Man Made DIY

Space. It's mysterious, possibly infinite, and as captured in these photographs by NASA astronaut Don Pettit, absolutely stunning.   

Photographer Lincoln Harrison has created the most amazing long exposure star trail photographs in the Australian Outback. Taking up to fifteen hours to capture each lens, Harrison uses standard, albeit high-end, photography equipment like the "Nikon D7000, Nikon D3100, and a wide assortment of lenses. Harrison captures a large number of exposures of the foreground and stars separately. He then combines the images (sometimes hundreds of them) into amazing photographs showing the sky dominated by colorful star trails."

It's official: I'm declaring today, Tuesday, January 11th 2011, Paper Day! Most of the country is under a winter storm advisory, so lots of us are stuck inside, eating from the fridge and looking for something to do. Since you might not be able to get out of the house and pick up supplies for a large scale DIY project, we'll be offering four sweet and FREE how-to or printable projects to keep you busy.

Paper Day, Part 3: Moravian Star

A Moravian star is a popular Advent and Christmas decoration in Germany. They originated as a geometry lesson, but eventually became adapted by the Moravian Church as a holiday symbol. [… read more

NPR's All Tech Considered blog takes a look at Noel Dickover, a hobbyist pumpkin carving master, who's created some amazingly detailed Star Wars themed jack-o-lanterns. "For Halloween and Star Wars geeks alike, it's truly a harmonic convergence of awesomeness."

As Noel says, "There's a difference between carving a pattern on a pumpkin, and a pumpkin sculpt.  In the case of R2-D2, or the Deathstar, for instance, the pumpkin "is" the object, not just a portrait.  So in thinking about carving R2-D2, I absolutely had to have a fairly tall, completely cylindrical looking pumpkin.  I found one that weighed in at right around 40 lbs. Without this, there's no way I could have gotten the detail I was looking… read more

You know those moments when you just look at an object, and you think, "oh my gosh! That totally looks like a _________." It could be something you've never seen before, the form of which immediately stands out to you. Or, it could be something you've seen and used all your life.

Lindsey had one of those moments with a standard one-gallon milk carton. The realization? Stormtrooper helmet. Of… read more