This week’s Spotify-powered SolidSmack Radio Playlist knocks you in the pop sockets with head-boppin’ groove tuneage to help propel you through the work week in style. Whether you find yourself inking markers until they’re dry, grinding material through a bandsaw or working that 3D geometry all day, consider these tracks as a tool for your process. This week we’ll start things off with “Black Market” from Weather Report and work our way through tracks from Curtis Mayfield, Betty Carter, Lennie Tristano, Luiz Bonfa and others before wrapping up with “Lush Life” from John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. Have suggestions? As always, let us know what you listen to, what you…

There’s one thing cheese balls are good for – pelting your friends and family. I guess you could eat them, but that just seems like a complete waste. Ben, aka NightHawkInLight, creates amazing vidoes of DIY science and awesome. My kids and I enjoyed his tornado machine and the brilliant sci-fi propane pop gun inspired from an Instructable by Eric Rocher. However, nothing combines food and ballistics quite like his Cheese Ball Machine Gun, and since it only fires delicious balls of puffed cheese, there’s likely no chance it will lobbied against by anti-gun groups. BAA-ZIIING!! Mom, can I have cheese ball machine gun for Christmas? “You’ll shoot your eye…

Well, THIS is timely. Why it wasn’t but four days ago that Simon, Adam and I were talking about how many tiny, 3D printed, low poly pumpkins we could hold in our mouth and still discernibly say ‘low poly pumpkin’– think ‘chubby bunny’ but with 3D printed pumpkins instead of marshmallows. Sadly, our guesses were based on pure speculation, but now that David Hagemann has provided a set of sweet, low poly pumpkin prints, the competition can truly begin! David created nine different little low poly pumpkins, naming them Chompy, Slurpy, Crushy, Piercy, Slicey, Crunchy, Munchy, Smoochy and Squashy. He designed them to either be snapped and stacked together or…

Mondays might not be your favorite day of the week, but the good news is that we’re all in this together ladies and gentlemen. As purveyors of prime Grade A web content, the SolidSmack crew has done some of the heavy-lifting to make sure you get your Mondays started on the right track. Welcome to The Monday List. Each Monday, we’ll link you up with some of the most insightful, informative, and socially-relevant stories to keep tabbed, bookmarked, reading listed, pocketed, or what have you. Be sure to check in each Monday morning for a new crop of freshly sprouted words curated straight from the source of your favorite homegrown ‘Smack.…

Last week we sent out a quick post to spread the word about Sketch Browser beta. This week I had the opportunity to delve a little deeper. So when I fired up the App, Mr. my.SketchUp himself “Josh” (the avatar, no relation to Señor Mings), greeted me with a casual but blank stare. He made me feel right at home and gave me plenty of room to roam around and explore. So that’s exactly what I did. In this post I’ll share three snippets; drawing tools, keyboard shortcuts and browser limitation specific to the build of my.SketchUp Beta available at the time of this post. Drawing Tools Being that I was itching to model something, I headed straightway…

If you live in a large city, even a smaller town, you may have noticed it. As populations surge, ideas to improve life in those urban environments emerge almost as quickly. The future certainly looks interesting, but when advancing technologies present a new set of struggles for city leaders, growth can fast become growing pains. “There’s a huge movement of people migrating towards living in cities around the world,” Ugo Valenti tells me. “More than 50% of the world’s population live in cities right now, and that’s a number that’s going to continue to grow, so cities need to be sure that they can give their citizens what they need.” Valenti is the Show…