Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Kellbot! · SDXF - Python Library for DXF

Kellbot! · SDXF - Python Library for DXF

Stani’s DXF library for python is an excellent tool for writing lines, circles, and polygons in DXF format. DXF (Document Exchange Format) is an ASCII file format published by AutoCad which can be read by a variety of programs, including Blender, Maya, CorelDraw, and a host of others.

I’ll attempt to document the library here as I figure it out, and also release updates to it as I slowly add more element types. I’m learning python and the DXF format as I go along so I can’t guarantee that any of this is correct.

Download SDXF 1.1.1

Changes in 1.1.1

  • Added support for LWPOLYLINE, so you can now make a continuous polyline instead of several separate lines

Example Code

This will draw a line from (0,0) to (1,1) and “Hello World” at (3,0)

import sdxf

d=sdxf.Drawing()

#set the color of the text layer to green
d.layers.append(sdxf.Layer(name="textlayer",color=3))

#add drawing elements
d.append(sdxf.Text('Hello World!',point=(3,0),layer="textlayer"))
d.append(sdxf.Line(points=[(0,0),(1,1)], layer="drawinglayer"))

d.saveas('hello_world.dxf')

Shopbot Buddy CNC Routers and ZomadiCAM

Shopbot Buddy CNC Routers - Affordable CNC Machining









ZomadiCAM provides a ruby toolset for translating Sketchup Models and Geometry into Shopbot Partfiles which can be run on a Shopbot CNC router.





Sunday, December 28, 2008

The Net-Zero Gas Tax

The Net-Zero Gas Tax

The Net-Zero Gas Tax
A once-in-a-generation chance.
by Charles Krauthammer
01/05/2009, Volume 014, Issue 16


These benefits are blindingly obvious. They always have been. But the only time you can possibly think of imposing a tax to achieve them is when oil prices are very low. We had such an opportunity when prices collapsed in the mid-1980s and again in the late 1990s. Both opportunities were squandered. Nothing was done.

Today we are experiencing a unique moment. Oil prices are in a historic free fall from a peak of $147 a barrel to $39 today. In July, U.S. gasoline was selling for $4.11 a gallon. It now sells for $1.65. With $4 gas still fresh in our memories, the psychological impact of a tax that boosts the pump price to near $3 would be far less than at any point in decades. Indeed, an immediate $1 tax would still leave the price more than one-third below its July peak.

The rub, of course, is that this price drop is happening at a time of severe recession. Not only would the cash-strapped consumer rebel against a gas tax. The economic pitfalls would be enormous. At a time when overall consumer demand is shrinking, any tax would further drain the economy of disposable income, decreasing purchasing power just when consumer spending needs to be supported.

What to do? Something radically new. A net-zero gas tax. Not a freestanding gas tax but a swap that couples the tax with an equal payroll tax reduction. A two-part solution that yields the government no net increase in revenue and, more importantly--that is why this proposal is different from others--immediately renders the average gasoline consumer financially whole.

Here is how it works. The simultaneous enactment of two measures: A $1 increase in the federal gasoline tax--together with an immediate $14 a week reduction of the FICA tax. Indeed, that reduction in payroll tax should go into effect the preceding week, so that the upside of the swap (the cash from the payroll tax rebate) is in hand even before the downside (the tax) kicks in.

The math is simple. The average American buys roughly 14 gallons of gasoline a week. The $1 gas tax takes $14 out of his pocket. The reduction in payroll tax puts it right back. The average driver comes out even, and the government makes nothing on the transaction. (There are, of course, more drivers than workers--203 million vs. 163 million. The 10 million unemployed would receive the extra $14 in their unemployment insurance checks. And the elderly who drive--there are 30 million licensed drivers over 65--would receive it with their Social Security payments.)

...

Yes, a high gas tax constitutes a very serious government intervention. But it has the virtue of simplicity. It is clean, adaptable, and easy to administer. Admittedly, it takes a massive external force to alter behavior and tastes. But given the national security and the economic need for more fuel efficiency, and given the leverage that environmental considerations will have on the incoming Democratic administration and Democratic Congress, that change in behavior and taste will occur one way or the other. Better a gas tax that activates free market mechanisms rather than regulation that causes cascading market distortions.

The net-zero gas tax not only obviates the need for government regulation. It obviates the need for government spending as well. Expensive gas creates the market for the fuel-efficient car without Washington having to pick winners and losers with massive government "investment" and arbitrary grants. No regulations, no mandates, no spending programs to prop up the production of green cars that consumer demand would not otherwise support. And if we find this transition going too quickly or too slowly, we can alter it with the simple expedient of altering the gas tax, rather than undertaking the enormously complicated review and rewriting of fuel-efficiency regulations.

...

In our current economic crisis, there is but a single silver lining--the collapse of world oil prices. This in turn is already stimulating a struggling economy, helping our balance of payments, humbling OPEC, and weakening our adversaries. When economic conditions improve, and oil consumption and prices rise again, these benefits will evaporate precisely as they have time and again since the first oil shock of 1973. A time of $1.65 gasoline is our chance to enact a net-zero gas tax. It is a once in a generation opportunity that we cannot afford to miss.

Charles Krauthammer is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Friday, December 26, 2008

Universal lamp shade polygon building kit


Universal lamp shade polygon building kit - More DIY How To Projects

Pepakura Designer

Pepakura Designer
NO.0000267
category:Human/Animal
TitlePortrait of Mr. Ivo Opstelten
Author Bert Simons
URL
CommentPaper portrait of Mr. Ivo Opstelten, d former Mayor of Rotterdam, netherlands. My latest paper portrait and the first portrait of which unfolding and texture printing was completly done with pepakura high res. version and teh final cutting with craft robo viewer
Delete

Pop-Up Card Designer

Pop-Up Card Designer



Change Shapes

Laser Cutting Popups (or, with wires, a table base)
dsc02853.jpgdsc02838.jpg (tabl

Laser Cutting and Scoring: A Production Run

Laser Cutting and Scoring: A Production Run

Hackerspaces - HackerspaceWiki

Hackerspaces - HackerspaceWiki

Hackerspaces are community-operated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects.

This website is for everyone who started or wants to start their own hackerspace.

Resources

Rotating Corner Workstation with Sliding Side Tables: Amazon.co.uk: Kitchen & Home

Rotating Corner Workstation with Sliding Side Tables: Amazon.co.uk: Kitchen & Home

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

MailHook.org - The easiest way to accept mail in your web apps

MailHook.org - The easiest way to accept mail in your web apps

No more scary Sendmail configurations.
No more complicated mail parsing.
No more extraneous polling of mailboxes.
Just another fine example of web hooks in action.

MailHook.org

Receive email in your web apps like a form post!

Signup and start accepting pre-parsed mail in minutes:
Email sent to anything at
Gets posted via HTTP to



Manage hook with this email
What do I do after signup? Is this a free service? Why have you done this?
You’ll probably want to set the value of your MX record to mailhook.org. Then put a script (PHP is quick and simple) at the URL you gave that emails you the contents of the request parameters and send a test email to the domain. Then chuckle at how easy it was... Ideally it would be! We give you 100 free emails to try it out, and then we ask for $14/year per domain to pay the cost of running this service. This may change, but since the service is new and we hope to be able to build others like it, we need to cover our asses a bit. Besides our ongoing desire for cool new infrastructure toys, we think email is a an underutilized way of letting users interface with web applications. Most people know how to use it, and are more likely to use it instead of your app anyway, so why don’t you let them use your app via email?

Les Smithson's Python Projects - SMTP

Les Smithson's Python Projects - SMTP: "Simple SMTP Server tools for Python
The script smtps.py implements a simple extensible SMTP server. This makes it easy to develop specialized SMTP Servers for testing etc. It is usable as a test server as it is, or you may specialize it by subclassing in your own scri"

Monday, December 15, 2008

MIT OpenCourseWare | Special Programs | SP.723 D-Lab: Disseminating Innovations for the Common Good, Spring 2007 | Home

MIT OpenCourseWare | Special Programs | SP.723 D-Lab: Disseminating Innovations for the Common Good, Spring 2007 | Home

SP.723 D-Lab: Disseminating Innovations for the Common Good

Spring 2007

A hand-powered vacuum pump features a wooden flywheel that connects to two commercial vacuum pump units, mounted on a wooden frame.
This human-powered vacuum pump was developed by SP.723 students on the Vac-Cast project for use in rural clinics. Using the pump, technicians can make a mold in sand around an amputated limb, to quickly and cheaply cast a fitted prosthesis. This technology won $7,500 funding in the '06-'07 MIT IDEAS Competition. (Image courtesy of Vac-Cast Project: Tess Veuthey, Goutam Reddy, Irina Azu, Maria Luckyanova, Aron Zingman, and Stephen Samouhos. Used with permission.)

Course Highlights

This course features a gallery of student projects, which were deployed in various communities during the summer of 2007. It also contains a full set of class discussion notes.


YouTube - PyGamePySightHD.avi

YouTube - PyGamePySightHD.avi

YouTube - Gomi Style Presents Sparky, the DIY Video Chat Robot

YouTube - Gomi Style Presents Sparky, the DIY Video Chat Robot


gmail notifier project (for dummies) | Build it up to break it down again

gmail notifier project (for dummies) | Build it up to break it down again

gmail notifier project (for dummies)

November 25th, 2008 · 5 Comments

I've been really interested in doing J4mie's Physical Gmail Notifier ever since it came out in February. I only recently dropped into the project and got to learn a lot about python, plists, and arduino auto-reset functionality. I'm going to share what I've learned because I think there are lots of other people out there struggling to make it work. This page doesn't really offer much that J4mie didn't already say - it just says it in a different way.

All of the files are zipped HERE.

jsBox

jsBox

This application is an example of the WireIt library.
Each box contains a javascript function. The number of input terminals is automatically updated when you edit the function.
When you press 'Run', all the functions without input parameters are exectued. Then, the other modules are executed sequentially.

Web Hooks and the Programmable World of Tomorrow

This is where we're at.

Sunday, December 14, 2008

Evernote Blog » Blog Archive » Evernote Integration Spotlight: Tarpipe

Evernote Blog » Blog Archive » Evernote Integration Spotlight: Tarpipe


Use case: automatically tag a screenshot using Evernote from Bruno Pedro on Vimeo.

YouTube - Information R/evolution

YouTube - Information R/evolution

How To Upload Photos by Email to Picasa Web Albums

How To Upload Photos by Email to Picasa Web Albums

How To Upload Photos by Email to Picasa Web Albums

1. Open your Picasa Web Albums account.

2. Go to Settings from top right.

3. Go to the fifth option “Upload Photos by Email” and check Allow me to upload photos by email.

4. Enter a secret word and under the box you will see a unique email address for you.

5. Save your settings!

Now whenever you want to upload photos by email, all you have to do is attach photos in an email and send it to your unique Picasa Web Albums email address.

If you want to upload photos to a specific album, then enter the album name in the Subject field of your email.

mh_hypertree_test as photo gallery

JIT mh_hypertree_as Photogallery

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Google Earth Plugin - Interactive Samples

Immersive Google Earthers, our ship has come in!
(you're looking at two gEarths in two side by side browser windows)














Google Earth Plugin - Interactive Samples

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Spy--Live Screen Casts

DESCRIPTION
Spy allows you to run a small server on your Mac, that when accessed by any normal web browser, allows people to see your screen, as well as information about your Macintosh. But it doesn't stop there - they can look at a normal static image, or they can look at your screen, live, in real-time! You can also choose which image format you want to use - JPEG or PNG. Not only that, but the user can choose what picture quality they want by manually specifying their desired quality and scale in the picture.jpg or picture.png request! Other more...features include 2 built-in layouts and custom layout support, and a Live Connection manager that lets you see everyone that is viewing your desktop live as well as disconnect any of those users.
WHAT'S NEW
Version 1.2b1 release notes not available currently.
REQUIREMENTS
Mac OS X 10.1.5 or later.

CamTwist for Mac - Add special effects to your video chats. MacUpdate Mac Video Software Downloads

Download CamTwist for Mac - Add special effects to your video chats. MacUpdate Mac Video Software Downloads: "DESCRIPTION

CamTwist is a software package that lets you add special effects to your video chats. It's also possible to stream your desktop and still images. With CamTwist, you can also use multiple video chat programs at the same time.

Please note: CamTwist does NOT work with iChat. Please see ChatFX for a similar product that works with iChat."




All we needed to do was use a Mac program called CamTwist to turn our desktop (or rather, a portion of it) into a camera feed, which we brought into our live-video production on Mogulus. Thus creating what is, in effect, a live screencast.

Though the broadcast is obviously now out of date, here’s one of those screencast segments:

Quantcast

After the break, I’ll break down how we did it.

Using Google Spreadsheets as a Database in the Cloud

jQuery SVG Demo

jQuery SVG Demo

A jQuery plugin that lets you interact wih an SVG canvas.

see http://keith-wood.name/svgBasics.html

Library for simple drawing with jQuery - OpenStudio Communication sur Internet

Library for simple drawing with jQuery - OpenStudio Communication sur Internet

Simple but cross-browser library.

Applies SVG (using Keith Wood plugin for jQuery) or canvas method if supported on the client browser (includes explorercanvas patch for ie). If not, applies methods derivated from the work of Walter Zorn for compatibility.

- example 1, a simple line :

Thursday, December 04, 2008

DIYbio

DIYbio


DIYbio in 5 minutes - O'Reilly ignite Boston from mac cowell on Vimeo.

Skyrails Second Build

Visual Recipes

Most people are familiar with the structure of a recipe in a recipe book: a list of ingredients is given, maybe with a cooking time/temperature, followed by a set of 'assembly' instructions for the recipe.

But how about this novel summary table for a recipe from the Cooking for Engineers website? (Cooking for Engineers?! Hear the rationale behind the site from its creator, Michael Chu: Geek Cooking, Debunking Hollywood Science and Green Roofs.)

Cooking for engineers: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/36/Meat-Lasagna


How does the structure of the table convey "process information" - that is, what steps to take with what ingredients in what order?

Dig out your favourite recipe, and see if you can represent it using the tabular layout, then upload a screengrab of the table and add a link to it as a comment to this post :-)
Add starUnshare

Free Cut and Paste Timelines for your Blog : My Timelines

Free Cut and Paste Timelines for your Blog : My Timelines

Powered by My Timelines

Seedmagazine.com | Revolutionary Minds | The Game Changers | Carl Bergstrom

Seedmagazine.com | Revolutionary Minds | The Game Changers | Carl Bergstrom


Seedmagazine.com Revolutionary Minds

Tagging

This is the companion website to the book Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web. I plan on including some of the material I left out of the book, along with links, references and other things that might be useful. For now you can read interviews and look at notes from the book.

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

caitlin gannon » JsVIS: JavaScript visualization software

caitlin gannon » JsVIS: JavaScript visualization software

JsVis, by Kyle Sholtz, is a JavaScript framework for creating “Snowflake graphs” like this one:

JSVIS Snowflake Graph

There is a lot of potential for visualizing complex relationships with this sort of tool. The basic layout is best for tree structures, but a thread on the discussion board indicates that there is a non-tree display method (particle model layout) which warrants investigation.


A Vision (4/15/08) of the RIT Student Innovation Center on Vimeo

by Jon Schull and Xanthe Matychak



A Vision (4/15/08) of the RIT Student Innovation Center on Vimeo

dipity / JonSchull

dipity / JonSchull



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