“Finally working again at 70 years, happily playing Casablanca.” 📺

Wow. Read the rest

The DIY, duct-taped motorcycle was described as the "most unusual vehicle" Sgt. Stephen Andrews had ever seen in 26 tears of pulling over motorists. But he found that it was roadworthy, had passed its Ministry of Transport inspection, and that the driver had paid his taxes. So on its way it went.

"This is certainly not a vehicle that is seen very often on our roads but after road side inspection we couldn't find anything that would prevent the rider to continue his journey.

"The vehicle was keeping up with other traffic and didn't cause any obstruction to other road users.

"The owner made sure that he fulfilled all the safety regulation as well as keeping the insurance, MOT and tax in date."

I would not drive it on a bumper car rink let alone the highway, but godspeed to whoever created this excellent contraption and braves the M25 in it.

The most unusual vehicle I've stopped on a motorway in my 26 years! All checked and in order, although still not convinced I know what it is. #400795 pic.twitter.com/oRNgPJEHHa

— BCH Road Policing (@roadpoliceBCH) August 18, 2019

Photo: BCH Road Policing Read the rest

In 1983, a crew of young, DIY documentarians visited Long Island's Roosevelt Field Mall to study mall culture. This is Mall City. (via r/ObscureMedia)

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The Pulp Librarian tweeted a fun history of Letraset's rub-on lettering sheets. Launched in 1959, the dry transfer letters transformed DIY design and publishing, from 'zines to record albums! Below are a few of the tweets. Click here for the whole thread!

Davis and Mackenzie – both experienced designers – created Letraset as a cheaper alternative to phototypesetting, to help speed up the design process. From humble beginnings in an old factory behind Waterloo station Letraset eventually swept across the design world! pic.twitter.com/jZsHV6Jjc2

— Pulp Librarian (@PulpLibrarian) July 25, 2019

In 1961 Letraset adopted the dry transfer process: letters screenprinted onto a polythene sheet were sprayed over with adhesive. You placed the sheet over the paper and used a pencil to rub over the letter, which detached from the carrier sheet and stuck to the paper. Sometimes. pic.twitter.com/nVV19tozTX

— Pulp Librarian (@PulpLibrarian) July 25, 2019

Darius Kazemi runs Friend Camp, a small social network for about 50 people; it costs him about $30/month to run, and consumes about 2h/week to administer: in his guide to running your own social network, Kazemi explains how to run a network of your own, with no ads, no surveillance, and no feature changes without the consent of the community. Read the rest

Finding a place home depends on what you can afford, deciding upon what you can live with and coming to understand what you can't live without. Many of us will never have the opportunity to build our own home, much less be able to scrape together enough currency to buy a parcel of land to plop it down upon. Ben Uyeda no longer has this problem: He bought 10 acres of land in Joshua Tree, California and built a lovely, modern home out of shipping containers.

If you've got the money and you're so inclined, Ben's series of videos on how he built his home, explains the whys and the hows of creating a place to call your own out of shipping containers. While I have no particular urge to settle down, I found myself enthralled by what went on behind the scenes to make this build happen. Read the rest

Using an Arduino, a bunch of code and a little machine learning, Benn Hamm created a cat door to keep his cat from bringing dead--and sometimes live--rats and birds into his home in the middle of the night. It's not often that I'm down with bringing surveillance technology into homes but, as a former cat owner who's had to clean bird shit off a flat-screen TV, I have nothing but love for this project.

Image via Wikipedia Commons Read the rest

Holy crap this is the most ambitious 'hey I think I'll build a fishpond' project I've ever seen. Read the rest

You know what's more badass and relaxing at the same time than going on a week-long canoe trip? Going on a week-long canoe trip in a vessel you built your own damn self. What I dig the most about this video is that shows the build process, mistakes and all, from start to finish. I don't know about you, but I always feel a whole lot better knowing that mistakes can be made by an expert and the project can still come out looking like a champ. Read the rest

Master maker Simone Giertz and her friends transformed her Tesla Model 3 into an electric pickup truck. Their fake TV commercial is above; build video below. TRUCKLA: Available nowhere. Now.

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Is there anything Adam Savage can't build?

His new Discovery TV show attempts to answer the riddle. Read the rest

The ClockworkPi Gameshell is a portable game console you make yourself, coming as a modular kit and assembling to form a GameBoy-like gadget with a quad-core CPU, 2.7-inch color display, WiFi and Bluetooth, 1GB of RAM, HDMI output and a 16GB MicroSD card holding its Linux-based OS: "a powerful computing platform that lets you begin creating immediately." Read the rest

'Mythbusters' TV star Adam Savage's first book is out. 'Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It' is a wonderful read, in which Adam shares his own personal guidelines for creativity, from inspiration to execution. Read the rest

Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg have long mentioned wanting to get their hands on a nice collection of Jamie Hewlett's Fireball comics from Deadline Magazine, so Jim decided to make one on his own. In fact, he hand bound three books before this recording.

BOOK BINDING TUTORIALS:

DIY Comic Book Binding with dozymuppet! This is the tutorial that led Jim to make some books. Highly recommended

Sewing Printed Signatures - Part 1. This video gives a clear demo of how to kettle-stitch signatures

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Subscribe to the Cartoonist Kayfabe YouTube channel for more vids celebrating the medium of comics. Read the rest

Architecture hacker/maker Ben Uyeda of HomeMadeModern designed and built his house out of shipping containers in the high desert of Joshua Tree, California. And he documented the process in fascinating detail.

How to Build A Shipping Container House (YouTube)

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I have a new piece on Better Humans exploring some of the main considerations when planning, designing, and outfitting your own home shop or personal makerspace. In the piece, I talk about the benefits of a public makerspace/hackerspace, namely high-end and cutting edge tools that many consumers still can't afford (3D printers, CNC machines, laser cutters, electronics equipment) and the learning and community aspects of joining such a space. But for those who would rather work alone, many of these technologies are now reaching price-points for more widespread adoption. For this reason, I use the term "personal makerspace" to refer to this type of high-tech home workshop. And I talk about setting up home workshops in general. I cover planning and design, basic tools, specialty tools, "maker tech" (3DP, CNC, etc.), storage, workbenches and carts, lighting and power, workshop as sanctuary, and more. Here is a brief excerpt:

Don’t Hate on the Harbor Freight

In the maker community, it is something of a sport to make fun of the cheap tools found at Harbor Freight. While it is true that a lot of Harbor Freight products are on the cheaply-made side, if you’re careful, discriminating, and do your homework, you can get perfectly fine workbenches, storage tech, hand tools, and even some respectable shop machinery and equipment for hundreds less than higher-end brands.

For starters, Harbor Freight workbenches, work carts, and storage systems are perfectly fine, especially for a home makerspace on a budget. I just bought their multipurpose sheet-steel workbench for $99.