Rose, orange blossom, and elderflower marshmallows

September 13, 2011

egg whites, eggs, elderflower, gelatin, marshmallow, marshmojo, orange blossom, rose, rosewater, s'mores, st. germain

[caption id="attachment_1623" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Homemade rose, orange blossom and elderflower marshmallows."][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1624" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Extreme closeup. These marshmallows look slightly different - the holes are a lot bigger and much less uniformly distributed."][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1621" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Test cards for figuring out what was wrong with my original recipe."][/caption] At some point I will write a longer post about the work we did for our wedding, which included a lot of DIY stuff.

Designing a 3D printer kit: Sourcing parts

September 12, 2011

3d printing, design, makerbot, mendel, prusa, reprap, user experience

This is the second entry in a series of four exploring the design, packaging and user experience of 3D printing kits. Each article will be published to the front page of this blog, but you can also find them, as well as other articles I’ve written about open-source 3D printing, on my 3D printing topic page. Sourcing the components In the last entry, I talked about my general thoughts on producing a user-oriented 3D printing kit.

Measuring creativity

September 11, 2011

creativity, entrepreneurship, intelligence

[caption id="attachment_1589" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="We didn't have a knife handy. Yes, that is a hacksaw."][/caption] Creativity’s important, right? If you can’t come up with new ideas, you can’t produce anything new. Nor can you adapt to changing conditions or circumstances. CEOs think it’s important, as do teachers, artists, academics - probably anybody whose work isn’t purely transactional. And yet, it’s hard to define exactly what creativity is. I think most people have an intuitive understanding of it, but here’s an interesting paper from Ian Fillis and Andrew McAuley that talks about creativity in general (as well as its relation to entrepreneurship and marketing, but that’s near the end).

Designing a 3D printer kit: Introduction

September 9, 2011

3d printing, design, makerbot, mendel, prusa, reprap, user experience

[caption id="attachment_1534" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Cutting some rods!"][/caption] This is the first entry in a series of four exploring the design, packaging and user experience of 3D printing kits. Each article will be published to the front page of this blog, but you can also find them, as well as other articles I’ve written about open-source 3D printing, on my 3D printing topic page. Introduction The last time I wrote about 3D printing, I said that I was concerned about where the open-source 3D printing industry is going.

3D printing

September 9, 2011

A RepRap. “3D printing” means you can print objects instead of images and text. Right now you can only make fairly simple objects, but the technology is rapidly improving and coming down in cost. The most exciting part of 3D printing for me is DIY 3D printing. In particular, I’m very interested in the RepRap Project (and its derivatives). RepRap is an open-source 3D printer that you can build yourself, and that is intended to be able to print all of its parts.

Jumpstarting a car

September 6, 2011

cars, education, home ec, jumpstart, makers

On one of the last days of my recent trip to Portland, we found out that our car had run out of batteries. Instead of starting, it just sat there when you turned the key. Fortunately, the guy parked in the car in front of us had jumper cables. This entry isn’t primarily about how to jumpstart a car, but here’s what we did, so you know I’m legit: Make sure both cars are off.

Designing your own business cards with Inkscape

September 2, 2011

business cards, inkscape

[caption id="attachment_1492" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Business card back and fronts - in many colors!"][/caption] I wanted to write a quick post about creating my own business cards, which I did a few weeks ago. I wasn’t very satisifed with the existing options out there. Even a hip business card seller like moo has a fairly limited selection of standard, rather drab-looking business cards. Plus, I think that most business cards give only an extremely limited understanding of who the card-holder is.

FedExing donuffins cross-country

August 17, 2011

beets, donuffins, fedex

[caption id="attachment_1477" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Yup."][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1478" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="They arrived in pretty good shape. It looks as if the glaze may have melted back into the donuffins."][/caption] After I made these donut-muffin hybrids (“donuffins”), I decided it would be fun to send them on a long journey. Why? I don’t know. I think part of it is that my fiancee had just left to go to Portland, Oregon, where we’ll be getting married in a few weeks, and I wanted her to try them.

Making cast-resin 3D printer parts

August 13, 2011

cast, casting, oomoo, reprap, resin, silicone, smoothon

[caption id="attachment_1465" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Red resin gear closeup!"][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1463" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Detail shot of the original parts we used."][/caption] [caption id="attachment_1461" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="The materials you'll need: resin (left), silicone mold material (colorful buckets), mold release, paper towels, cups, stirrers (for mixing the molding material)"][/caption] I think I’ve alluded to the fact that I spent part of this summer making cast-resin 3D printer parts. In this entry, I’ll talk about the process for doing that.

Understanding the differences between pasta shapes, or why it's "fettucine alfredo"

August 10, 2011

alphabet pasta, bolognese, campanelle, clams, ditalini, fettucini, lasagne, linguine, noodles, olive oil, pasta, pasta shapes, penne, pesto, soup, spaghetti, tagliatelle, white wine

There are 600 different varieties of pasta; even if you chalk 90% of them up to regional preference or marketing decisions, that still leaves a lot of variation to explain. Here’s some research I’ve conducted on why there are so many different pasta shapes and when you might want to use one or the other. Understanding the functions of the basic pasta shapes As a general taxonomy, you can split pasta up into a few archives: strands, shapes and tubes, and sheets.