Kewpie Mayonnaise, made in Japan, has extra egg yolk and MSG in it, making it far superior to any other commercially-made mayonnaise. My family loves the Kewpie. To make it easier to squeeze out of the bottle, I 3D printed a thing you can attach to the cap so you can invert the bottle and let the mayo settle near the spout. Now we don't have to shake the bottle to get the mayo out.
If you want to print one of your own, here's the STL file. If you don't have a printer but love Kewpie and need one of these, email me (mark@boingboing.net) and I'll print one out and send it to you for the price of the postage.
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Hugh Jeffreys bought a wrecked MacBook Pro for $100. The hinge was broken, the case was bent, dented, and scratched, and two of the bottom feet had fallen off which allowed the inside to become filled with dirt.
He started by opening it. It was filthy inside. He cleaned out the fan then powered it up. Fortunately, it booted and the display seemed to be in good working order.
He bought a replacement battery, a new bottom case, upper case, top lid, front panel glass, a 500 GB SSD, and a new clutch cover. The video shows how he removed all the broken parts and replaced the new ones. It looks like a lot of work but the end result is great. And now he has one of the good kind of MacBook Pros, not the bad kind with the USB C port.
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Cleveland's Stephanie "Crochetverse" Pokorny created a freehand, crocheted Alien Xenomorph costume for her (incredibly lucky!) son, Jake, adding glow-in-the-dark fabric paint accents to make it luminescent. It's completely amazing.
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If you do soldering work, I recommend getting a pair of these micro cutters. They'll cut copper wires flush with the blob of solder, making your work look tidy. And they cost just on Amazon Read the rest
We're big fans of useless machines around here: those boxes with one or more switches, that, when toggled, trigger some kind of arm that pops out and puts the switch back in the off position, before retreating to the inside of the box.
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Phil Torrone from Adafruit writes, "Why roam around with a boring pumpkin bucket when you collect delicious candy with
a robotic Xenomorph head? This robotic candy bucket shoots out a small receptacle to retrieve candy and bring it back into the bucket. Some 3D printing is required to create the linear actuator. Two servo motors controlled by a Circuit Playground Express, coded with MakeCode, power this project."
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This is the lowest price I've seen for a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ single board computer. It has a 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core processor, WiFi, Bluetooth, and Ethernet. These Pis are great for playing retro video games (emulators for almost every game platform from the 80s and 90s you can think of are available). This Amazon deal is 16% claimed so far. Once it's fully claimed the price will go back up. Read the rest
Today is National Slinky Day. As Rachael Lallensack
writes in Smithsonian, a spring, a spring, this marvelous thing was invented by accident:
In 1943, mechanical engineer Richard James was designing a device that the Navy could use to secure equipment and shipments on ships while they rocked at sea. As the story goes, he dropped the coiled wires he was tinkering with on the ground and watched them tumble end-over-end across the floor.
After dropping the coil, he could have gotten up, frustrated, and chased after it without a second thought. But he—as inventors often do—had a second thought: perhaps this would make a good toy.
As Jonathon Schifman reported for Popular Mechanics, Richard James went home and told his wife, Betty James, about his idea. In 1944, she scoured the dictionary for a fitting name, landing on “slinky,” which means “sleek and sinuous in movement or outline.” Together, with a $500 loan, they co-founded James Industries in 1945, the year the Slinky hit store shelves...
Seventy-two years ago, Richard James received a patent for the Slinky, describing “a helical spring toy which will walk on an amusement platform such as an inclined plane or set of steps from a starting point to successive lower landing points without application of external force beyond the starting force and the action of gravity.” He had worked out the ideal dimensions for the spring, 80-feet of wire into a two-inch spiral. (You can find an exact mathematical equation for the slinky in his patent materials.) It was Betty that masterminded the toy’s success.
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In this video, The Q shows how to cut the heads out of coins. Start by putting the coin in a vise. Drill a small hole through the coin. Run a jeweler's saw blade through the hole and start sawing away. That's really all there is to it!
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Shipbrook makes 3D models of "props from science fiction movies, TV shows, and computer games that I enjoy" and uploads the models to Thingiverse so other people can print them out on a 3D printer. Here are the plans for his Star Trek Original Series - Hand Phaser Type II Body model.
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Ever since he was a kid, Matt Bilsky has wanted to make a kite-string winder. His first attempt, at age 8, didn't work because the motor was not strong enough and the string kept getting tangled. But a couple of decades later, he made one with a 3D printer that gets the job done. Read the rest
Surprisingly, bikinis with a watermelon theme are a thing. I think IsneakSush1ToBed's hand-crocheted melonkini is the best of the crop, though.
Finished the melonkini
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This is the least expensive Arduino-clone starter kit I've seen. It's just on Amazon, and comes with an Arduino Uno clone, a solderless breadboard, resistors, LEDs, jumper wires, pushbuttons, and a lot more.
If you need to learn how to use an Arduino, may I recommend my Skillshare video class? If you sign up here you can get 3 months of Skillshare videos for 99 cents. Skillshare has thousands of great videos to teach you about programming, art, animation and more. I've been a happy paying subscriber for years. Read the rest
Jan Hakon Erichsen is a Norwegian artist whose Destruction Diaries series chronicles his creation of a series of bizarre, whimsical and delightful machines for popping balloons and undertaking other acts of minor mayhem.
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Ken Landauer is an artist and woodworker who designs nice-slooking piece of furniture with two constraints. First, a piece or set can only use one standard 4 x 8 foot sheet of plywood, and second, it must use at least 94% of the sheet.
From Core 77:
Landauer's signature puzzle-piece style is made of CNC cut pieces that are finished with a UV-cured acrylic coating and can be customized with laminated or lacquered color options. Each piece is sanded, edged, and joined by hand.
The angular designs have acquired a reputation for being more comfortable than they initially appear. As a trained yogi (Landauer's body was used to develop the male cartoon figure that appears in 108 Yoga Poses for Dummies) Landauer considered proper body alignment and support when deciding on the various angles and surfaces of his pieces.
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Michael Gardi posted instructions for making a replica of the GENIAC ("GENIus Almost-automatic Computer") that was sold in kit form in the 1950s and 1960s for $20. Read the rest
