The Walls Have Eyes

...r adapters etc all equipped with hidden cameras. Could their be legitimate uses for these devices? Maybe the sight of a baby monitor offends your aesthetic sensibilities and you’d prefer it discretely hidden in a smoke alarm? Possible but unlikely. We all know but don’t want to think about these inexpensive electronics in the hands of Airbnb voyeurs. While our ancestors once scanned the savanna in the hopes of bagging a gazelle for dinner we moder...

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Curing Boredom with Solenoids

...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcgFfY4fVqU Sixteen year old Brandon Switzer came up with a way of dealing with boredom: build a player piano. The project uses a humble Arduino and a whole lot of solenoids. It took six months to finish. I’ve come to see the value in taking on a project that’s out of your comfort zone and this is a great example of learning while making....

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How FilmLA Blocks Bike Lanes

...od is a bike lane if it’s always blocked by cars and trucks? As anyone who uses what passes for the meager bike infrastructure here in Los Angeles, pretty much only early on Sunday morning will you find your path unimpeded by an assortment of Uber drivers, beer delivery trucks and FedEx employees. But the most annoying bike lane blocking is courtesy of the film and television industry. In order to close a bike lane for filming you have to get a fi...

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A Crisis of the Real: A Levitating Saints and a French Theory Remix

...we all find ourselves in. If you’re a theory-head you’ll love Gilles Delueze riffing on topics in alphabetical order for six whole hours (!). Someone has thoughtfully uploaded a subtitled version to Archive.org. It’s hard to believe, in our idiotic present, that this kind of content used to be on mainstream television. Lest you think this is just a French thing I’ll point out that, when philosopher Henri Bergson came to New York to do a guest lec...

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Pepper’s Ghost

...eB4kup3oKY0?si=Lp8HuYnto3B3_gH1 Looking for an easy Halloween display that uses stuff you might have at hand? In this video Joshua Ellingson shows you how to create the 19th century Pepper’s ghost effect using an iPad, some plastic film and a glass container. YouTube is full of pre-made Pepper’s ghost videos so you don’t even need to shoot anything. If you want to go deeper there’s a free version of a video DJ type program called VDMX that you can...

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