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Favorited Video: The making of original <i>Star Wars</i>' computer graphics on Boing Boing Gadgets
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Favorited Cabel Sasser Finds OS X's "Awesomest Finder Bug of All Time" on Boing Boing Gadgets
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Favorited HOWTO Be blogged on Boing Boing
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Favorited HOWTO Be blogged on Boing Boing
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Favorited HOWTO Be blogged on Boing Boing
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Favorited HOWTO Be blogged on Boing Boing
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Posted Video: Russian School for the Blind to Boing Boing Gadgets
Charles Shopsin is a New York City-raised and Brooklyn-based software developer. In his spare time, he runs the Modern Mechanix blog. This is a film I saw last year at the Anthology Film Archives in New York. It was part of a series called "Trash-Picking and Eye-Popping: Offbeat Gems from America's Oddest 16MM Collectors." The film features what appears to be a Russian school for the blind and vision-impaired, although it took me a really long time to figure that out. I'm not sure if the school existed or if this was just some Soviet era propaganda/futurism piece. If anybody wants to translate, please post it in the comments, because I'd love to know. It looks like a cross between a science museum and a vacation resort. They have all sorts of nifty gadgets to teach the kids astronomy, engineering, anatomy, and, er ... massage. Plus there's a kick-ass computer lab complete with Braille teletypes. When I found out I was going to be guest blogging here I sent an email to Stephen Parr, owner of Oddball Films+Video asking him if he had a digital version that I might share with the class. He graciously provided me with this. Thanks, Stephen!...
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Posted The Sidewinder and the Snow-Motor to Boing Boing Gadgets
Charles Shopsin is a New York City-raised and Brooklyn-based software developer. In his spare time, he runs the Modern Mechanix blog. OK, I admit: a forklift is not exactly standard fare for a gadgets site, but the Airtrax Sidewinder is pretty cool. It uses a set of four individually powered Mecanum wheels that allow it to move in any direction, including sideways and diagonally. I was reminded of this video by a commenter who posted another video a couple of weeks ago on my blog. It's a 1926 snowmobile kit called the Snow-Motor. It seems really agile and looks quite fetching when slung under a Chevrolet....
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Posted Review of the Bionicam to Boing Boing Gadgets
Charles Shopsin is a New York City-raised and Brooklyn-based software developer. In his spare time, he runs the Modern Mechanix blog. When USB microscopes started appearing on the market a few years ago, I thought they looked like a lot of fun, but the prices were a bit steep for an impulse buy. So I added it to my disturbingly long mental list of "things I'd like to buy if they ever get cheap enough or I get rich enough" and went on with my life. A few months ago I saw that Amazon had the EyeClops BioniCam microscope on sale for $19.99, so I snatched one up. It may look like a giant eyeball mounted on the end of a hairbrush but it's really a fantastic toy. Sadly, the price seems to have risen back up to $39.99 but that's still pretty cheap for what you get. There is a camera right in the center, where you'd expect, and the eyeball rotates to serve as a focusing ring. There is a magnification dial on the side with settings for 100x, 200x and 300x zoom levels. These aren't digital zooms: turning the dial actually places a different lens in front of the sensor. Inside are 3 bright LEDs to illuminate your subject, which shows up on a screen mounted on back. The BioniCam takes pictures at up to 1280x1024 and video at 427x240. Focusing can be a bit fiddly, especially when you're hopping between magnifications but all in all the pictures are quite nice. Unlike other similar kits, this one is not tethered to your computer. It comes with a 32 meg thumb drive that sticks into a slot on the top, making transferring images and movies to your computer a snap. Moments after seeing my BioniCam, my brother in-law Andy ordered one of his own. Soon I started receiving emails with attachment names like crustyoldbooger.jpg (warning: this is just as disgusting as it sounds) and face_salt.avi, a bizarre romp through the wilds of Andy's beard. Lincoln's Eye from five dollar bill at 100x Gallery of my BioniCam Shots Bionicam tag on Flickr...
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Posted Wurlitzer Factory Tour - 1950 to Boing Boing Gadgets
Charles Shopsin is a New York City-raised and Brooklyn-based software developer. In his spare time, he runs the Modern Mechanix blog, waits tables, and finds new ways to torture his cat. His dream girl is Jordan from the movie Real Genius. When I was a little kid I saw an episode of Mr. Rogers where he visited a factory that made canned vegetable soup. The soup was made in giant vats and the ingredients — peas, carrots and whatnot — were poured in from giant overhead buckets. Then they went on to the canning, labeling and packing lines. It was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen. I've been hooked on factory tours ever since. I'm also a huge fan of ephemera and when you put the two together you get old factory tours. The best place I know of to find these is the online outpost of the Prelinger Library, hosted by Archive.org. I think I have watched almost every movie listed there and this week I'll be sharing a few of my favorites. The video I'm linking to today is called "A Visit to Wurlitzer:" made in 1950, this film visits the factory that made Wurlitzer jukeboxes. Maybe not the most exciting video to watch but it is fascinating. Think about all of the buzzwords relating modern production: just-in-time logistics, outsourcing, off-the-shelf components, sub-contractors, and even automation. Now think of the opposite and you'll have some idea of what this factory was like. Wood, plastic and metal go in one end, and jukeboxes come out the other. They make pretty much everything on site. There are chemists who develop and produce the varnishes, machinists who make the tools, and a sharpening room. They even make their own plywood. Because they produce pretty much everything from the cabinet to the smallest circuit on their assembly line, the schematics for a single jukebox cover 300,000 square feet of blueprint. It's a stunning example of the change the manufacturing industry has gone through in the last 60 years. Apple is one of the biggest electronics companies in America and I don't think they actually own a single factory. Skip to about 6 minutes in if you just want to see the tour and not a history of Wurlitzer. Link (Part I, Part II)...
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Posted Make your PS3 actually work as a media player to Boing Boing Gadgets
Charles Shopsin is a New York City-raised and Brooklyn-based software developer. In his spare time, he runs the Modern Mechanix blog, waits tables, and finds new ways to torture his cat. His dream girl is Jordan from the movie Real Genius. Hi! I'm Charlie and I'll be your guest blogger this week. I'm not sure what Joel was thinking when he offered this spot to a blogger whose blog consists entirely of scanned images. Kindly direct all complaints to him. Recently I purchased a big screen LCD television and a PlayStation 3 with the goal of using my PS3 as a network media player. Up until this weekend, I've found it to be a pretty frustrating experience. My goal was pretty simple: I wanted to store all of my media on a 1TB drive attached to my AirPort Extreme and play it through my PS3. It should've been a snap, right? This thing is a frickin' supercomputer with every connectivity option imaginable. Why did it not work? The first thing I discovered is that you can't play media from a plain-old shared network folder (Windows or Mac). Instead, you need a DLNA compliant UPnP server. No problem. Windows Media Player has a built in UPnP server and it seemed to work fine. I could see all of the media on my computer under the Video tab on the PS3. So I started browsing around to see how things looked on my fancy new TV. Some things played fine, but others give me a "this data type is not supported" message, seemingly at random. I'm sure that someone with a deep knowledge of video encoders, transcoders, muxers and media containers could tell you why, but I can't. Also, forget about playing back any H.264/AC3 HD content one might have um ... acquired on the Internet. The other issue I noticed was that I couldn't see any of the video stored on my AirPort Extreme, even though I had the shared disk mapped to a drive in Windows and had added it to my WMP media library. Apparently, WMP doesn't allow you to share content from a remote drive. So, I went looking for a third party solution and found one called PS3 Media Server, an open source java app that runs on Windows/Mac/Linux. The description on the site claimed that it could make your PS3 play pretty much anything under the sun, with zero configuration: Real-time video transcoding via MEncoder DVD ISOs images / VIDEO_TS Folder transcoder OGG/FLAC/MPC/APE audio transcoding Thumbnail generation for Videos All formats PS3 natively supports: MP3/JPG/PNG/GIF/TIFF, all kind of videos (AVI, MP4, TS, M2TS, MPEG) the ps3 is willing to play Display camera RAWs thumbnails (Canon / Nikon, etc.) ZIP/RAR files as browsable folders Support for pictures based feeds, such as Flickr and Picasaweb Internet TV / Web Radio support with VLC, MEncoder or MPlayer Podcasts audio/ Video feeds support Basic Xbox360 support Windows/Linux Only: Direct streaming of DTS / DTS-HD core to the receiver Remux PS3 compatible H264/MPEG2 video and all audio tracks to AC3/DTS/LPCM in real time with tsMuxer FLAC 96kHz/24bits/5.1 support I installed it, turned on my PS3 and went to the Video tab. There was now a new entry called PS3 Media Server and under it, I found all of the drives on my computer, even the network shares. Everything played! All of the videos that wouldn't play before worked fine now. Even H.264/AC content played fine, thanks to the ability to transcode/remux video streams on the fly. I've only just scratched the surface of what this app can do, but it has already made watching video over my PS3 a lot more pleasant. Link...
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Posted <i>Modern Mechanix</i> Round-UP to Boing Boing Gadgets
Recently on Modern Mechanix we looked at the Heli-Vector, which had everyone asking "Will he blend?", Time Magazine's 1956 round up of the state of factory Automation, a bicycle powered hair salon, a man who claims to own outer space, a UCLA lab where they put people in ovens at over 260° F just to see what happens, an unintentionally ironic Lucky Strikes ad, a bank teller's cage with fourteen ways to foil robbers and a rather bizzare family bicycle/sewing machine. Also, we learned how to roast weinies when all you have is wood, nails and an outlet, the origins of NASCAR and how to build a pedal powered airplane swing for your back yard. Plus, the birth of the ethanol lobby....
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Posted <i>Modern Mechanix</i> Round-UP to Boing Boing Gadgets
Remember kiddies, while doing a bunch of crystal meth may seem to make you more productive, it's all just an illusion. Things just start slipping through the cracks; things like your regular Modern Mechanix Round-UP on BBG. Well no more, here's what we've, er, let's drop the royal we thing, I've been up to on MM. (BTW: I've never been able to figure out why Joel capitalized the P in UP, but he's the boss, so I'll stick with it.) First off we start with this um, er, stilt-cycle? Legicycle? Footcycle? It's a pedal driven pair of legs, one I would very much like to see in motion. In the plain old weird crap department we have an atomic golf ball designed to be easy to find in the rough with your handy geiger counter and hit with your giant golf club, fish trained to swim through a hoop, an early pedometer/proto-gps backpack, the new sport of barrel dropping, and an inflated "hot" suit for entering rooms full of plutonium. Actually the last one is kind of funny. An eagle eyed, yet heretofore silent reader of the site pointed out that I had posted an identical image a few years ago. This reminded me that one of the first communities that started regularly linking to the site was a Hazmat fetish Yahoo group called HazmatBabes. Actually if you go to the site, the main image is from MM. Anyway, back to the Round-UP. In transportation we have Denmark's 1930 submarine/plane, a weird boat that floats on rollers, one man's bizarre looking "solution" to the helicopter problem, an auto racer with built-in perch for your pet lion, the first trailer for a movie star, a stuntman's attempt to test the durability of tires by driving straight into a brick wall (don't ask, I don't understand it either), and a flying whirligig. Plus Popular Science asks if the autogiro will banish airplanes and Modern Mechanics (as it was spelled before 1932) takes us on a tour of torture devices from old convict ships. In the computers section we have a 1979 round-UP of revolutionary personal computers. What's so special about these computers you ask? Well you can actually buy software for them instead of writing it your self! Also, from Play Girl magazine (not that one), we learn that Men DO MAKE Passes at Girls Who Wear Glasses. And... well, I'll save the rest for the next, hopefully quicker, update....
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Posted <i>Modern Mechanix</i> Round-UP to Boing Boing Gadgets
Over at Modern Mechanix we're currently in the middle of series of posts about technologies that were invented earlier than you might have thought. We've already done fax machines, answering machines and televisions and have more coming later this week. (At right is a color fax machine from 1946) We've also posted articles about a man who designed magic tricks for famous magicians, designs for floating airports, extremes in sexual behavior (of the time, pretty mild by today's standards), a truck that walks on metal feet, the $125,000,000 (1931 dollars) mini-golf industry, how to disarm a gun toting attacker, self lighting cigarettes, a photographer who poses as a cactus, Wile Coyote style, a collection of strange bridges, one man helicopters, rocket planes that'll get your from NYC to LA in 40 minutes, leg falsies, a nicotine remover for cigarettes, 3D-movies, camouflaged military pigeons, a self dialing directory driven phone and a look at where television stands today (today being 1931). In the computer section we also looked at Byte magazine's review of the original Macintosh, and their much more interesting interview with the design team (hint: even in 1984 Jobs was arrogant and irritatingly right), an ad for a 1983 "64-bit" computer, and in 1968 Look magazine asked the question "The Computer Data Bank, Will it Kill Your Freedom?"...
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Posted <i>Modern Mechanix</i> Round-UP to Boing Boing Gadgets
Sorry for the recent hiatus folks. Today we’re back with a Modern Mechanix Mega Round-UP. Let’s start with the Computers section of the site. Recently we’ve looked at Byte magazine’s first reviews of the Apple IIe, Apple Lisa, a variety of early 80’s British computers and the original Compaq, which was the first PC clone. We learned that Compuserve once tried to trademark the word Email and that the catholic church invented modern database driven direct-mail fundraising. In aviation we learned all about atomic planes, Northrup's B-49 flying wing bomber, vacuum dirigibles, spinning wing airliners, and a miraculous flying machine powered by the physics defying "gyradoscope". On the plain old retrofuturism front we had a 1955 Mechanix Illustrated round-up of the Amazing Marvels of Tomorrow, Radio-Electronics magazine's 1967 House of Tomorrow, Popular Mechanics' 1939 Electric Home of the Future, some amazing 1931 movie miniatures portraying the cities of tomorrow, and what tomorrow's car will look like. We also learned how to make an inflatable dome from a kit, how a modern hotel is run, how the world will end, how daredevils make a living, if sharks really bite, and how fancy electronic signs are made....
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Posted <i>Modern Mechanix</i> Round-UP to Boing Boing Gadgets
Today on Modern Mechanix we looked at these oh-so-cool sport binoculars, an advertisement for Harley Davidson's 1951 Hydra-Glide motorcycle, a centuries old automaton of an old woman that writes letters and learned that Canada is full of courteous people and fresh fish. This 1932 Modern Mechanix article documents the birth of the nascent US electronics industry, complete with a bunch of nifty photos. Also be sure to check out this 1968 Mechanix Illustrated article introducing the Boeing 747 and this 1934 piece about the construction of the Pan-American highway, stretching from Alaska to Argentina....
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Posted Today on <i>Modern Mechanix</i> to Boing Boing Gadgets
Recently on Modern Mechanix we looked at this nifty wrist watch camera from 1939 that holds enough film for 36 photos, an odd cure for hay fever, a shipboard kennel located in a false funnel on the ocean liner Normandie , another "compact" hearing aid that isn't so compact, a 1914 amphibious vehicle called the Hidromobile that bares a striking resemblance to a clog and a tubby, well dressed robot that can dance. From 1939 we learned what Popular Mechanics thought a stay on Mars would be like, and Mechanix Illustrated asks the frightening question: "Will Polar Waves Swamp America?" along with some awesome illustrations in case the headline didn't sufficiently scare you....
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Posted <i>Modern Mechanix</i> Round-UP to Boing Boing Gadgets
Recently on Modern Mechanix we look at this cool little fish shaped submarine, a 1902 ad for an adding machine called the Comptometer, a 1936 Popular Science piece that explains why we might have another ice age, a dome light for Japanese cops, a comparison of the New York skyline from 1880 and 1930 (and today) as well as a 1977 Hewlett Packard computer advertisement touting their astoundingly inexpensive ECC RAM, just 5 cents (17 cents in 2007 dollars) per byte....
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Posted <i>Modern Mechanix</i> Round-UP to Boing Boing Gadgets
Recently on Modern Mechanix we looked at a 1950 Mechanix Illustrated article about how some of history's most famous inventions were discovered by accident. Pictured at right is Wilhelm von Roentgen's simultanious discovery of both the X-Ray and the electric razor. We made a brief stop in the seventies today with this Popular Science piece about preventing Skyjackers, and a trippy 1977 science fiction themed ad for Fairchild Semiconductor. We also looked at the booming business of balloon manufacturing, early abstract animations set to music, scientific highlights of the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, phono/photo post cards, experiments with oxygen, a parachute jump tower and a 1961 ad for an IBM punched card modem. Lastly you really should check out this article about a co-ed crew of crazy miners in 1902 who built a sail powered car to cross the desert and gain access to their gold mine. The picture alone is worth the price of admission....
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Posted <i>Modern-Mechanix</i> Round-UP to Boing Boing Gadgets
Today on Modern Mechanix we looked at this gasoline powered radio that gets 160 hours of playtime per gallon, a pretty precarious looking sled-bike, a lengthy 1931 Popular Science article about evolution, and a 1928 plan for passengers in a hurry to be loaded into bi-planes and catapulted off of the deck of ocean liners when they get within a couple of hundred miles of their destination. We also learned how scientists of 1947 planned to raid the ocean floor and that automobiles are not popular in Holland....
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Posted <i>Modern-Mechanix</i> Round-UP to Boing Boing Gadgets
Today on Modern Mechanix we look at a wonderful 1954 article from Colliers magazine that predicted the huge changes coming due to solid-state electronics. Published just a few years after the invention of the transistor this article talks about color VCRs, touch-tone phones, solar power and many other inventions including the surprisingly modern looking flat screen TV at right. Today we also looked at a cute profile of a goofy inventor, a bar tender automat , the oh-so-stylish cigarette hat, and little house shaped motorbikes for home repairmen. This weekend we learned about a government program to breed raccoons, how the greeting card industry works, and how crimes are solved by using hypnosis. We also looked at a doughnut handle, a rain coat that is also a map, a gas-raid shelter for pets, a monster bus that is also a movie theater, an expanding mobile home, a lip shaped stamp used to apply rouge and a rather scary looking cage mounted on the rumble seat of a car to take convicts off to prison....
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Posted <i>Modern Mechanix</i> Round-UP to Boing Boing Gadgets
Today on Modern Mechanix we have a 1956 Mechanix Illustrated article about scientist's plans to redesign the human body, including moving the mouth to the stomach and adding an eye to the tip of a finger. Showing that hucksters never miss a chance to exploit people's ignorance of new technology Popular Science wrote a 1939 expose about sham spiritualists using "Spirit Televisions" to fleece their marks. We also looked at an assembly line technique for rapidly developing color photos, a round-up of cool kids toys and a milk wagon towed by zebras. Lastly there is this theater impresario's 1929 prediction that future theaters will be shaped like an egg with multiple slide projectors providing "sets" for the films. Oddly, he doesn't even mention the idea of talkies....
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