When NYC Resistor’s Chris Fenton wanted a Cray, he wasn’t talking about a casemodded PC. No, he really wanted his own Cray. His exhaustively-researched machine simulates the functionality of one of the old-school supercomputers, to the point where he’s researching old Cray resources looking for programs to run — apparently you can’t exactly download Centipede for the Cray off the Internet, who knew?
No hackerspace is complete without it’s own rockin’ supercomputer - and when a Gibson isn’t available, a Cray-1 will have to do. My 1/10-scale, binary-compatible Cray-1 is finally done! This project took a long time (almost as long as my infamous electromechanical computer, or *gasp* the MegaScroller), but it’s done. And it’s awesome. NYCR now has its own Cray-1A, complete with wrap-around pleather sitting area. Eat your hearts out fellow hackerspaces!
Brave hackers take note, Chris has made his working files available on his site. [Via NYC Resistor]
Florin wanted a MakerBot watch but they were never in stock. So he made his own! He calls it the DWex, which stands for the ‘Duino watch for experimenters.
This watch is built around a 3V-powered ATmega328P running at 8MHz. Time is shown using 2 circles of 12 LEDs, in a manner similar to an analog watch (with hands). Minutes are indicated on the exterior circle of green LEDs; hours are indicated on the interior circle of red LEDs.
To make the watch practical (that is, wearable), the battery life should be at least in the order of months. This can only be achieved by keeping the processor in sleep mode most of the time. At the push of a button the microcontroller becomes active and lights up the appropriate LEDs for 3-5 seconds; then it goes back to sleep.
Paper is many things: a carrier of text, illustration, history and emotion.
Jeremy May has captured the beauty of paper via a unique laminating process. Littlefly jewellery is made by laminating hundreds sheets of paper together, then carefully finishing to a high gloss. The paper is selected and carefully removed from a book, and the jewellery re-inserted in the excavated space.
Each piece is impossible to replicate, and is unique to the wearer. The beauty of the jewels extends within the piece: text and images pass all the way though the object, only exposed at the surfaces – giving a tantalising glimpse of the book within.
Adam Richard Cooper built this hand-cranked model of a classic mechanical governor–which, as MachinistBlog succinctly put it “regulates the speed of steam engines by acting as a negative feedback system”–and made the dimensional drawings and build notes freely available for download at his site. I like the idea of a hand-cranked governor model, particularly, because it provides tactile feedback of the device’s purpose: You crank it faster, it gets harder to crank.
A band saw box makes a fun and satisfying beginner’s woodworking project, and Instructables user Wood Chuck has a great tutorial to set you up for success.
I currently live in the Phoenix, Arizona area, which gets mighty hot in the summer. This summer, we’ve had several days around or above 110 degrees. I have twin baby boys, and despite cracking the windows, using reflective seat covers and running the A/C full blast when driving them around, their backs are just soaked with sweat when we reach our destination. The seats bake in the car in the sun for hours, then you put a baby in it and they never really cool off. So I devised this method for cooling their car seats with pump-recirculated cold water. The end product is a cooling pad to fit underneath the car seat cover behind their backs. This can be easily modified to fit adults too.
Blogsnapper at 10:09 am 
