DO IT: Projects, Plans and How-tos

After spending a bone-chilling week in NYC, freezing my hands every time I had to answer a phone call, I started looking for a solution to using this wonderful iPhone while not losing any digits to frostbite.

Turns out, there’s a simple solution: conductive thread.

The iPhone’s touchscreen is capacitative, where the slight electrical charge in our skin interacts with a slight electrical charge behind the glass screen. This point of interference is registered and processed. Wearing gloves insulates that electrical transfer from happening.

By adding conductive thread to the fingertip of your glove, the electrical interference is once again able to take place. Here are the super simple steps from Instructables.com

Supplies
You will need:
A glove.
A needle.
12″ (30cm) of conductive thread. (TIP: If you don’t want to buy a whole spool, you can buy a few feet much more affordably from SparkFun with the Lilypad Bobbin.)

• Sew a few stitches in the finger of your glove.
On the outside try to make the stitches pretty close so it only touches the screen in a smallish area (about 1/4″ or 6mm in diameter.)  This will help your finger touches be more accurate.

Tip: Don’t make it too small!  The iPhone, for example, will ignore small touch areas.  If it doesn’t seem to work very well, try increasing the size of the stitches on the outside.
On the inside of the finger, it’s actually good for it to be messy.
3-5 stitches should be enough.

• Leave some extra inside the glove.
You want to make sure the thread touches your finger or your hand on the inside, so leave some extra.  Leave danging thread on your knots, etc.  You might even tack a bit to the lining of the glove

• Repeat on other fingers (optional)
If you use other fingers or thumbs to use your screen repeat the step on them too.

That’s it! Not as accurate as glove-less iPhoning, but much warmer. Now, to figure out how to stop clumsily dropping my phone when I’m wearing winter gloves..

Now you can catch any episodes you missed the first time around. Watch me and Zach challenge a team of contestants to build something that can save their prize from near-certain devastation. And at the end, I get to see if I’m able to beat my own “method of destruction” too. Full of fun science, physics, engineering and destruction. 10 great episodes. Science Channel.

• iTunes: Catch It Keep It: Season One (will open iTunes)
• Amazon: Catch It Keep It: Season One (watch online or download)

The good dudes at Discovery’s Timewarp TV show filmed a hide-your-eyes segment about the SawStop, an table saw with an electronically controlled safety brake that uses the inductive capabilities of the human skin to immediately stop the blade. Watch as the saw’s inventor offers to sacrifice his own finger to demonstrate the safety of his creation.

Pizza: One of my favorite things to make. There are so many challenging variables in creating a perfect pizza, many that are nearly impossible to control completely. Oven temperatures, yeast activity, ambient humidity, protein content in the flour, etc. As hard as it is, even a failed pizza tastes pretty amazing. But when the variables all line up, it’s a truly magical experience.

I’ve worked in pizzerias in high school and college, taken pizza classes, and spent countless hours reading books and websites in search of the perfect pizza. And still, after many years of learning and experimenting and eating lots of great pies, I am still working to master many specific parts of the process. Currently, I’m working on using wild yeast for a rich flavorful sourdough. The first attempt worked out great–made the best batch of pizza I’ve ever made, but the second time the dough lacked the elasticity and strength to hold itself together well, and pulled apart easily while being shaped. Regardless, we cooked on the grill and the pies turned out very tasty.

Two resources that I’ve found that have been a good guide: the A16 Pizzeria cookbook (my favorite pizzeria in San Francisco), and S. John Ross’ Sourdough Bread: How To Begin website. And I just upgraded to a KitchenAid mixer finally, with 575 watts of dough-kneading power under the hood. I hope to have a solid grasp on the sourdough by the Spring. And then its back to the garden to grow those tomatoes…

Here’s a photo recap of four years of tasty pizzas I’ve cooked and enjoyed.

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Steadycam test 2 – before and after from Nathan Carrick on Vimeo.

Shaky footage can be one of the biggest killers when shooting video. As cameras get smaller, and zoom ability gets more powerful, the effect of shake is multiplied greatly. This can still be fine for everyday, “snapshot” use – but to capture footage for any semi-serious use, you need to brace your camera against the jitters.

A way to retain mobility while combating shake is to move the center of gravity of the camera to a point that is not in line with the lens. This is the basic idea behind the steadicam, a mounting rig that is used by many professional camera operators. Typically, a counterweight is affixed to the camera at a certain distance via a mounting bracket. The length of the bracket and the heft of the counterweight are set for the specific style of shooting that you want to do. The displaced center of gravity helps nullify the small jitters from shaking the lens, and the added mass of the setup also helps keep the motion more fluid and less herky-jerky.

Normally, you’ll see high-end steadicams that have a nearly frictionless joint (gimbal) that allows the camera to remain steady as the rig twists, turns, and tilts. But satisfying results can be had with a simple unit that uses just the counterweight alone.

Johnny Chung Lee has a start-to-finish writeup on his site steadycam.org on how to build a $14 steadycam with everyday items. The gist: two short lengths of steel pipe are combined in a sideways T, one side for a handle, the vertical piece to hold the camera at top and the counterweight below. A small weight is affixed on the bottom, the camera is connected to the top with a modified endcap that has a mounting bolt in it, and voila: DIY steadicam.

DOIT reader Nathan Carrick sent me some photos and videos of his assembly of this project, and a before/after video of the results (the inspiration for this post). I’m impressed – you can see how this improves the quality and creates a smoother looking result.

Nathan's PVC endcap for the DIY Steadycam. The 1/4" mounting bolt on top is the standard size all cameras use.

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Waiting for a delayed flights is a regular activity for most people, so when airports take it upon themselves to have interesting installations, I say “Hell yeah, this ain’t so bad after all.”

Case in point: SFO’s Tornado Machine. Tall enough for a grownup to stand inside of, the machine creates a very cool vortex of mist spiraling seven feet high. The effect is completely mesmerizing – I stared at it for two hours straight, and suddenly it was time to board my flight. Here’s a quick video I took of it.

Tornado machine at SFO from Mike Senese on Vimeo.

Gotta have your own? I felt the same way, and found a write up on how to build one for your home (with accompanying PDF information). This is a smaller size unit (about 3′ tall) but some modification wouldn’t be too hard.

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“You’ve gotta see it to believe it” means less and less as we take each step into a digitally manipulatable future that is nearly impossible to distinguish from the real thing.

Need to film a visit to Vegas? NYC? Moscow? Green screen it! As evidenced by the above demo reel, we’re now at a point where the television and movie images that look and feel so very real are as fake as science fiction. Even as someone who works in the entertainment industry, I’m blown away, and maybe even saddened a little by these illusions be revealed to me – I truly thought Hiro from Heroes was IN Times Square. But it is a testament to the acting abilities and the special effects capabilities that we have available today.

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Jump into your weekend with some DIY projects. Here are a few of my favorite ones that I’ve posted here. Remember to take pics and send them to me too.

How to Build a Temporary Wood-fired Brick Pizza Oven with Cheap, Easy to Find Materials
(and Make Your Own Wooden Pizza Peel (Paddle))

Near-Space DIY Aerial Photography for $150

How to Make A Digital Pinhole Camera – Fast, Cheap and Easy

Arduino RC Controlled Lawnmower Project

Build a Six-Wheel-Drive ATV for Go Anywhere Fun

Build Your Own Camera Gyro-Stabilizer With a Spare Hard Drive

DIY Electronic Drum Pads for Less Than $30

Bike Repairs Made Easy With the DIY Bike Repair Stand
Then Tune Up Your Bike: Adjusting the Derailleurs

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As a pizza making fanatic, I love visiting well-regarded pizzerias to observe and sample their handiwork, learn some tips, and gather inspiration. During my recent travels to New York City, I set out on a pilgrimage to eat at some of the top pizza on this side of the Atlantic.

My pizza safari focused primarily on Neapolitan pizza, a style that I absolutely fell in love with during a visit to Naples in 2003. A blazing hot wood fired oven cooks the pizza in 2-3 minutes (sometimes faster), leaving a slightly charred edge and bottom, but springy and chewy in the middle of the crust. For ease of comparison (and personal preference), I stuck to the basic and classic “marinara” style: sauce, basil, garlic.

In seven days I visited six pizzerias. There are many NY spots still on my list, including Di Fara, Luzzo, Lucali, Totonnos (Coney Island, closed for renovation – I unknowingly tried to go there), Roberta’s, Salvatore’s (Staten Island), among others.

The most surprising discovery on my trip is that while the wood-fired oven is a staple for good pizza, it is not the only fuel found. Some of the top rated spots in NY use coal burning, oil burning, or even electric ovens. Secondly, the reputation of the location’s oven doesn’t always correspond with the outcome of the pizza. You’ll see this in my notes below. And, the locations that touted their use of fresh, organic ingredients stood out for the richness of their pies.

I made a quick video for each spot, to preserve the memory, show the ambiance, and take a good look at the all-so-important pizza oven. Here are the six place I visited and some of my notes. Enjoy!

Even though the odds of getting to see the darkness of space in person are slim - just over 500 people have traveled into space - it’s possible to still see it through the lens of your camera with a small assembly project and a few cheaply obtained materials. Including a styrofoam beer cooler.

A team of students from MIT recently set a goal to capture some photos of the curvature of the earth. Their off-the-shelf project cost them approximately $150, and the results have garnered them attention from CNN, Fox, ABC and more. Here’s how they made it:

Equipment Used in the Launch Capsule

One of the amazing parts of this project is that there were only two small modifications needed on the materials: The camera used was selected for its ability to use a timed shutter script through the CHDK firmware update (I use this same setup for most of my timelapse films), and the styrofoam cooler allowed for lightweight thermal insulation which can be easily cut to allow the lens of the camera to stick through.

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