In this video Pablos shows me two new materials that makers really need to be aware of. The first is shapelock, a material for making anything. The second material is neodymium, which is a rare earth magnet that defies gravity.
While talking with Pablos, I had a flashback to when I worked as an assistant at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. A mech named Flimsy and I would go troll the hardware stores looking for materials that we could apply to the animatronic gorillas we were making for the movie. One day, Flimsy turned to me in Home Depot and said, “There aren’t many new things in the world. You’ve got to make new things by combining old things.” I told this story to Pablos and he added, “And you always have to be on the lookout for new materials.” A big thank you to Pablos for sharing his passion for innovation!
We had such a great time with the first audio podcast, that we’re doing another!
What were your early art experiences? Here at I Make Things, I want to know about what happened to you in your younger days as a young artist. Did you experiment with new artistic mediums as a kindergartener or did you do some crazy art experiments in College? Call in to (206) 888-MAKE and give me the scoop!
So I had folks call in to (206) 337-1750 and offer their ideas for the future telephone. I’ve put their messages into a podcast and I’m really happy with the results. I had no idea I would get such a great response to this challenge. You can listen to the first ever I Make Things Audio Podcast: The Future Phone right here. Click on the play button to make it play and click on the word “playing” to make it pause if you like. If you subscribe to my feed, you can automatically have this downloaded to your ipod through itunes.
I got the IMT Audio Podcast Number (206) 337-1750 from K7 which is an awesome service that records and sends your telephone answering machine messages to you via email.
I had to tweak the expert settings in Quicktime 7 in order to make this 8 bit recording importable into Garageband. Click on the photo here to make it big so that you can set it up for yourself.
A special thanks goes out to the anonymous participants who called in to make their predictions: The World Will End Guy, The Toilet Scrubber Woman, and The Future Genius Guy.
You may have noticed the little dreamhost banner in the righthand sidebar. It’s there because dreamhost rocks. For $7.95 a month I get 20 Gigs of storage and 1 Terrabyte of transfer. With those numbers you can host your own videos on your site.
With dreamhost you can host as many websites as you want for that same $7.95. Yep, that’s right, Room 132, I Make Things, We Are The Media, Pinkbunny, and Magic Monkey Bob all on the same hosting plan plus I host sites for my friends Eric Borgesen and Clark Ov Saturn. Even though I Make Things, Zip Zap Zop, and We Are The Media are pretty popular, we haven’t even broken past 1% of the bandwidth capacity.
Dreamhost also makes it really easy to make a blog. You can have a wordpress blog installed on your site with one click and it doesn’t stop there. You can also install forums and a bunch of other cool stuff with one click too.
If you need awesome hosting, please click on the link at the right to sign up or use the code “grassrootsmedia” when asked who referred you. Or hey, you could click right here. When you click on the dreamhost link on this page, we get a little kickback which goes toward paying for my own hosting and other projects.
I’m curious, what would you like your phone to be able to do? Do you want an electric shaver attachment? Do you want to be able to watch a webcam of your front door on your phone? I want to know your craziest ideas for cellphones of the future. Call up (206)888-MAKE and leave a message with something that you would like to be able to do with your phone in the future. I’ll put the messages together into a podcast for everyone to hear.
I’ve been thinking about the difference between video podcasting and video blogging. A video podcast should really start as a videoblog. As a videoblogger, you put your videos up on your blog and make it a videoblog. It really becomes a podcast when you have a feed that people subscribe to in an aggregator like itunes. No text gets sent out to your ipod when you watch those videos and that is really the main difference between a videoblog and the video podcast. A video podcast doesn’t necessarily have any meta data or text or narritive.
As aggregators go, I have to give a shout out to Fireant which integrates the text into the aggregator and you can read the post that the video is in.
If your a videoblogger, it’s important for videobloggers to mention their names and site in their videos so that people who see it away from the blog can associate the video with the person and the website.
Can you think of any other differences between video podcasts and video blogs?
Recently I met up with Pablos to talk about inventions and innovation. We got to talking about new materials and Pablos got out these cool little baggies of interesting materials to share. In this video you’ll see two kinds of new materials that you may not have known existed.
A maker is always on the lookout for new materials. By learning about new materials, you can open up new worlds of possibilities. If you like to make things, you should follow Pablos’ lead and always by on the lookout for new materials.
Pablos is what I would call an archetypal innovator. While I set up my camera to shoot this video, he off-handedly offered suggestions for improvement and by the time I had had everything set up, he had pretty much redesigned my kit to be lighter and more efficient. He lives and breathes innovation and invention. If you need something made that doesn’t exist, I’d put my bets on him that he could make it.
This is the first of a two part series about Pablos for the Makezine Blog. Check back in a week for part two, or just subscribe to my feed, and watch it as soon as it’s released!
I’ve been busy editing videos so I haven’t posted much lately. The thing that I’m excited about right now is photos. While I was at Northern Voice, the Canadian blogger conference, I got inspired to take and share more photos.
It used to be that you took photos and got them developed and shared them with friends and family in an albumn. I have a habit of making art with photography and I love the look of a big optical print on the wall. Lately I’ve changed my focus from a print/product based photography to a digital/social based photography. I use photo-sharing online to connect to friends and family and document my life and what I’m interested in.
In fact this is the same reason that I video-blog. In video, I can explore relationships and concepts like innovation. In video I can share not just my point of view, but my personality.
To share my life I rely on a lot of online services and my current favorite is Shozu, which is an application for cameraphones. If you’ve got a cameraphone, get yourself an unlimited internet plan and install Shozu on your phone. It took me about ten minutes to get it all set up and then you’re good to go. Whenever I snap a pic with my cameraphone, it asks me if I would like to publish it to Flickr. Then it goes ahead and uploads it. If you take a bunch of photos, it sends them one at a time. If you go out of your calling area, where it might be more expensive, it stops uploading to save you money. I heart ShoZu. If someone is interested, I’ll make a little movie showing how it works.
I’m hanging out with
Latest Comments
RSS