Today I designed a toilet paper roll holder:

Tired of having to hunt for that roll of soft tissue every time you do your business? If only there were a fashionable hook upon which you could place this precious velvet!

Fortunately for you, oh bachelor or bachelorette, Science has heard your cries and has an answer! What you are seeking is called a toilet paper roll holder, and they are none to difficult to acquire! Sensible people would go to the store and buy a nice wooden or metal one to match their decor, but who are we kidding? You’re either desperate or have no sense of taste, so join the club and print yourself one now!

This design is inspired by Charles Pax’s filament spool holder. You’ll need a Thingomatic with a slightly taller than average (116mm+) build height in order to construct it.

Bre challenged us to make something using 3dtin. I came up with and printed this marble maze, using the ball from a bearing. Next I want to make a 3d version of the maze as a blind cube, with holes on two sides and ??? in the middle. A generative version might be even more fun…

My friend and I made this Robot Plant for a build series I’ve been running over at Make. Instructions, etc can be found there! There is also a contest with some pretty fabulous prizes that you can win if you build some sort of plant yourself (and you should!).

Dayne Barton of Tokyo Tek put together this great summary video of Make: Tokyo Meeting 06, where he asks both Mitch Altman and myself about our favorite projects.

Other cool Make Tokyo stuff:

• My photos from the event.
• Lem of Robots Dreams takes a look at my spoon organ project.
• A much more talented musician than me plays the spoon organ
• Another spoon organ player!
• Tokyo MX interviews Mitch and Nick about hackerspaces.

At the workshop at Blooming Labs in Bloomington, IN, we were short a couple of soldering stands. Mitch showed us this nice trick for replacement stands using a standard coat hanger and some wire cutters, so I wrote up some quick directions so that others would be able to make them as well. Also, I made one into a fish:

For the rest of the month, I’m going on tour with Mitch Altman and Jimmie Rodgers as their official roadie. We’re visiting a number of hackerspaces in the Midwest, and holding soldering workshops at them. They started their journey a week ago in Canada, and I joined up with them on Sunday in Detroit. I’m planning a more in-depth series of blog posts for Make, but for now here are the pictures from the first workshops, and our schedule:

OCD (Detroit, MI): workshop on 8-August
Mt. Elliot Makerspace (Detroit, MI): workshop on 9-August
i3Detroit (Detroit, MI): workshop on 10-August
A2 MechShop (Ann Arbor, MI): visit on 11-August
AHA (Ann Arbor, MI): workshop on 12-August
LVL1/Actors Theatre (Louisville, KY): demo on 13-August
LVL1 (Louisville, KY): workshop on 14-August
Hive13 (Cincinnati, OH): presentation on 17-August
Hive13 (Cincinnati, OH): workshop on 18-August
BloomingLabs (Bloomington, IN): workshop on 19-August
Arch Reactor (St. Louis, MO): workshop on 20-August
KC Mini Maker Faire / CCCKC (Kansas City, MO): Hardware Hacking Area at Faire on 22-August
Quad Cities Co-Lab Hackerspace (Quad Cities, IA/IL): workshop on 24-August
PS:1 (Chicago, IL): workshop on 25-August
Madison BarCamp (Madison, WI): talk on hackerspaces on 28-August
Sector67 (Madison, WI): workshop on 29-August

Light switch technology has come a long way from antique push button light switches to modern rockers, and what better way to celebrate this achievement than to put them both in the same fixture? This setup controls the lights in the entryway to my new apartment. I’d love to take the plate in for a replacement, just to see the look on the salespersons face…

After 5 years at 1&1, I’m moving cibomahto.com over to a shiny new account at pair Networks. I’ve put in for the domain to be transferred to my new domain host, and once that goes through I will make a final backup of the site here and switch the nameserver over to my new host. This should hopefully happen transparently within the next week.

I don’t anticipate any issues, but this will affect my email server as well. If something does happen and you need to contact me, I can be reached at matt.mets on gmail, or via twitter.

Bam! High-def version of the video is available here. The system looks like this: