The iPhone is a beautiful piece of hardware but a few months in your pocket along with those keys and coins is enough to scratch it up. Now, instead of toting a clawed-out piece of hardware, you can apply some elbow grease and restore it to near perfection
To fix scratches on the back, you need to gently dry sand it, then add some water to wet sand and polish it with a 3M Headlight Lens Restoration Kit. The detailed step-by-step pictorial offers information on what grit of sandpaper to use and how to get the mirror-like finish.
The only catch is that the Apple logo at the back is erased in the process but that’s a small price to pay. And it’s not like anyone can mistake the iPhone for another phone–whether Apple’s logo is on there or not.
Fixing scratches on the display is a little more tricky because it involves getting a replacement top layer but that’s available on eBay for $10. Just follow the instructions to open up the front cover and its simple enough to do.
The technique doesn’t apply to just the iPhone. You can take any scratched-up phone and polish it to get a new look.
Let’s face it: Taking it easy isn’t very easy. Meditation classes, binge drinking, marijuana, movies with sexy blue alien cats — these are the things we hardworking Americans rely on to help us unwind. But what if we could eliminate stress altogether? What if we could train our brains to stay relaxed forever?
That’s the idea behind Harcos Laboratories “most painful toy hack ever.” The team of kooky geeks was intrigued with Mattel’s Mindflex, a wireless headset that reads the frequency of your brainwaves to levitate a ball. LEDs on the headset light up if you’re concentrating hard; if you’re calm, no LEDs light up. Harcos Lab wondered, “How can we put that to more practical use in our everyday lives?”
Easy: Reprogram the Mindflex to shock the bejeezus out of you if you concentrate too hard. Harcos hooked up the leads of the LEDs to a transistor/resistor relay network so they’d instead activate an electric-shock kit made by QKit. The end result? Concentrate a little, and you’ll get zapped a little. Concentrate hard, and you’ll get an electrical pulse that will make you think you’ve wandered onto the set of Green Mile. What a shockingly brilliant solution to all our problems!
Actually, the hack wasn’t that easy. Harcos admits it was difficult opening up the Mindflex. A full how-to is over on Harcos’ blog. Check out the lab’s Mindflex hack in the video below.
The red ring of death is an inevitable conclusion for most Xbox 360 owners. But instead of mourning his console’s loss, U.K.-based student Jasper Stevens did something fun to give his lifeless and out-of-warranty Xbox 360 a second chance.
Stevens took it apart and harvested its parts to create a mechanical robot called Roboman.
“The copper wire used in the piece, the flexicable stuff and some other pieces of wiring is from outside,” he says. “Everything else is from the Xbox.”
It’s the first sculpture he has made out of gadget parts. And it took just about three hours to create.
“My recent art exam was around the theme ‘discarded’ ,” he says. “So I salvaged the parts and used some of the wire I had hanging around to make this.” Stevens then clicked a few photos and sent it to the Technabob blog.
The entire piece is connected using wiring and there’s no glue or tape holding the parts together. The Xbox 360’s DVD drive founds its place as the base of the sculpture. The robot’s joints are flexible but it doesn’t have any batteries so you can only move it around like an action figure.
Check out more photos of his fun and creative re-use of electronic parts.
In music, timing is everything. When you’re dancing with an enormous machine, it’s even more important to get the timing correct, down to the microsecond.
For its latest video, released on YouTube Monday night, pop band OK Go recruited a gang of very talented engineers to build a huge, elaborate Rube Goldberg machine whose action perfectly meshes with the band’s song, “This Too Shall Pass,” from the band’s new album, Of the Blue Color of the Sky.
For nearly four minutes — captured in a single, unbroken camera shot — the machine rolls metal balls down tracks, swings sledgehammers, pours water, unfurls flags and drops a flock of umbrellas from the second story, all perfectly synchronized with the song. A few gasp-inducing, grin-producing moments when the machine’s action lines up so perfectly, you can only shake your head in admiration at the creativity and precision of the builders.
Those builders were Syyn Labs, a Los Angeles-based arts and technology collective that has a history of doing surprising, entertaining science and tech projects that involve crowds of people, at a monthly gathering called Mindshare LA.
OK Go developed a reputation for making catchy, viral videos four years ago with the homemade video for “Here It Goes Again,” which features the band members dancing around on treadmills. The company ran afoul of music label EMI’s restrictive licensing rules, which required YouTube to disable embedding, cutting views to 1/10 of their previous level. Now, the new video is up — and it’s embeddable, so the band seems to have won this round with its label — and is already generating buzz on YouTube and on Twitter.
Planning for the video began in November, when Syyn Labs secured a warehouse in the Echo Park area of L.A. But it wasn’t until January that work really got going. The video was shot on Feb. 11 and 12.
“A Rube Goldberg machine is in its essence a trial-and-error thing,” Adam Sadowsky, the president of Syyn Labs, told Wired.
Sadowsky explained how many tiny details needed to be just right for the machine’s timing to work out.
For example, the wooden tracks used to guide metal balls at the beginning of the video had to be cleaned and waxed to keep dust from slowing down the balls and making them stick. And the angle of that board was set at a precise 3.4 degrees of incline, which was perfect for the timing but sometimes led the balls to jump the track.
Given that each of the machine’s dozens of stages need comparably precise adjustments, it all adds up to a lot of labor by a lot of people.
“It took about a month and a half of very intense work, with people on-site all the time,” Sadowsky said.
Sadowsky estimates that 55 to 60 people worked on the project in all. That includes eight “core builders” who did the bulk of the design and building, along with another 12 or so builders who helped part-time. In addition, Syyn Labs recruited 30 or more people to help reset the machine after each run.
Because of the machine’s size and complexity, “We needed to bring in every resource we could to help reset,” said Sadowsky.
Even with all those people helping, resetting the whole machine took close to an hour.
The video was shot by a single Steadicam, but it took more than 60 takes, over the course of two days, to get it right. Many of those takes lasted about 30 seconds, Sadowsky said, getting no further than the spot in the video where the car tire rolls down a ramp.
“The most fiddly stuff, you always want to put that at the front, because you don’t want to be resetting the whole thing.”
OK Go hired Syyn Labs to produce the contraption according to certain specifications. One example: The machine couldn’t use any magic.
“That was really important,” said Sadowsky, “because we are all engineers, and we love magic. We love computers, and servomotors, and fire, and all of that stuff.” All those “magic” tricks — basically anything your mom can’t understand — couldn’t be in the machine.
The band was also heavily involved in the project for the final two weeks of its construction, and the band members are right inside the machine during the video, of course.
“We wanted to make a video where we have essentially a giant machine that we dance with,” said the band’s Damian Kulash, Jr., in a short “making-of” video posted on YouTube.
Otherwise, Synn Labs’ engineers went to town, dreaming up the most outlandish and elaborate mechanisms they could to “dance” along with the music. The results are impressive.
Oh, and OK Go’s treadmill video from last year? It makes a cameo appearance in the machine too.
“It really was a labor of love,” said Sadowsky.
See below for more videos about the making of “This Too Shall Pass.”
It’s time for a glance into the distant past. Here is Ouroborus, a lazy-man’s domino toppling game from artist Karl Lautman. Lautman’s self-righting domino circle won a second prize at the International Kinetic Art Competition in 2004, but is certainly still worth a look today.
When you press a button on the front, one domino is tipped over, causing the familiar cascade. But when the ripple of falling tiles reaches half way around the circle, the dominoes at the beginning stand up again. The head and tail of the ring pursue each other in what could be an infinite chase, had Lautman not decided to halt the race after five circuits. This head-swallows-tail action is what gives the piece its name: Ouroborus was the mythical serpent which swallowed its own tail.
But how does it work? It’s actually dead simple. Inside the base are solenoids hooked up to polyester threads which run through holes and are joined to the bottoms of the dominoes. These solenoids fire in a timed sequence and yank to dominoes back into an upright position. The effect is, as you can see, hypnotic, even after all these years.
For more of Lautman’s spooky, autonomous gadget-art, head to his site. We especially like the head-banging Art Makes an Impact.
Hollywood is not always larger than life. RoboSteel, an Ireland-based firm that creates sculptures from scrap metal, has created a real-world piece inspired by the the character of the queen from the cult Hollywood franchise Alien.
The piece, called “alien queen,” is 1,200 pounds of recycled steel and has more than 4,000 parts, polished and lacquered to create a replica that would make any tinsel-town art director proud.
A sci-fi horror film released in 1979, Alien featured a band of aggressive extraterrestrials that killed humans on a spaceship. In the sequel to the movie released in 1986, the alien queen is a 15 feet tall, a terrifying monster whose power comes from being the only fertile member of the predatory species.
In RoboSteel’s real-world version, the queen is about half the size (2.5 meters, or 8 feet) but still impressive in its details.
Nearly 90 percent of the parts for the sculpture came from Yamaha motorcycles collected from scrapyards, says RoboSteel. All the parts were hand-welded.
The construction took about three months and three people worked full time to complete the project. RoboSteel made an alien king and queen pair. The king was sold last year and now lives in Trinidad.
If you want this sculpture next to the R2D2 in your living room, it will set you back by about $6,000.
The sculpture will also be featured in Ripley’s Believe It or Not later this year.
This is the hottest thing you’ll see today: an iPhone with a custom titanium back. Martin Schrotz wasn’t happy with the plastic back of his iPhone 3GS, so he did what anyone would do. Martin measured the original case digitally, plugged those numbers into some CAD software and then milled his new case design from a solid ingot of titanium,.
You first thought will be “what about the reception?” I thought the same thing, and apparently so did Martin. The block from which he carved his masterpiece is in fact a titanium alloy which, although non as RF-transparent as plastic, gives a good enough signal.
We love it, especially the unibody-chunkiness of it, which makes it look like a tiny iPad. Version 2.0 is already under way, with a smaller Apple logo and a thinner case near the antenna, which is one of the thickest bits of titanium in V1.0. More pictures below.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated. The LoJack car-security system is based on radio frequency technology, not GPS. —
Every time tech is used to fight crime, the bad guys just get better gear. The only crime-fighter who manages to always have the better gadget is Batman. Now car thieves are using GPS jammers to blot out the satellite signals that some antitheft services use to locate stolen automobiles.
It’s not hard to do, either. A quick Google Shopping search for GPS blockers shows models on sale for under $30. They don’t even need to be powerful. In order to swamp the incoming satellite signals, a jammer only needs to put out two watts of power. Speaking at a symposium, Bob Cockshott of “cybersecurity” company Digital Systems KTN said that “the strength of a GPS signal is about as strong as viewing a 25-watt light bulb from a satellite 10,000 miles away.” Small wonder that sat-nav devices take so long to acquire a lock.
It’s not just criminals who are using this tech, either. Employees whose cars are tracked by their companies use them to go off the clock, and according to The Guardian, German truck drivers use them to “to evade GPS-based road charging.”
But knocking off gas-guzzling cars and sticking it to the man are just the annoying part of the potential for GPS jammers. A 20-watt unit would be enough to cover a commercial airport, with rather scary results.
There is also the possibility of feeding false signals to a GPS unit, which would be harder for an operator to spot than straight-up jamming. If you start doing that to boats driven by sailors with no sextant experience, you get havoc.
Still, something good could come of this. It’s possible that people reading the story could become less trusting of their in-car sat-nav units and actually look through the windshield once in a while. This would avoid the estimated 300,000 crashes caused in Britain every year by GPS-following fools.
The secret to a great cocktail, most connoisseurs would agree, has something to do with the ice, the liquor, the glass — and the bartender.
But what if the bartender is not a warm-blooded human with a sympathetic ear, but rather a cold, soulless machine made of pistons, valves and servos?
At a bar in San Francisco, a group of artists, engineers and tinkerers sought the answer with their creations: robots designed specifically to pour out a nice drink.
The booze-making bots included an all-mechanical, lever-operated robot; a Cosmobot with a rocket-shaped body; and Barnold, who is “strong and big, just like Arnold.”
“We really just like robots and cocktails, and both together seemed like the perfect thing,” said Simone Davalos, one of the organizers of the Barbot 2010 event. “There is no real aim for world-changing, paradigm-shifting technological achievement, at least not from our perspective, but who knows? Lots of amazing things have happened over cocktails.”
From cosmos to appletinis, these robots measured, mixed and poured out drinks that were precisely assembled. And those droids were mesmerizing to watch.
As for the drinks themselves, having sampled drinks from almost all the robots, my verdict is that the robots still have a long way to go. The cocktails taste just a little too clinical. There’s a missing ingredient in there. Could that be the human touch?
The Corpse Reviver
Even a humble cocktail robot can be an engineering marvel. The imaginatively named Corpse Reviver is a cleverly designed robot that’s completely mechanical.
“It’s all levers and linkages,” said Benjamin Cowden. who created the robot.
The Corpse Reviver has four levers that are attached to four bottles arranged in a circle. To make yourself a drink, place a glass at the center and pull the first lever. This pushes the attached bottle up, then tips a measured pour of a little more than an ounce into a bowl-shaped holding container. Do the same with the two other levers, and finally pull back on the fourth to release the stopper and push the liquid from the holding container into a second chamber that’s full of ice. A few seconds later, the drink is in the glass.
“This is my favorite robot in this room,” said Lillian Fritz-Laylin who had come to check out the event . “It’s interactive on multiple levels. It’s not just ‘push a button and walk away.’ And the drink was really good.”
Cowden designed the entire mechanism and sketched it out on a 2-D design program. All the parts for the robot have been custom laser-cut. And it’s the attention to details that really make this a winner. For instance, once a lever is pulled and the bottle tips out its pour, a hydraulic damper and spring mechanism make sure it slowly and steadily returns to its original position.
A team of students at Yale decided to build a spokeless bike for their mechanical design class. One semester later, they had the machine you see here.
The students concentrated on the rear wheel, for reasons of both time and money. The back wheel is where all the work goes on anyway, so if it worked, then the front wheel would be easy.
The back wheel is machined in standard 26-inch size so a stock tire would fit, and inside it you see a belt drive, usually used to replace a chain. The weirdest aspect is that double-crank and double bottom bracket. This was used to get the gearing right: imagine connecting a single crank to that rear wheel and you’ll see why. You’d have the lowest granny-gear ever.
It’s a single-speed, and as is the law of single speed bikes, we have to discuss the gear ratios. The chainrings both have 53 teeth, and the cog has 13.
We dig the look of the bike, too, especially the low-tech, scrapyard aesthetic. The spokeless wheel offers extra space. Zhaolander, the team-member who posted these photos on Reddit, says that the gap could be used to fit a motor or, even better, a carrying basket that would be in the perfect place to balance its load. The only problem seems to be the handling. Zhaolander says that the big rim supports make things top-heavy.
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