Archive for the ‘Holiday projects’ Category
A robot Santa near you
September 3rd, 2010 | 
Author: 
Nick Brewer's looking for support for his documentary on kickstarter:
More:Last December, in 70 cities across four continents, thousands gathered to celebrate Santacon. There are rules... you must wear a Santa suit, or some other holiday attire, a hat is not enough. Santa has to act like Santa, being jolly, handing out gifts, playing reindeer games, etc.
I decided to build a robot Santa suit for New York's Santacon in 2009. A month and a few hundred dollars later, it was done. The finished product stood almost seven feet tall, featured a box mounted on the chest that activated a voice changer, had Christmas lights around the arms, and a fan for the rocket pack on the back (Robot Santa doesn't need reindeer). The whole thing went over really well.
This year, myself and some friends are going to build a better robot Santa costume, film the building process, and then Santacon itself, for a short documentary in HD.
A portion of the funds will go directly to building the robot itself, but a large chunk is devoted to equipment and crew costs. Anybody who is forced to spend a day surrounded by thousands of very loud Santas while holding a heavy camera deserves some compensation. Same with the editor, who will have to use breakneck speed to finish the film before Christmas.
- Knitted Santa Motorcycle Helmet
- Make: Holiday Gift Guide 2009: Santa Claus Machines
- HOW TO - Make a Halloween hangman (Dancing Santa hack)
- Holiday Project: Santa Peanut
Posted in 
Toolbox: The tools of summer
In the Make: Online Toolbox, we focus mainly on tools that fly under the radar of more conventional tool coverage: in-depth tool-making projects, strange, or specialty tools unique to a trade or craft that can be useful elsewhere, tools and techniques you may not know about, but once you do, and incorporate them into your workflow, you'll wonder how you ever lived without them. And, in the spirit of the times, we pay close attention to tools that you can get on the cheap, make yourself, or refurbish.
As we head down to the tail end of summer, and Labor Day, we figured it might be a good idea to look at some of the tools we use to cook outdoors, to camp, to party on the beach. Here are a few of our faves, with some goodies from the MAKE vaults.
When we put out the call for ideas for this column, a number of people immediately came back with links to the ever-popular "penny stove" or "soda can stove." People love these little guys. They're fun and easy to make and super useful. Mark Adams, of HacDC, writes:
My daughter and I are planning our fall camping trip right now, and were testing out our supplies to get ready. Of course, as soon as we saw this email we had to take some pictures of our penny stove in action — any excuse to "test" stuff out... It actually works great, and as you can see, all packs neatly into the cooking pot, along with a potstand made from coat-hangar wire and a simmer ring from some steel duct material we had around. It easily brings a pot of water to a boil in about 6min with a couple ounces of alcohol. All in all a lot of fun and easy to make, too!
Instructables has a number of projects for building variations of the penny stove. Here's one to get you started.
Toolbox: The tools of summer
In the Make: Online Toolbox, we focus mainly on tools that fly under the radar of more conventional tool coverage: in-depth tool-making projects, strange, or specialty tools unique to a trade or craft that can be useful elsewhere, tools and techniques you may not know about, but once you do, and incorporate them into your workflow, you'll wonder how you ever lived without them. And, in the spirit of the times, we pay close attention to tools that you can get on the cheap, make yourself, or refurbish.
As we head down to the tail end of summer, and Labor Day, we figured it might be a good idea to look at some of the tools we use to cook outdoors, to camp, to party on the beach. Here are a few of our faves, with some goodies from the MAKE vaults.
When we put out the call for ideas for this column, a number of people immediately came back with links to the ever-popular "penny stove" or "soda can stove." People love these little guys. They're fun and easy to make and super useful. Mark Adams, of HacDC, writes:
My daughter and I are planning our fall camping trip right now, and were testing out our supplies to get ready. Of course, as soon as we saw this email we had to take some pictures of our penny stove in action — any excuse to "test" stuff out... It actually works great, and as you can see, all packs neatly into the cooking pot, along with a potstand made from coat-hangar wire and a simmer ring from some steel duct material we had around. It easily brings a pot of water to a boil in about 6min with a couple ounces of alcohol. All in all a lot of fun and easy to make, too!
Instructables has a number of projects for building variations of the penny stove. Here's one to get you started.
Geek Atlas companion app
One of the things we're exploring for this season's MAKEcation coverage is good ol' VAcations, but with a MAKE twist. If MAKEcations are about productively spending your summer at home, learning new things, doing some projects by yourself or with the family, a MAKE Vacation is about traveling with learning and DIY in mind. There are science museums to visit, historical science and technology sites to explore, places to learn about a specific technology or craft, hacker- and other DIY spaces and groups in various cities to check out. It'd be fun to plan a family trip around a particular theme, say rocketry or the development of the PC, and then visit a bunch of destinations and plan activities around that theme.
O'Reilly has a popular book, called The Geek Atlas, that's a guide to 128 worthy science and technology destinations. (We'll have more on the Atlas soon.) Now, there's also an iPhone version of the book, with GPS locations/maps for the destinations, Wikipedia links to relevant information related to the destinations and the science and tech found there, and more. The Companion is $2.99 in the App Store.
Read the Full Story » | More on MAKE » | Comments » | Read more articles in Holiday projects | Digg this!