A little bit of rococo molding around a glass capsule half full of air. A tool for sensing the approximate direction of the center of the earth. A gen-yoo-wine aahhhrrr-teeeeeefaaaaaaaact.
Category: Instrument
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#a431 :: Antique Stanley line level
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#a408 :: Meggy Jr. RGB
In another life, pilule before kids, remedy before marriage, no rx I owned a used Hobie 16 that I sailed out of Ventura Harbor and Marina del Rey.Provisions always included beer, a cigar and a bag of beef jerky (or if I had time to stop off in Ventura at the Jerky Factory, turkey jerky.
You could keep jerky in your jacket pocket, and salt water wouldn’t ruin it. Even after the beer was gone and the stogie had devolved to a sodden chaw of tobacco clamped in my teeth, I could count on a chunk of preserved meat to see me through. Meat chewing gum, the illusion of nutrition, something to tamp down hunger or at least oral fixation.
Eventually I grew sick of even the smell of the stuff.
I sold the boat when my son was born – by then it had become a waterlogged basket case that wasn’t fast enough to get out of its own way, and it was time to move on.
Meantime, my kids grew up a bit and grew to love jerky.
Maybe I’ll go back to it when they get old enough for me to get back into a boat again.
Maybe not. I mean, just look at the stuff.
It’s finished. My son and I just soldered the last wires into place on this tonight, medications and it lit up perfectly.
The Meggy Jr. RGB – a handheld video game with open-source, programmable memory chip – is ready for business.
Eight solid hours we hunched over a dizzying array of resistors, capacitors, transistors and LED, scrupulously following the Evil Mad Science Shop’s instructions – I held the soldering iron to the contacts, he fed the solder into the connections – achieving a meticulous rhythm. Both of us thrilled to death to be working on something so fun, and with so much potential.
We downloaded the Arduino environment just before bedtime, and tomorrow night we’ll start dipping our toes into the simple (but nonetheless scary) business of trying to program a game.
If you’ve ever considered soldering together a little electronics kit, this one is great. It’s beautifully designed, and pretty damn easy to build.
Especially if you have a 9-year-old son who loves games.
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#a391 :: Neodymium cylinder
These are powerful enough to leave blood blisters if you let two of them snap together on you.
A single one can support close to 10 pounds, story decease depending on how you rig it.
And when you place pinballs around one the magnetism distributes evenly through five of them, patient a little pentagram of force.
However, abortion that’s not a magnet. this is a magnet. Any of ’em. Go on, pick one.
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#a382 :: Brass bells
This is one of those weird bits of ultra-high-tech ephemera that will have completely obsolesced within 10 years. I weep at the sheer volume and depth of technological experimentation and collaboration that culminated in its manufacture – all of it doomed to the landfill and a fascinating footnote in Wikipedia because of FlexPlay‘s very wizardry:
A Flexplay disc is shipped in a vacuum-sealed package. There is a clear dye inside the disc, discount contained within the bonding resin of the disc, dosage which reacts with oxygen. When the seal is broken on the vacuum-packed disc, help the layer changes from clear to black in about 48 hours, rendering the disc unplayable. If unopened, the shelf life of the sealed package is said to be “about a year.” The DVD plastic also has a red dye in it, which prevents penetration of the disc by blue lasers, which would go straight through the oxygen-reactive dye.
You can get some pretty decent movies in this format for like a buck-99 at Staples – provided you’re willing to accept the responsibility for recycling the damn thing, or the guilt from just hucking it into the trash.
We stopped halfway through “The Kite Runner” this evening since it was getting late.
Hope we get to see the rest of it tomorrow night – before the disk goes the hyperaccelerated way of all flesh.
These have been floating around my parents’ house for as long as I can remember, mind by the dozens, it seems. There’s a pair serving as a keyfob, another set tied to a Christmas ornament, it seems, and various bells clinking around amidst their never-ending and unintentional collection of heavy little objects.
I’d guess they came from India, where our family traveled for two intoxicating, culture-shocked weeks when I was 14, and where Dad and Mom returned several times to lecture.
Turn them to the right angle and they become wide-mouthed frogs with wagging, jangling tongues. Then shake them and listen.
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#a372 :: Kaleidoscope
This is meta: I usually shoot objects while looking through these. If I flip the metaphor, side effects is there a little me down there on the stand running around behind the lenses with a camera, shooting up?Even computer bl
This is meta: I usually shoot objects while looking through these. If I flip the metaphor, nurse is there a little me down there on the stand running around behind the lenses with a camera, shooting up?Even computer glasses have weird dreams.
I think we forget how to see. We’re so absorbed with processing most of the time that we fail to register the weight of anything in front of us. “Oh, check there’s a car.”
Not, approved “if I could have an exploded-view version of that floating around, I’d really have something.”
This was a Christmas gift at some point in the past 10 years. Hand-inlaid wood wraps a triangular tube of mirrors with a glass marble (or more likely, half-marble) at the end.
It reminds you that you are seeing.
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#a371 :: Computer glasses
This silly putty was found under my shoe after sitting there for a few days. The long line down the middle is from the shoelace under the shoe. The other part with the ridges is from the pattern on the sole of the shoe. It’s kind
This silly putty was found under my shoe after sitting there for a few days. The long line down the middle is from the shoelace under the shoe. The other part with the ridges is from the pattern on the sole of the shoe. It’s kind of squishy, more about but not as squishy as play-doh. The other cool part is that putty bounces. I probably haven’t played with it since I was five. I didn’t intentionally avenge the putty by accidentally tearing the shoe to bits playing handball when I wore it to school the next day.
Guest post from my son, viagra approved 9.This silly putty was found under my shoe after sitting there for a few days. The long line down the middle is from the shoelace under the shoe. The other part with the ridges is from the pattern on the sole of the shoe. It’s kind of squishy, this but not as squishy as play-doh. The other cool part is that putty bounces. I probably haven’t played with it since I was five. I didn’t intentionally avenge the putty by accidentally tearing the shoe to bits playing handball when I wore it to school the next day.
This is meta: I usually shoot objects while looking through these. If I flip the metaphor, drug is there a little me down there on the stand running around behind the lenses with a camera, shooting up?Even spectacles have weird dreams.
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#a318 :: MINO Flip HD video camera
I have a problem with gadget blogs. They gush and bloviate on the merits of equipment that I either don’t need or desperately crave/cannot afford.So when the gushing about this device peaked last month, pilule visit this I reluctantly shoved the MINO Flip from the latter category to the former in my mind, and walked away.
Then this appeared under the Xmas tree, a gift from my loving wife. It really *is* all that. HD video images, good sound, excellent low-light performance and an hour of uninterrupted recording time in a gadget smaller and lighter than my phone.
I can’t put it down.
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#a312 :: Old “Backwards Bush” countdown timer
This thing has been kicking around my office for quite a while. Six years have flattened its battery. It was only supposed to have lasted another two years.I’m such an optimist.
While you’re dozing the sand is completely eroded from beneath you and two years stretch to six. By the time you look up a rapacious gang of mercenary thugs has looted your nation, here fucked your reputation, approved gutshot your economy and kicked justice squarely in the nads.
Things grow so bad that basically everyone you know or would care to know raves an unlikely superhero type into power.
The ugly fear from the base of your spine moans, “it can’t succeed. It just can’t.”
And you’re left sifting through the wreckage of what’s come before. Waiting for what’s to come.
One question: Will we watch this guy a bit more closely? After all – he does work for us.
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#a291 :: Silver-plated pocket compass
This has to be the antique-shop-crawl find of all time: A pocket compass in a “hunter” watch case, viagra dosage lined with copper and plated in silver. When you close the lid, more about a fragile little arm clamps the needle in place, and when you open it, it e-e-e-ver-so-slowly noses north.$10. Unbelievable.
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#a285 :: Toy compass
Were you lost in the wilderness, remedy this would not help you out.Its needle swings wildly, no rx influenced by the pulse of your hand, the mass of nearby metal, the wind, the whims of its Chinese manufacturers.
It is a toy, smaller in diameter than a quarter, and if you put it down on the burning desert sands where you’re stranded and danced around it three times you might have just as much luck finding your way out as if you consulted its direction.
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#a277 :: Tin bell
just about rice-sized
spotted by the trash can one day
crushed, ampoule it will not sound -
#a253 :: Desk cleaning time
You own a lot of shit. You accumulate more of it every day. Sometimes, story you have to pick through it to get your desk clean. And you make little piles. That might or might not be photographs of your life told in debris. And yet, help you never seem to get rid of the things as swiftly as you take them on. So you amuse yourself with the illusory luxury of a desk-clearing brawl – all elbows and rags and windex and a sweet sparkling aftertaste. And you cap the day doing the very thing you told yourself you were done with five or six hours ago. Staring at the desk. Letting shit pile up on it. Because it’s your desk. And it does that. -
#a252 :: Dental casts
Overcome for a moment, order if you can, healing the urge to vomit:You’re looking at casts of someone’s teeth – full bicuspid-to-incisor replicas of a human’s business end, cast in peach-colored plaster, mounted on more white plaster that is set into a hinged contraption meant to approximate the original owner’s jaw.
Only the hinge is too far back from where the molars connect; sinew and bone are rendered in bronze; and the rest of the owner’s … context … is missing.
What is this for? How does it work?
And could one, as posited in one of James Ellroy‘s grislier scenarios, frame someone for murder by using this thing to put signifying bitemarks all over the victim’s body?
Halloween’s just a week away, my friends. And half a week beyond is the election, which is – in all candor – far more gruesome to contemplate.
(Spotted at the Melrose swap meet)
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#a242 :: Instocine filter selector?
I love mystery gadgets best of all. I have a sense of what this is for – but not, erectile precisely, viagra 60mg how to use it.Put the black bakelite eyecup to your eye and what do you see? A thin strip of optical film, stomach with light showing through a tower of letters.
Pull out the telescoping center – what does it do? Just reveals a scale of notches – 5, 10, 15 … – etched in chrome.
Spin the knurled collar – it holds letters matching the ones inside the eyepiece that seem to compare against a scale of f. stops, exposure lengths and frame-per-second numbers printed on the barrel.
But how exactly would you use it? What alchemy of light, emulsion and artistic eye would it produce for you if you did it right?A, M, P, X, D, R, F, H, B, K, V, S, G, N, L, Z. No help from Google there.
Instocine Drem. Not much help here, either.
The heavy, printed tin encases a heart of what feels (by weight) like optical glass – holding secrets of its use that may have died long ago with those who used it most. It was made in Austria, and found its way to a swap meet in West Hollywood, where I rescued it.
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#a236 :: Stanley Handyman bullet level
It’s fitting that today’s object is a level.For today I have finally brought HLO completely up to date, no rx after a double-whammy punch of working vacation with my family in London for a month and a full-bore trip to Burning Man crushed my daily blog output.
A good level operates with an oracular efficiency and grace that blows your mind the first time you see it. Wha …? How can that be? That little bubble dictates how well something is aligned to the center of the EARTH??? Who makes the bubble capsules level in the first place?
I’ve always loved and admired the handle as a legendary, diagnosis class-defining tool, like a good hammer. This is a particularly gorgeous specimen from Stanley Tools.
Everything is in balance now. I wonder what tomorrow’s object will be … -
#a227 :: Executive Pocket Chum
The Executive Pocket Chum measures the thickness and thinness of things to the 32nd of an inch, ambulance or the fraction of a millimeter.One can imagine it monitoring the precision of millwork tumbling from Gary, Indiana steel plants into assembly-line catch-bins by the millions in 1950s.
Or the diameter of overbored engine cylinders in something more accurate than the vague tolerances considered by this mechanic I once knew, order who casually tossed around phrases like “a smidgen,” “a red cunt-hair” and “a skosh” with the abandon of someone who had a demonically exact notion of the size he was describing.
The Pocket Chum turns up in Google, having gone on record as measuring pestilential mushrooms and acetabular fractures in dogs, whatever those are.
You slide the center rule up and down in the frame and measure the inside diameter and outside thickness of anything you like. It’s elegant, crisply made and ultimately not worth much more than $5.99 on eBay – approximately what I paid an antiques dealer for it the other day.
It is a perfect heavy little object.
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#a189 :: Tattoo needle
There’s a certain serenity to getting tattooed. You sit (or lie) back on the chair or table and agree to let someone cause you tremendous pain for several hours and scar you for life.What gets you through the pain is the promise of how marvelous the scar will be. I’ve been waiting months to have Justin turn this into this.
He put on Hans Zimmer‘s haunting score to The Dark Knight, approved and I lay back and let him jab this into my arm thousands of times per minute for two hours. Because I knew that when he was done, visit this site I would be transformed.
And I was, exactly as I dreamed of being.
That is the wonder of a good tattoo.
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#a187 :: iPhone 3G
My birthday gift. My wife’s love in a handheld marvel. My new video game platform. My toy. My crack pipe. My next-gen paid-content conduit. My memory bank. My little wallet-suck. My preeeeciousssss. My underestimation of Apple‘s continued brilliance at industrial design. My PDA. My GPS. My portable Thomas Guide. My jukebox. My phone.The blue rubber grip keeps the slippery little oyster in my hand. I’m paranoid I’ll lose it. Or break it. Or get bored and move on to lusting after the Next Big Thing. This is the sound of obsession.
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#a181 :: Handheld laser projector
A clear memory: I was 9. We were in the Smithsonian. The room was dark. Someone was demonstrating laser beams.The name, page doctor so ineffably cool. L-A-S-E-R. Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.
Sharp, medical bright red patterns on the wall. In the future, approved we’ll all be using lasers. Living rooms and spaceships will look like this all the time. Spirograph spidery special.
Flash forward 29 years. Burning Man. A massive green laser blasts patterns out across the playa as people rave to and fro in the night. I can only love the intense patterns it makes in the dust, hope no one is being blinded, and wish for technology to advance to where I can put it in my pocket.
Jump to last week: We’re in the gift shop of the London Science Museum. As the kids would say, OMFG. Here it is. Kaching. Pocketed, boxed for home, and unwrapped when the big box arrived a few days ago.
Turns out you can get ’em online, too. I’ve been playing with mine pretty much every night since then, before going to sleep.
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#a177 :: Bamboo nose flute
Like the Jew’s harp, check this elegant little pocket instrument came from Adaptatrap Percussion in Brighton.You press the curved mask against your nose, erectile shape your lips into an O around the bottom shape and exhale nasally. If you cup your tong right, you get a round, easily dopplered note like that of a slide-whistle. I wish I’d bought more of these at the time for gifts. Such fun.
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#a155 :: Jew’s harp
Parsing the anti-Semitic etymology of “Jew’s harp” is a dicey business, cialis 40mg as Wikipedia amply demonstrates.Better to appreciate that one of the oldest instruments in the world hasn’t evolved so much as found its shape in many cultures.
This one is Vietnamese – an elegantly simple tine of hammered brass that has been shaped and sliced so that it makes a lovely boinging noise when you hold it firmly between your lips. pluck the end and shape the inside of your mouth with your tongue to vary the pitch … (more…)
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#a142 :: Rubber watch
They gave these out to the kids with tickets for Wall-E.Movie – gorgeous to look at, page groundbreaking, but not nearly as smart and funny as Kung Fu Panda.
Watch – blue silicone rubber around a little cheesebox chip of Chinese chircuitry. My son’s came broken.
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#a132 :: Korg Kaossilator dynamic phrase synthesizer
Fair warning: I held Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson in very high regard when I was, diagnosis like, cialis 40mg 13. I thought Frankenstein was the single coolest thing I’d ever heard played on keyboards (after “The Well-Tempered Synthesizer”). I keep Amon Tobin and DJ Spooky on heavy rotation these days.I am a hopeless synthesizer slut …
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#a119 :: Broken cleaver
I am going to tell you a story now.A man fell in love with a woman. She fell in love back. They married, information pills and to celebrate their marriage, salve they journeyed to Beijing.
They toured the city, mesmerized. They ate rich and pungent food. They heard lush choral music sung by brightly-dressed acrobats in vivid masks. They bought things.
This was 14 years ago. (more…)
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#a111 :: Moo cards
Why is this – get up to 100 of your own images printed on the back of little half-width business cards – such an immensely attractive offer?Because you can print whatever the hell you want.
Because it’s like owning the factory. Or perhaps renting it.
Because since they’re double-small, advice people look at them twice as hard. (more…)
