New Research and Interesting Finds

Information- and enlightenment-wise, the last two days have been very exciting for me. Once in a blue-moon-ago I found a podcast in the iTunes library from MAKE magazine about how to ... er ... make things. Yesterday, after attempting some product research and a web-related effort to make one of the project pdfs available to my electronic-engineer-brother, I started browsing over the MAKE site http://makezine.com/ and HOLY COW, is it SWEEEEEET! What's more, in the spirit of sharing information that they embrace, they also had several links to other amazing artists and engineers. Oh, the fulfilling flury of frontal-lobe-stimulating words and images. I was swept away.

Words are both too much and not enough to describe the experience of my recent web-browsing, so with annotations to let you know how I was led through this landscape of learning, I'll let you browse some of these exciting links yourself.

MAKE Magazine
On just the page of this link alone you'll find links and project ideas for a GPS logger, uses for a vibration motor and PSP touch screen and newly-reduced-in-price accelerometers, USB wall charger, Cyclean - the pedal-powered washing machine, and plush irradiated sirloin (microcontroller nightlight), and MORE!

There are some great links ahead, but this might be one of the greatest web-finds of my life! Truly, there is something for everyone on this site, the whole spectrum from crafty to truly techno-dweeby.

In one of the many links available at this site I was led to a Boston Globe article about a philosophical/artistic movement called Steampunk. If you remember the Will Smith movie "Wild, Wild West", then you've seen it - truly modern inventions done to look or behave as if they are fresh out of the 1820s. That led me to other wonderful pages ...

Datamancer, AKA Rich "Doc" Nagy has fabricated a number of wonderful old-timey-looking objects some of which look to become available for purchase in the near future. Definately a very interesting renaissance man. A friend of his is ...

Jake von Slatt of the Steampunk workshop. On this website, he actually shows you how he makes things, which led me to ...

Cedric Green and GREEN PRINTS: etching metal without acid. This website actually brought me full circle as I had spent most of the morning yesterday looking for a supplier of Ferric Chloride to etch copper and bronze for some pendants I wanted to try. It was my frustration with not being able to find a vendor locally, since anyone who had to ship needed to charge an additional $20-25 HazMat fee, and I needed a mental break and decided to check the MAKE magazine link from the pdfs I uploaded for my brother ...

It's so interesting the way some things turn out; the way that unexpected things are very much related!