Here's some DIY magic from Grathio Labs. Now you too can learn how to turn a old book into a bedside lamp. "It turns off when its closed and gives off a variable amount of light depending on how far you open it, up to about a 40W light equivalent. It gives a nice warm, soft light and it looks right at home on my bedside table." says Steve Hoefer, the man behind Garthio Labs. The real skill you will need, aside from "some basic soldering and some rudimentary wood cutting," will be the ability to "scalp a book" without breaking into...
A Headboard for Bibliophiles: DIY
Now this is a project that might get me to buy a hammer!A step by step visual guide to building your very own book headboard.Thanks to Design Every Day one can now accomplish this in 9 easy steps.Man, just think of the possibilities. A smaller version for the kids with covers of Dr. Seuss books or a headboard with only illustrations.And the visual poets will have a field day.Hmm, perhaps a contest for the coolest book headboard is in order....
The ‘Little Library’ in the Big Picture
OK everyone, put on your long read hat and settle in. Shannon Mattern has a must read essay on the Design Observer blog Places titled Marginalia: Little Libraries in the Urban Margins.In it she looks at the recent rise of the mini, pop-up, guerrilla and ad-hoc library and tries "to figure out where they’re coming from, how they relate to existing institutions that perform similar roles, and what impact they’re having on their communities.""Nowadays we have libraries in phone booths and mailboxes, in public parks and train stations, in vacant storefronts and parking lots" says MatternMattern also covers the various mobile...
That Didn’t Take Long: The DIY iPad Book Cover
Looking for an inexpensive book-friendly way to hide and protect you new iPad?Welcome to the iBook.For $10 and a little time you can learn to cover your iPad with a book.Here are the reasons that propelled the creator of iBook:- Didn’t want to drop $40 for Apple’s iPad case- iPad back scratches easily, I hate to rest it naked on the table- I feel like a pretentious bastard using the iPad in public because everyone knows what it is, but few people have one — this helps me disguise it while in use- On a similar note, the iPad feels...
Book Flipping Scanning
No, this not a new Olympic sport for librarians. It is the latest prototype from the lab of Masatoshi Ishikawa, a professor at the University of Tokyo.They're calling the process 'book flipping scanning'. It allows one to scan a book by simply flipping its pages in front of a a high-speed camera. Currently, it can digitize a 200-page book in a minute.Here's the details, courtesy of the robotics blog of IEEE Spectrum:The camera operates at 500 frames per second, with a resolution of 1280 by 1024 pixels. For each frame, the system alternates between two capture modes. First it shines...