Ordinary things blowing up, in gorgeous, beautifully-lit slow motion: it’s a promotional video for some Danish TV show, but it’s totally grinworthy.

Those fluffy stick-on mohawks for motorcycle helmets are now available with LEDs and fiber optics.

Nicely done light fixture using old-style wire filament bulbs, mason jars, cloth-wrapped wire, redwood planks, and plumbing pipe. Step-by-step build gallery included.

Clever, beautiful use of a laser cutter: custom etched nori squares for elegantly surprising maki-sushi rolls.

We’re having an open house at ALTSpace today. If you’ve been curious about the space and what goes on in it, feel free to come by any time from now until 10 pm. It’s just general open-house time until 6 pm, then we’ll have our one-year anniversary party – beer, wine, snacks, and lots of art to look at!

Oh, yeah: I finally finished the dress for Jeanine, yesterday. I hate hand-sewing and avoid it whenever possible, but this is a semi-formal dress and not sportswear so hemming it via my usual “topstitch it with contrasting thread” strategy wouldn’t really have worked. It’s a lined dress, too, so I had to blind-stitch both the dupioni shell and the charmeuse lining. Ugh. I’m glad that’s over. It looks pretty – I made the lining just a little bit too long, on purpose, so you see a little flash of soft champagne gold at the bottom of the dress, for contrast. This project has taken a while; I was only about half done when I burned through my original stock of enthusiasm, so it’s been grinding along at a much slower pace for the last couple of months.

Current active project list:

• Radian, of course
• Electric motorcycle (still mostly just planning)
• Accelerometer-driven lighting system for “la petite piege” aka the spiderweb
• Floodland (next step: BLM permit)

That’s really it. Kind of a short list, but I think that’s OK: Floodland is the sort of thing that can suck up an arbitrary amount of time, and the electric motorcycle is a pretty large fabrication job too.

ALTSpace is supporting itself, and we’re going to have a first anniversary party on Saturday the 14th. It’s really satisfying to walk in there and see all the projects people are working on. There are clothes hanging on the wire shelves, bits of sculptures out on workbenches, an entire back corner taken over by painters… The Seattle Meshnet people come in every couple of weeks to hack on radios, and the last Dorkbot meeting happened here. I’m delighted to see the place functioning as a hub for creative & social activities.

I’ve been in a funk for the past month or so, but today my mood seems to be lifting. It’s a sunny day, I’m getting things done, and while my work situation is not going the way I had hoped, neither is the mess I’ve made quite the disaster I had feared it might be. Life is actually pretty much OK.

I bought a pair of Firstgear leather motorcycle pants last summer when I started commuting to work via bike again, and they really haven’t held up to steady use. One of the snaps broke, the fly zipper pull broke off, the right side leg zipper pull broke off, and then last week the whole right side zipper broke. I thought about trashing them and getting something more durable, but decided to try upgrading them first. I hammered in a new snap, then cut out the old zippers and replaced them with sturdy, chunky visilon zippers. I didn’t get the stitch line *perfectly* straight but it’s good enough that nobody will notice but me, and the new zippers ought to be substantially more durable than the old ones were.

Today I’m going to put a little more work into the dress I’ve been making for Jeanine. It’s all basically done now save the finish on a couple of interior seams and the actual hem. I’ve been moving very slowly on this project; perhaps I can finally get it done today.

Via boingboing, here’s Best Made: an online catalog of goods with simple, classic designs which are made as competently as possible. I doubt I will buy any of their goods but it is nice to see someone collecting Good Stuff.

From the boingboing comments, Sundial Wire offers that classic thread-covered wire in a variety of colors, plus an assortment of old-fashioned plug styles. It makes me want to make a new version of my mad scientist lamp. (This is apparently kind of a thing now – I am clearly not the only one who was inspired by Nik Willmore’s “Tube Lamp”!)

Running linux on an 8-bit AVR: the author thinks his hand-wired board “may be the cheapest, slowest, simplest to hand assemble, lowest part count, and lowest-end Linux PC”. It is certainly a contender. Of course he accomplished it not by running Linux directly on the AVR, but by writing an ARM emulator – ludicrously slow, but it apparently does work, to the point that you can boot bash and execute commands.

I’ve occasionally fantasized about building a parallel computer using an array of STM32F103 chips – they are 32-bit ARMs running at 72 MHz. They have no memory manager but I had a similar idea for using VMs… it’s hard to see what the point would be, though, other than the experience of building something that is technically a parallel computer by hand.

I met up with Dan Ryan over at ALTSpace and did some radio hacking tonight. He showed Ava and me how to disassemble, reset, and configure the Ubiquiti Nanostation Loco. You can get batches of ’em on ebay in unknown condition: out of the ten I bought for $60, two worked, six are broken, and two more still need to be tested. Not bad for an hour’s work.

The plan is to use these as part of the new Seattle Meshnet project. It’s not related to the old Seattle Wireless group, but it’s a similar idea: we’re building an unlicensed citywide wireless data network, which will support data sharing and perhaps even act as a backup Internet connection.

The web site is very awkwardly laid out, but there is some useful information in it: a 72-volt electric motorcycle conversion using six lead-acid batteries and the nearly-standard Mars ME0709 motor. He claims top speed of 45 mph and range of 25-30 miles; that’d be plenty for my commute.

Home-built PCB drill press using a Micromot 50 instead of a dremel, the latter apparently having insufficient precision. This is not a CNC device, but hand-operated.

Legit is another frontend for git; this one focuses on simplification of the branch operations.

Ava and I spent the weekend roaming around in Eastern Washington, taking hikes out in the channeled scablands. We dipped our fingers in Soap Lake, let the wind knock us backward from the edge of Dry Falls, cruised through quiet little towns, and walked for miles through cliff-walled canyons watching the birds soar overhead.

CycleXchange offers a variety of custom CB750 parts.

This is not a surprise, but it’s interesting to see an institution as mainstream as the NYTimes finally recognizing it: the USA has a serious problem with the way it welcomes visitors.

Americans may be surprised by the conclusions of a 2006 survey by the U.S. Travel Association, which found that foreign travelers were more afraid of United States immigration officials than of terrorism or crime. They rated America’s borders by far the least welcoming in the world. Two-thirds feared being detained for “minor mistakes or misstatements.”

Commercial electric motorcycles are popping up all over the place: the Native GPR-S is a product of Electric Motorsport, which has been selling EV components for a decade or so. It’s actually more of a kit than an actual bike: for $2500 you get a rolling chassis, which you can fit out with whatever combination of motors and batteries suits you.

It only works for Arduinos which include their own USB interfaces, but this bit of software synchronizes source code up to github every time you upload the binary to the board. The idea is that you can later plug in any arbitrary Arduino board and recover whatever code was last flashed to it, even if you have completely forgotten what project it was originally for.

The Moto Preserve in Brooklyn is a shared workshop / storage space for motorcycles and scooters. No idea how their financial model works but it’s neat to see a hackerspace-like operation for greasemonkeys.

Using a Raspberry Pi with Arduino

I started a Pinterest page for motorcycle design ideas. I didn’t want to flood this blog with dozens of other people’s photos of other people’s bikes, but I do want to collect all the little bits I find so I can refer to them later.

Following up on the idea that in the future everything will be a coffee shop, here’s a Make Magazine blurb about a Japanese cafe which offers laser-cutting services.