Long ago, the wrinkled hands of the oarsmen would take the otter tails by the tips and fling them repeatedly towards the front of the boat. A lone traveler watching the rising mound of otters amidst their tails, playing quite gleefully, asked why they were thrown to the front. They replied as if asked before, “To keep them away from these links.” Jan Sarbort – Oh, the wonderful concept ships, robots, space scenes and more, drawn with a captivating perspective and atmosphere. Free Oil Painting Lessons – A great series from Web Art Academy on painting in oil. Includes nine lessons and only requires an email. Deeply Artifical Trees -…

Corn. It’s not just for soaking in butter or rotating on a drill at 2500 RPM. While Nike has made huge strides to minimize their environmental footprint, and Adidas has been introducing shoes made from plastic sourced from ocean waste, Reebok is the latest footwear company to get in on the sustainability action with the announcement of a new eco-friendly line of footwear. Simply called “Cotton + Corn”, the line of shoes will use DuPont’s Susterra Propanediol to craft a 100% sustainably and renewably sourced outsole that will be paired with an upper created from organically-sourced cotton. The shoes are so eco-friendly, they can even be used as compost at…

It doesn’t matter if you’re a seasoned Arduino developer or an Arduino beginner, there’s always something new to be learned with the versatile open-source hardware development kit. Whether it’s a prototype for a wearable design or even controlling your garage door via a Twitter feed, the possibilities of what can be done with the versatile development board are seemingly endless. For those looking to expand their Arduino capabilities, this master collection of Arduino E-Books is the perfect companion for deep-diving into new avenues of the open-source platform including developing products for the Internet of Things, mastering the art of a well-designed wearable and how to best implement Arduino with iOS…

SketchUp has a very interesting extension called “PlaceMaker” to instantly generate 3D models of cities. I don’t often recommend SketchUp for 3D printing purposes, as it is primarily focused on visual 3D, rather than the solid 3D required for proper 3D printing. It’s just too easy to create non-3D printable models in SketchUp and you are best to use other 3D print-specific tools. Nevertheless, SketchUp does offer a very interesting extension I haven’t seen in other environments yet. Their “PlaceMakers” extension has the wonderful ability to automatically generate a 3D model of cities, including buildings, roads, and greenery. Take a look at the image above and imagine building that by yourself,…

There’s been plenty on 3D metal printing to talk about over the last few years, but 2017 may be THE year of more metal – more metal printers and more structures printed in metal. I’m ready for it too – ready for a metal suit, a metal house; bring on the metal. CES 2017 saw Markforged launch their Metal X printer. That will take care of the small items, while metal mastodon MX3D finally sees their metal printing robots complete multiple, large-scale projects. Last year we took a look at the stainless steel 3D printed bike developed by students from TUDelft and manufactured by MX3D. We mentioned the plan by MX3D to 3D print…

Code. You don’t have to be a computer science hotshot to take the deep dive—heck, some people are up and running with their first project in a matter of weeks. But knowing where and how to enter can be half of the battle. The recently-launched Learn How to Code 2017 Bundle is the perfect entry point and includes over 156 Hours of premium coding instruction, from Python to Ruby & everything in between. Consisting of ten courses in total, the ‘Pay What You Want’ bundle covers not just specific code languages, but also how and why you may decide to choose one over another depending on the project at hand.…