Wired Video: TechShop Opens Tool Heaven in San Francisco

TechShop, in San Francisco, is loaded to the gills with high-end tools of all descriptions.

If your town has a lending library for tools, consider yourself lucky. But if your town has TechShop, you’re in geek heaven.

TechShop, founded in 2006 in Silicon Valley, is a workshop filled to the gills with all kinds of tools. Instead of renting the tools, you pay a flat monthly fee and can come in and use whatever you want.

“It’s kind of like a health club,” says CEO Mark Hatch, “but it’s a health club for makers and geeks and tinkerers.”

For $100 per month, you get access to the workshop and all the tools inside it, ranging from the simple (and somewhat archaic) English wheel to the high-end and extremely precise CNC milling machine. They’ve got everything in between too, including TIG welders, table saws, drill presses, laser cutters, sewing equipment and 3-D model prototyping machines.

TechShop also offers classes (what, you don’t already know how to operate a laser cutter?)

The company has locations in Menlo Park, California, in Raleigh, North Carolina, and just opened a shop in San Francisco, in the South of Market district, not far from Wired’s headquarters. New York, Detroit and San Jose, California locations are coming soon, the company says.

Mythbusters star Adam Savage is a fan: In this video, he calls TechShop “the ultimate possibility engine.”

Watch the Wired video below, and let us know what you’d do with a workshop full of tools like this.


          


How To Install iMovie on Your iPad 1

IMovie will run on your old, slow, bloated iPad as well as the shiny new one

It is possible to install the new iPad 2-only iMovie on the original iPad. You don’t need to jailbreak, and the app runs perfectly well, but there is one big problem which may annoy you into uninstalling it. Read on to find out how.

The App Store checks your hardware and stops you from downloading iMove with an unsupported iDevice. Get around this by downloading iMove using iTunes on your computer. Then you need to download a piece of software from Apple called the iPhone Configuration Utility. There are versions for Mac and PC.

Next, plug in your iPad and wait for it to finish syncing with iTunes. Launch the iPhone Configuration Utility and pick the “Application” tab at left. Then click “Add” at the top of the window and navigate to the newly downloaded iMovie app (inside the Music/iTunes/Mobile Applications folder on a Mac).

Adding the iMovie app to the iPhone Configuration Utility

Once added, you’ll need to actually install it on your iPad. To do this, click on the name of your iPad in the left column and then select the “Applications” tab. Scroll through the list of apps until you get to iMovie. Then click the “Install” button next to it (the screenshot shows it already installed, as I have already installed it on my own iPad).

Installing…

And that’s it. You can now fire up iMovie and start editing. Any compatible video already in your Photos app will show up, and everything seem to run plenty quick enough.

But there’s one problem. Next time you sync the iPad with iTunes, you get this error message:

This annoying box will pop up every time you sync

Authorizing doesn’t help. You just get sent back to this warning after inputting your password. Clicking “Don’t authorize’ will delete iMove from your iPad. Clicking cancel is the one you want. Cancel and iMovie stays.

It appears that this warning only applies to iMovie. I have updated other apps on my iPad since installing iMovie, and that went fine. Syncing then copied those new apps back to the iPad. I imagine it may be possible to get rid of this warning using provisioning profiles, but for now just clicking “cancel” once on each sync works fine.

One final note: Getting footage into iMovie is absurdly complicated. If you have an iPhone, you can shoot movies and import them using the camera connection kit. But if you have a camera that shoots iPad-compatible movies, you’re out of luck. You may be able to view the clip in the Photos app, but it doesn’t show up in the source list of iMovie. Or it does. It just depends on which camera you are using.

It’s probably better to run iMovie on the iPad 2, complete with guaranteed-compatible camera, but if you’re happy to do a little hacking, then your iPad 1 is certainly up to the job.


Lock-Cracking Robot Is Your Companion in Crime

Next time you forget the combination to your locker, you might turn to a team of students at Olin College of Engineering. Instead of using the brute-force method of hammer and cold-chisel preferred by tough-guys such as me, they opted to be egg-heads, and built a robot that will solve any Masterlock combination un under two hours.

If you know one or more of the numbers in your combination, the robot will crack the code much quicker. Quick enough for you to open “your” locker, grab whatever you came for, and get out, undetected.

The robot consists of a clamp, which hold the lock in place using a thumb-screw, and a puller, a solenoid-controlled grabber which yanks the loop of the lock to try to open it, and a stepper-motor which actually turns the knob and dials in the combinations.

Once the lock is in place, you fire up the companion software called LockCracker. You input the numbers you know, hit start, then go out behind the bike-shed to smoke an illicit cigarette. The software — written in Python — runs through all possible combinations in turn, trying the lock each time (so it really does use brute-force after all). Eventually, it will pop, and you’re in. It will even tell you the combination so you can do it yourself next time.

Like any powerful invention, the LockCracker can be used for good or evil. Or just demonstrations. Seeing as you would have to drag a computer, workbench and the robot itself into the locker room, this may be a little unwieldy for your criminal capers. Perhaps that hammer and chisel will be useful after all?

The LockCracker [Olin. Thanks, Jessica!]

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Drill-Powered Trike Is Uncomfortably Awesome

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ex_schraeg-1


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Nils Ferber’s EX is named for the word “eccentricity”, although it may as well mean “ex-living”, so amazingly dangerous does this machine look. It’s a three-wheeled electric trike, powered by two electric drills and steered by your own spine. The open design was inspired by “a skeleton with its organs [exposed]“, and this is what you might become if you make a wrong move.

To ride the EX, you must lay almost prone, with your knees inserted into metal hoops that put almost all the weight of your body on your shins as they press against thin, hard rods. The rest of your weight is taken by your arms and wrists. To see where you are going, you must hold your head up by craning your neck. We can safely conclude that this isn’t the most comfy ride out there.

The EX will speed across the ground at up to 30 km/h (18.6 mph), which will surely feel a lot faster with your face so close to the road. The machine is “controlled” by throttles and brake levers mounted on the handlebar, and the power is sent to the rear-wheel via bike chains and cogs.

I would definitely take this thing out for a spin, although you’d never get me on public roads — the EX in that case would be a little too EXhilarating for me. I imagine it makes you feel like you are flying. Well, flying whilst having Joe Pesci going crazy on your shins with fire pokers, but flying nonetheless. Take a look at Nils’ project site, including his amazing early models which are made out of Lego, and marvel at the man who not only built this thing, but then went on to race it.

EX trike [Nils Ferber via Oh Gizmo]

Photos: Nils Ferber

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10 Hacks That Make Microsoft’s Kinect a Killer Controller

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The Kinect


The Microsoft Kinect is one of the hottest gaming peripherals we’ve seen in years, and that’s because it can do a lot more than control games.

Within weeks after the Kinect hit stores, scientists, programmers and researchers hacked away at the device. It turns out that the Kinect, which consists of cameras and an infrared-light sensor to track and follow your body movement, has applications for medical purposes, language learning and even partying outdoors. Those applications are enabled by a relatively open programming interface which lets people quickly hack together their own custom software to interface with the Kinect hardware.

None of these hacks are officially supported by Microsoft, but they demonstrate the amazing potential of turning the human body into an interface controller. Who’da thunk a gaming gadget would be so powerful?

What follows are some examples of the coolest Kinect hacks we’ve seen, pulled from the Kinect Hacks blog.

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MobileNotifier for iOS Embarrasses Apple’s Poor Effort

Peter Hajas’ MobileNotifier is what iOS notifications should be

Notifications on iOS suck. Peter Hajas’ MobileNotifier hack fixes them, and fixes them good.

You’re probably as sick as I am of having a Twitter or e-mail alert pop up in the middle of a game of Angry birds and freezing everything. Or worse, pulling your iDevice off the nightstand in the morning to be greeted by a stack of alerts which can only be viewed in order, and dismissed one by one.

MobileNotifier is an jailbreak hack for the iPhone and iPod Touch that is so good, it should have come from Apple. Normally I wouldn’t cover jailbreak-only software, but this is obviously too good not to write about. It works like this:

When you get a new notification, it slides in from the top of the screen. You can ignore it, dismiss it or open the relevant app to view it. It also combines multiple alerts together, instead of stacking them in an endless mess like the built-in system.

And then things get interesting. First, you can see the notifications from the lock screen, letting you check to see if you have new mail, voicemail and so on, at a glance. This alone is worth installing the app. But then you get to the “AlertDashboard.”

The AlertDashboard pops up whenever you double-tap the home button, showing up on-screen above the iOS task switcher. It’s a box in which all your notifications are shown, letting you quickly check on what has happened since you last looked.

To check it out, you’ll need to add Hajas’ software repository to your iPhone. The app is beta, but if you’re running a jailbreak then you probably don’t care about that.

MobileNotifier beta3 [Peter Hajas via Lifehacker]

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Cute Electronic Piggy Bank Munches on Credit cards

Arduino and iPhone-based Piggy Bank by Wang Chao, Maggie Kuo and Jordi Parra

This little piggy bank is an electronic monster whose wild mood swings can only be appeased by a credit card. Yes, this might sound just like the behavior of trophy wife of a Hollywood star, but it is in fact a rather sweet project executed by students at the Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden.

The Piggy Bank gets agitated when it detects nearby people, or if it is moved. Its eyes flicker into life, looking much like a sad puppy, and to “feed” it you slot in a credit card. Money is deducted and stored in a savings account. Sated, the little piggy goes back to sleep.

The project, by Wang Chao, Maggie Kuo and Jordi Parra, was built in just two days. The controller is an Arduino, and the case is a beautiful laser-cut wooden box. To keep up with time constraints, the display inside is an old iPhone. When the accelerometers detect movement, the box wakes up, and the iPhone’s screen displays mood-appropriate googly-eyes. When the card is inserted, the Arduino sends the information via Bluetooth to a nearby computer, which in turn sends data back over Wi-Fi.

Is it practical? Hell no. Is it a fun way to save some money in a soulless, cashless world? Maybe. And is it a lot more lucrative than its spiritual predecessor, the Tamagotchi? Yes. Yes it is.

Piggy bank [Zenona via Oh Gizmo]

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3-D–Print Yourself With Kinect

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Fabricate Yourself Pieces


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“Fabricate Yourself” is like a 3-D photo booth. Using a Microsoft Kinect, anyone can hit a button and have a 3-D model of themselves printed right then. The project, headed by Karl Willis, removes the arcane intricacies of CAD software and replaces them with something anybody can pick up and play with.

Presented at the Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction Conference, the setup turns a Kinect into 3-D scanner. The Kinect is hooked up to a Mac, and users can pose in front of it and see a real-time wire-frame representation onscreen. When they see what they like, they hit a button and they are captured in an STL (stereolithography) file. This file is sent to the 3-D printer, where a small, low-resolution model is finally spat out.

At the conference, the models were limited to 3 x 3 cm to keep the machine running fast. This used just a quarter of the Kinect’s resolution, but the results have a rather cute, jaggedy 8-bit look to them. The cuteness was also upped by printing the models onto snap-together jigsaw tiles so they could be combined into one big mural (or even joined together to spell out words).

Taking high tech and making it easy and fun to use is clearly awesome. I am slightly disappointed with the conference-goers’ lack of nerd imagination, though. I have studied the resulting models closely and nowhere do I see the most obvious pose, and the first thing I would do if I could play with this machine: hands held up like Han Solo as he was frozen in carbonite.

Fabricate Yourself [Interactive Fabrication via i.Materialise. Thanks, Joris!]

Photos: Interactive Fabrication

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The Amazing Wooden B-Bit Violin

Ranjit Bhatnagar’s 8-bit violin is all corners

There’s not much to say about the 8-bit violin, other than it looks absolutely retro-gorgeous. The instrument is playable (although if you skip down to watch Make’s Bre Pettis scratching away, you’ll see its just as hard to conjure sweet sound from as is a regular analog violin), and every part except the fingerboard and the round holes for the tuning pegs is squared-off.

The amazing instrument was built by Ranjit Bhatnagar of Moonmilk.com, who normally spends his time making sound installations and taking photographs with scanners. He has never played the violin, and made this one as a part of his Instrument-a-Day project, in which he makes — you guessed it — an instrument every day throughout February 2010. It’s worth checking out some more of his pieces, which include a hand-made balalaika played with an AA battery rubber-banded onto a thumb.

Can you imagine how awesome this would be if Ranjit got together with Circuitmaster, the maker of the NES guitar, for some kind of nerdy dueling banjos action?

Instrument-a-day 20 & 21: 8-bit violin [Moonmilk via Make]

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Tiny House Makes Webcam Users Look Like Giants

Giant and Midget by Ryuji Nakamura

Ryuji Nakamura decided that he’d turn himself into a giant. A virtual giant. With some paper, a sharp blade and a few minutes of careful cutting and folding, Nakamura came up with this webcam covering house, which makes any video conferencer look as if they are a huge monster, peering one-eyed through the window of a tiny home.

Nakamura’s model comes complete with a minuscule dining suite of table and chairs, and was built for the DesignEast exhibition at the end of last year. What I like best about the piece, called Midget and Giant, is that the outside is as carefully made as the inside. You can’t see the overlapping roof or any of the upper floor from the webcam, but they are there, cutely propped atop an old iMac.

While you could just snap yourself as a giant and forget about it, there may be more practical uses, too. I imagine a miniature replica of the office to use when chatting to my editor, Dylan Tweney, via Skype, or a virtual cocktail bar to make me look more cosmopolitan when I send pictures to dating sites. It seems foolproof, except for one thing. I’ll have to explain why I have grown so huge. Dylan should be easy to fool — I’ll just tell him I’m testing out a new shrinking machine and it went wrong. The dating site? Well, that could be a little trickier.

Giant and Midget [Ryuji Nakamura via Unplggd]