and adults. The result is the ArduTouch Music Synthesizer! And it's only $30! Demo videos below. Mitch wrote about the method behind his maker madness in IEEE Spectrum. From his essay:

As a kid with a lust for music, I was rocked by the Moog synthesizer sounds of 1968’s Switched-On Bach. I needed to learn how to make those sounds! Thus began a lifetime of learning and synthesizer making while I made my way in the tech industry, where I ultimately created the TV-B-Gone, a gadget that lets you turn off almost any model of remote-controlled television. Since the popular success of the TV-B-Gone, I’ve created many fun, open-source, hackable hardware kits for the maker workshops I give around the world. In these workshops, newbies learn to solder, tinkering their way into electronics and microcontrollers. Remembering my own youth, I wanted to provide them with a kit that was simple to assemble [PDF] and use but still a fully fledged music synthesizer.

The result was the US $30 ArduTouch. This project incorporates, on a single board, a touch keyboard, an ATMega328P (the same processor used in the Arduino Uno), and an audio amp with a speaker. It also has a software library that can serve as an entry point into the world of digital signal processing.