cre.ations.net http://cre.ations.net/ A haven for creators and makers, cre.ations.net is the place to quickly publish anything you've created. Free and easy! en-us Copyright 2006, cre.ations.net Fri, 19 Mar 2010 05:16:34 -0500 Fri, 19 Mar 2010 05:16:34 -0500 custom http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss <![CDATA["Four Corners" Cardstock Puzzle]]> Created by tsmaster 48.3 weeks ago: "When I was a kid, I had a puzzle made of six plastic pieces that assembled into a symmetrical four-pronged shape. Years later, I discovered that this puzzle was originally designed by Stuart Coffin, and went by the name "Four Corners" (amongst many others). I've got a copy of Coffin's "Geometric Puzzle Design", which is a good reference and a good resource, but I had a hard time figuring out from the diagrams how the puzzle was formed - my geometric memory was a little hazy. Coffin remarks that the puzzle can be made out of a few geometric primitives, but I couldn't get a good mental image of the actual shapes of the..."

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]]> Created by tsmaster 48.3 weeks ago: "When I was a kid, I had a puzzle made of six plastic pieces that assembled into a symmetrical four-pronged shape. Years later, I discovered that this puzzle was originally designed by Stuart Coffin, and went by the name "Four Corners" (amongst many others). I've got a copy of Coffin's "Geometric Puzzle Design", which is a good reference and a good resource, but I had a hard time figuring out from the diagrams how the puzzle was formed - my geometric memory was a little hazy. Coffin remarks that the puzzle can be made out of a few geometric primitives, but I couldn't get a good mental image of the actual shapes of the..."

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]]> http://cre.ations.net/creation/four-corners-cardstock-puzzle http://cre.ations.net/creation/four-corners-cardstock-puzzle Toys Wed, 15 Apr 2009 01:22:02 -0500 <![CDATA[Froot Cake]]> Created by tsmaster 2 years ago: "When I was a kid, they had small type interposed into the name of the cereal, so the full name of this project might more correctly be "FROOT flavored CAKE". I'm not sure why they had to double up on making sure you knew that the cereal contained no real fruit - perhaps the quantity of froot wasn't at acceptable levels back then, so it was only "froot flavored". Anyway, for a festive alternative to the rum-soaked nut loaves that are so popular(?) this time of year, I offer my own creation, FROOT CAKE. The recipe was stolen, er, adapted from a more familiar crisped-rice cookie recipe, so you may already know how to proceed. 1/4 c. butter 6 c. froot flavored cereal in loop shape 10 1/2 ounces (1 pkg) miniature marshmallows 1. melt butter over low heat in large pan 2. add marshmallows 3. stir until melted 4. mix in cereal 5. pour into non-stick loaf pan 6. refrigerate overnight 7. cut into slices A couple observations: - if you can..."

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]]> Created by tsmaster 2 years ago: "When I was a kid, they had small type interposed into the name of the cereal, so the full name of this project might more correctly be "FROOT flavored CAKE". I'm not sure why they had to double up on making sure you knew that the cereal contained no real fruit - perhaps the quantity of froot wasn't at acceptable levels back then, so it was only "froot flavored". Anyway, for a festive alternative to the rum-soaked nut loaves that are so popular(?) this time of year, I offer my own creation, FROOT CAKE. The recipe was stolen, er, adapted from a more familiar crisped-rice cookie recipe, so you may already know how to proceed. 1/4 c. butter 6 c. froot flavored cereal in loop shape 10 1/2 ounces (1 pkg) miniature marshmallows 1. melt butter over low heat in large pan 2. add marshmallows 3. stir until melted 4. mix in cereal 5. pour into non-stick loaf pan 6. refrigerate overnight 7. cut into slices A couple observations: - if you can..."

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]]> http://cre.ations.net/creation/froot-cake http://cre.ations.net/creation/froot-cake Food Mon, 10 Dec 2007 23:35:49 -0600 <![CDATA[Boat Picture Above My Couch]]> Created by tsmaster 2 years ago: "Taking inspiration from a popular domestic television show, I wanted to have a picture of a boat over my couch. In fact, I wanted to have the same picture, to some degree. I found an episode of the show where the picture was shown straight on (to keep me from having to correct for perspective), screen captured a promising frame, cleaned it up in Photoshop a little, then sent it through http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/ Rasterbator (not my choice of name, sorry), which converts JPEG images to large-scale PDF files, suitable for sending to your printer. Rasterbator is capable of much larger projects http://www.flickr.com/photos/tsmaster/tags/orlandobloom/ like this, and probably wasn't necessary for the boat. In my research, I tried to get the picture sized to the couch to match what I saw on TV, but I'm not sure how well I achieved that..."

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]]> Created by tsmaster 2 years ago: "Taking inspiration from a popular domestic television show, I wanted to have a picture of a boat over my couch. In fact, I wanted to have the same picture, to some degree. I found an episode of the show where the picture was shown straight on (to keep me from having to correct for perspective), screen captured a promising frame, cleaned it up in Photoshop a little, then sent it through http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/ Rasterbator (not my choice of name, sorry), which converts JPEG images to large-scale PDF files, suitable for sending to your printer. Rasterbator is capable of much larger projects http://www.flickr.com/photos/tsmaster/tags/orlandobloom/ like this, and probably wasn't necessary for the boat. In my research, I tried to get the picture sized to the couch to match what I saw on TV, but I'm not sure how well I achieved that..."

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]]> http://cre.ations.net/creation/boat-picture-above-my-couch http://cre.ations.net/creation/boat-picture-above-my-couch "Art" Mon, 26 Nov 2007 08:04:14 -0600 <![CDATA[Wii BCD Clock]]> Created by tsmaster 2 years ago: "I was mucking about with cWiiRemote (version 0.2, but it looks like the project is now maintained http://www.ecando.it/faceplate.html# here), putting a SWIG wrapper around the library, so I could do Python prototyping of games using the Wii controllers. It turns out, as a programmer, you can turn the 4 blue LEDs on and off at will, so you don't have to display power levels or controller number, you could do other things, as well. Like a clock: the Python script acquires connections to the four controllers, finds the time (in this case, a 24-hour representation, so, 14:47), converts each digit to binary (which seems a little weird, but it's called 'Binary Coded Decimal', and it's quasi-useful and easier for humans to read than a full-on binary representation of the time), and sends the binary representation of the digits out to the controllers. So: 1 -> ---* 4 -> -*-- 4 -> -*-- 7 -> -*** I tried some other things, including sweeping a light back and forth Knight Rider..."

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]]> Created by tsmaster 2 years ago: "I was mucking about with cWiiRemote (version 0.2, but it looks like the project is now maintained http://www.ecando.it/faceplate.html# here), putting a SWIG wrapper around the library, so I could do Python prototyping of games using the Wii controllers. It turns out, as a programmer, you can turn the 4 blue LEDs on and off at will, so you don't have to display power levels or controller number, you could do other things, as well. Like a clock: the Python script acquires connections to the four controllers, finds the time (in this case, a 24-hour representation, so, 14:47), converts each digit to binary (which seems a little weird, but it's called 'Binary Coded Decimal', and it's quasi-useful and easier for humans to read than a full-on binary representation of the time), and sends the binary representation of the digits out to the controllers. So: 1 -> ---* 4 -> -*-- 4 -> -*-- 7 -> -*** I tried some other things, including sweeping a light back and forth Knight Rider..."

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]]> http://cre.ations.net/creation/wii-bcd-clock http://cre.ations.net/creation/wii-bcd-clock Computers Sat, 17 Nov 2007 08:30:59 -0600 <![CDATA[Photomosaics]]> Created by tsmaster 2 years ago: "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail - so I was considering what I could do with an image rescaling function, and it occurred to me that I could assemble photomosaics. A little more noodling suggested that grabbing album covers from Amazon.com would be one of the easier sources of square, recognizable, images. I wrote a program to assemble the photomosaics. The basic technique is pretty simple. First, decide how many tiles you want in the mosaic. Let's say that's 10x10. Then, decide on a sub-tile resolution - the size of the details you want to represent. Maybe you want to break the tiles into a 3x3 grid, which is what I used for most of the album mosaics you see here. If your tiles are non-square (like coming from a TV source), you might want a different aspect ratio, like 4x3 or 5x3. Then, multiply these two sizes together (10x10 x 3x3) to get the working size of your "big picture" image (30x30 in this case). Resize the big picture to that size as a..."

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]]> Created by tsmaster 2 years ago: "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail - so I was considering what I could do with an image rescaling function, and it occurred to me that I could assemble photomosaics. A little more noodling suggested that grabbing album covers from Amazon.com would be one of the easier sources of square, recognizable, images. I wrote a program to assemble the photomosaics. The basic technique is pretty simple. First, decide how many tiles you want in the mosaic. Let's say that's 10x10. Then, decide on a sub-tile resolution - the size of the details you want to represent. Maybe you want to break the tiles into a 3x3 grid, which is what I used for most of the album mosaics you see here. If your tiles are non-square (like coming from a TV source), you might want a different aspect ratio, like 4x3 or 5x3. Then, multiply these two sizes together (10x10 x 3x3) to get the working size of your "big picture" image (30x30 in this case). Resize the big picture to that size as a..."

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]]> http://cre.ations.net/creation/photomosaics http://cre.ations.net/creation/photomosaics "Art" Fri, 16 Nov 2007 08:19:43 -0600 <![CDATA[More bleached T-Shirts]]> Created by tsmaster 2 years ago: "Continuing to draw inspiration from jesse, brenda, sykora, and aliya, I did a second batch of shirts, burning through my pile of new shirts. This time, I used some fancier imagery, requiring the use of adhesive. I used 3M spray adhesive, and got good stickiness, but the nozzle velocity was way too high - it blew a number of the smaller pieces off the counter. So I ended up using a glue stick for the blue shirt (below). I consider this a mixed success - I'm psyched to have a cake shirt, and the teapot pleases me. The other two aren't all bad, but they didn't quite turn out as I..."

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]]> Created by tsmaster 2 years ago: "Continuing to draw inspiration from jesse, brenda, sykora, and aliya, I did a second batch of shirts, burning through my pile of new shirts. This time, I used some fancier imagery, requiring the use of adhesive. I used 3M spray adhesive, and got good stickiness, but the nozzle velocity was way too high - it blew a number of the smaller pieces off the counter. So I ended up using a glue stick for the blue shirt (below). I consider this a mixed success - I'm psyched to have a cake shirt, and the teapot pleases me. The other two aren't all bad, but they didn't quite turn out as I..."

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]]> http://cre.ations.net/creation/more-bleached-t-shirts http://cre.ations.net/creation/more-bleached-t-shirts Clothing Thu, 15 Nov 2007 21:24:19 -0600 <![CDATA[Wooden "Burr" Puzzle]]> Created by tsmaster 2 years ago: "A friend of mine had a birthday party recently with a "childhood" theme, including giving away gift bags to the guests, filled with candy and cheap toys. One of the toys in my bag was a plastic burr puzzle - the sort of puzzle where you pull out one piece, and all the other pieces fall apart in your hand, never to be reassembled, and one piece ends up in the couch, dooming your best intentions to figure it out anyway. As this puzzle was designed for small people, I figured I'd be able to solve it quickly, and after a day or two of fiddling with it while watching television, I got frustrated and resorted to writing a Python program to analyze the puzzle and report solutions. As it turns out, there are two independent solutions, after you remove rotations and reflections. The plastic pieces are definitely made to have an 'inside' face to them, and I was wondering if my program might find a solution where the inside faces were exposed, but it turns out that both solutions have all..."

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]]> Created by tsmaster 2 years ago: "A friend of mine had a birthday party recently with a "childhood" theme, including giving away gift bags to the guests, filled with candy and cheap toys. One of the toys in my bag was a plastic burr puzzle - the sort of puzzle where you pull out one piece, and all the other pieces fall apart in your hand, never to be reassembled, and one piece ends up in the couch, dooming your best intentions to figure it out anyway. As this puzzle was designed for small people, I figured I'd be able to solve it quickly, and after a day or two of fiddling with it while watching television, I got frustrated and resorted to writing a Python program to analyze the puzzle and report solutions. As it turns out, there are two independent solutions, after you remove rotations and reflections. The plastic pieces are definitely made to have an 'inside' face to them, and I was wondering if my program might find a solution where the inside faces were exposed, but it turns out that both solutions have all..."

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]]> http://cre.ations.net/creation/wooden-burr-puzzle http://cre.ations.net/creation/wooden-burr-puzzle Toys Thu, 15 Nov 2007 11:04:59 -0600 <![CDATA[Bleached Shirt - Black Die]]> Created by tsmaster 2 years ago: "Inspired by the other discussions around here about cool bleached shirts, I ran out to my nearby Ben Franklin's, which has t-shirts in a small selection of colors. Today, the options were orange, black, red, and blue - I suspect orange might get swapped out as it becomes less seasonal. I cut out three kite-shaped templates from ordinary printer paper and laid them on the shirt, to verify the rough size and shape. I was pleased with the results, so I proceeded to mix up a 50/50 bleach/water solution and spray it on the shirt. A few things I didn't think of: - a black shirt doesn't bleach to grey or white. In this case, it ended up orangey-brown. Not terrible, and I should have known better. - I made something like 25 ounces of bleach solution. That's a lot. The spray bottle warns you not to store bleach in the spray bottle, as it can corrode metal, so I rinsed out my spray bottle with clean water, and stored my solution for my next few shirts in a canning jar. - It..."

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]]> Created by tsmaster 2 years ago: "Inspired by the other discussions around here about cool bleached shirts, I ran out to my nearby Ben Franklin's, which has t-shirts in a small selection of colors. Today, the options were orange, black, red, and blue - I suspect orange might get swapped out as it becomes less seasonal. I cut out three kite-shaped templates from ordinary printer paper and laid them on the shirt, to verify the rough size and shape. I was pleased with the results, so I proceeded to mix up a 50/50 bleach/water solution and spray it on the shirt. A few things I didn't think of: - a black shirt doesn't bleach to grey or white. In this case, it ended up orangey-brown. Not terrible, and I should have known better. - I made something like 25 ounces of bleach solution. That's a lot. The spray bottle warns you not to store bleach in the spray bottle, as it can corrode metal, so I rinsed out my spray bottle with clean water, and stored my solution for my next few shirts in a canning jar. - It..."

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]]> http://cre.ations.net/creation/bleach-shirt---black-die http://cre.ations.net/creation/bleach-shirt---black-die Clothing Wed, 14 Nov 2007 16:28:34 -0600 <![CDATA[PlayStation 2 Controller in Jell-o]]> Created by tsmaster 2 years ago: "Inspired by "The Office", a buddy and I decided to embed things from our boss' desk in Jell-o. I put a gamepad in orange Jell-O. My buddy was going to try a chess set, but that turned out..."

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]]> Created by tsmaster 2 years ago: "Inspired by "The Office", a buddy and I decided to embed things from our boss' desk in Jell-o. I put a gamepad in orange Jell-O. My buddy was going to try a chess set, but that turned out..."

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]]> http://cre.ations.net/creation/playstation-2-controller-in-jell-o http://cre.ations.net/creation/playstation-2-controller-in-jell-o Food Wed, 14 Nov 2007 16:03:52 -0600 <![CDATA[Hand-woven Paper Icosahedron]]> Created by tsmaster 2 years ago: "I was thinking about 3d printing and how neat it is, but was lamenting how the price needs to come down some before I could screw around with it. Like Bathsheba Grossman said: "Think of 3D printing as the last resort when you've dreamed up something that is flat-out impossible to make by conventional methods". Which kind of took the wind out of my sails. I like technology, I like playing around with new stuff. I want to print out a thing that's never existed before into cornstarch, plaster, ABS plastic, or - hey, why not? - bronze. But Quicken has me on a short chain, so I can't really justify ordering a print run on a professional fabrication device just for my own amusement. So, I was noodling with the idea of weaving and symmetry and the next thing you know, I ended up with a hand-woven icosahedron (20 sided die, for all you half-elf fighter/clerics out there). Made from a single sheet of 8 1/2" x 11" card stock (with some left over), this little thing holds itself together..."

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]]> Created by tsmaster 2 years ago: "I was thinking about 3d printing and how neat it is, but was lamenting how the price needs to come down some before I could screw around with it. Like Bathsheba Grossman said: "Think of 3D printing as the last resort when you've dreamed up something that is flat-out impossible to make by conventional methods". Which kind of took the wind out of my sails. I like technology, I like playing around with new stuff. I want to print out a thing that's never existed before into cornstarch, plaster, ABS plastic, or - hey, why not? - bronze. But Quicken has me on a short chain, so I can't really justify ordering a print run on a professional fabrication device just for my own amusement. So, I was noodling with the idea of weaving and symmetry and the next thing you know, I ended up with a hand-woven icosahedron (20 sided die, for all you half-elf fighter/clerics out there). Made from a single sheet of 8 1/2" x 11" card stock (with some left over), this little thing holds itself together..."

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]]> http://cre.ations.net/creation/hand-woven-paper-icosahedron http://cre.ations.net/creation/hand-woven-paper-icosahedron Sculpture Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:55:05 -0600