I wrote about these a while back, and now someone has another fine example online — a Masonic code book:

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Fine craftsmanship and centuries-old techology — in a panoramic camera:

Their site is down, but you can read more at RetroThing.

Once upon a time, you needed a guy named Q to give you cool spy gadgets; now you can go to the internet and get all kinds of sneaky crap:

Want to be a Worth1000 darling? Learn how to blend two animals together in Photoshop. Below is a crappy example I did years ago — hopefully you can do better!

While I think I’ve seen most of these celebrity pinball machines, this is the only one I’ve actually played:

Stevel Carell is smart — you have to be smart to come up with a list of how to be smart.

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The monowheel concept has been around over a hundred years, but it hasn’t ever really improved on things we’ve already got. Modern ones tend to be motor-powered, but the guy below put together this pedal-powered monobike as a design project:

Personally, in my technical eye, the gearing ratio from pedal to gears to wheel is much, much too small; the reason there’s a small gear at the back of a bike is because the big wheel is attached to it and spins once for every time the small gear spins, but you can’t transfer that to the monobike design seen here; the monobike above counteracts the gear-reduction with that tiny, tiny ‘pusher’ wheel the transfers the energy to the big wheel. I can’t imagine a human ever being able to pedal fast enough to stay upright Huge pedal gear, tiny transfer gear, huge ‘pusher’ wheel…Gosh, darn it — now I’m designing one. I gotta stop thinking so much.

Really, if you know what a pinhole camera is, you can easily find many more varied, useful, and informative internet content — but this article from Low-Tech Mag does a nice job of condensing it for the masses, while tossing in some excellent examples of the process.

This is an awesome little find from RetroThing: a Fisher-Price battery-powered, Sesame-street themed record player. The little bird on the tone arm appears to play with his beak, a’la Flintstones. The parts are remiscent of the standard Fisher-Price record player of the time; I can’t remember if it was battery-powered, too. I’ve got one of the standard FP players (amongst others) — RetroThing recommends using it as a ‘tester’, when out and about buying record albums. Good thinking!

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