Make ’s Sean Michael Ragan reviews an old-school Dymo Metal Embossing Tapewriter he found cheap on eBay and finds it to be an eminently satisfying piece of kit. There are modern versions but they’ll cost you lots more, and this thing is pretty much indestructible so there’s no reason not to buy a cheapo one on eBay. But in terms of construction quality and durability, the Tapewriter is as far removed from those cheap plastic embossers as a Mercedes is from a Kia. Its 10? long, weighs almost two pounds, and is made almost entirely from cast aluminum, with steel fittings here and there, and all held together with machine screws. The only polymer in the thing, as far as I can tell, is a rubber friction coating on the internal tape drive wheels… Embossed aluminum is pretty much the ultimate labeling material. Without wanting to be morbid, there is a reason why military services around the world choose it for personnel identification tags. Secured with mechanical fasteners, instead of adhesives, an embossed aluminum label will stand up for years against water, extremes of heat and cold, prolonged direct sunlight, and any organic solvent you care to throw at it. This is a true industrial-grade labeling tool, and if you can snag a used one for a reasonable price, you can expect a lifetime of use from it. Tool Review: Dymo Metal Embossing Tapewriter

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Vintage aluminum label-embosser kicks your labelwriter’s ass

Fish , long thought to make terrible tradesmen (but delicious sticks), can apparently use tools . Rocks are tools, right? “URG!” …Thanks for your input, Grok, but your dingaling is showing . I’m serious, people are starting to stare. Me? I’ve been staring the whole time. Scientists have recently discovered that several species of wrass will pick up clams with their mouths and then spit them at rock “anvils” to smash them open and get at all that yummy slime inside. Mmmm, slimy shit . And to think this whole time I’ve been steaming them to get them to open. Gaaaaaaah, outsmarted by fish again! Hit the jump for a fish demonstrating his clam-crushing skills.

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God, Build Your Own Aquarium: Fish Use Tools

There comes a time in every young man’s life when he receives his first soldering iron . To me, that day feels like it was just yesterday. “That was yesterday — you f***ing stole it out of my toolbox .” Haha — finders keepers! About 1983, when I was fifteen, I dropped my dad’s red Bakelite soldering gun and broke the casing. Of course he was upset, so I did my best to “fix it.” So I took my original Star Wars Han Solo pistol and gutted it to hold the soldering gun components. I even ran the lightbulb up into the scope on top. The button on the handle worked well for the trigger switch. Ten years later, when the old house was sold, the gun wound up in my belongings. To this day, when an underpowered iron just won’t do, I pull out the “Han Solderer” and get the job done. Half of me likes the mod, the other half is ill over the fact that I gutted my vintage Star Wars toy. What’s done is done. Sure you gutted your vintage Star Wars toy, but you made it even better . Just like I did with this gutted deer carcass. See? Before it was just a deer. But now — now it’s a gutted deer carcass sleeping bag . Tauntaun tie-in? I think so! A picture of what the original 1977 Blaster toy looked like before modification after the jump.

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Now You’re Soldering Solo Style!: Vintage Han Solo Blaster Toy Modded Into Soldering Iron

The Crovel is like the Swiss Army Kite of shovels. ” Knife — not kite, numbnuts.” Yeah, whatever . It packs 13 different tools into a single unit (reminds me of my last kegger!). “What tools” you ask? LEMME TELL YA: Shovel Crowbar Pryer/Nail Remover (hey that’s just part of a crowbar!) Axe Hoe (you are!) Hammer Serrated Knife Cleaver Saw Machete Can Opener Grapping Hook Chair All that in a 5-and-a-half pound stick for $85. I bought two. I keep one in the house and one in my ass trunk! Plus it works for threatening a neighbor after he lets his dog shit in your yard. I WILL KILL YOU, CUT YOU UP AND BURY YOU ALL WITH THE SAME TOOL. Then grappling hook onto my roof and open a beer. One more shot comparing the Crovel to all the tools it replaces after the jump.

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The Crovel: Your New Apocalyptic Survival Tool

The $55 Snow Toolbelt from skate/snowboard clothing manufacturer 686 was designed for men of winter who don’t want to carry around a pocketful of screwdrivers for fear of falling and puncturing a lung. Which is a very real possibility . It feature 8, 10 and 11mm wrenches, a bottle opener , and flat/Phillips head screwdrivers. It comes in three different styles (original, small stud and large stud) and sizes M (30-34) L (34-38) and XL (38-42). Now I know what you’re thinking, and yes — you could probably get away ordering an XL and punching a few extra notches in it. Whatever the case, your ass WILL show when in use. Now would be a good time to learn how to wipe. 1:30 video demonstration after the jump in case your parents never explained the birds and bees belts and Swiss army knives to you growing up.

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What, No Pliers?: Belt With 6 Integrated Tools

When I was editing Cool Tools, J. Baldwin recommended a fantastic book on constructing furniture and other things with Grid Beam . I bought the book, but have yet to put it to use, so don’t take my word for it. From his Cool Tools review : Grid Beam is a great way to make working prototypes of furniture, experimental vehicles and even small buildings. If your idea doesn’t work, you can change it until it does… A drawing can lie to your client or worse, to you. Grid Beams never lie.

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HOWTO: Build With Grid Beam

There are plenty of nifty search engines that don’t begin with “Goo” and end with “gle,” as Wired points out . But one site they forgot to include is MrTaggy , which was created by PARC’s Augmented Social Cognition Area. Unlike other engines, this one doesn’t index the content of web pages. Instead, it uses PARC’s TagSearch algorithm, which aggregates and sorts the user-generated tags added to social bookmarking sites like Delicious . From there, users can give thumbs up or down for each and every result. The goal: be part-search, part-recommendation engine by tapping the wisdom of the crowd. BBG asked the ASCA researchers to connect the dots between PARC’s earlier forays into search and MrTaggy. Here’s what Ed Chi, Manager of ASCA , shared with us: First, one of the most efficient ways of browsing and navigating toward a desired information space was illustrated by the pioneering research on Scatter/Gather , a collaborative project on large-scale document space navigation between amazing researchers such as Doug Cutting (of Lucene, Hadoop fame) and Jan Pedersen (chief scientist at AltaVista, Yahoo, Microsoft for search). The research done in early to mid 90s , showed how a textual clustering algorithm can be used to quickly divide up an information space (scatter step), ask the user to specify which subspaces they’re interested in (gather step). By iterating over this process, one can very quickly narrow down to just the subset of information items they’re interested in. Think of it as playing 20 questions with the computer. Second, also around the mid-90s , an important information access theory was being developed at PARC in our research group called Information Foraging , which showed that you can mathematically model the way people seek information using the same ecological equations used to model how animals forage for food. We noticed that we can use information foraging ideas to model how people used Scatter/Gather to browse for information. It turns out that it was possible to predict how people use the information cues (which we called ‘ information scent ‘) in each cluster to determine whether they were interested in the contents inside the cluster. It turns out that Scatter/Gather can be shown to be a very efficient way to communicate to the user the topic structure of a very large document collection. In other words, people learned the structure of the information space much more efficiently using Scatter/Gather interfaces. I hope it is quite clear that the relevance feedback mechanisms are very much inspired by Scatter/Gather. The related tags communicate the topic structure of what’s available in the collection. Through this process, we designed MrTaggy, hoping that it would be just as efficient as Scatter/Gather in communicating the topic structure of the space. Third, our group had developed Information Scent algorithms and concepts to build real search and recommendation systems. These algorithms build upon earlier work on a human memory model called Spreading Activation . TagSearch algorithm uses similar concepts here. It constructs a kind of Bayesian modeling of the topic space using the tag co-occurrence patterns. TagSearch’s algorithm owes its heart and soul in concepts in Spreading Activation, which helps us find documents that are related to certain tags, and vice versa. So what it’s like to actually use MrTaggy? I started a search with the suggested tags “funny” and “video.” Less than 30 seconds later, I discovered this Bruno-related gem from FunnyorDie that had, until now, somehow escaped my attention. Digg Dialogg with Bruno - watch more funny videos Good find, MrTaggy!

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Mr.Taggy & the History of Search at PARC

“Uh, I think I snapped it…” I got my first tick on the BBG camping trip. I was lucky. I didn’t even know it was there until it was gone. I brushed it off in the shower somehow without leaving any of the tick in my body *knock wood*. My completely uneducated guess is the hot water must have shocked the little bugger, and when I inadvertently passed my hand over him, he backed out and/or fell out because he had yet to burrow? (if you’re a tick expert, feel free to weigh in). Next time, I won’t be so lucky, which is why I’m going to: a) use bug spray, and b) pick up a legit tick remover just in case. Cause there’s no way I’m going to try the above method. Here’s a series of tick removers, including one that uses cryotherapy . I’m tempted to buy the one with a mini-lasso and just call it a day. Before I do, though, please feel free to chime in with any suggestions, experiences or links to videos of yourself removing ticks. Tickner (”My name is Freeze . Learn it well. For it’s the chilling sound of your doom.”) Ticked Off (you can personalize yours ) Tick Off (battery-operated) Tick Key (comes in a variety of colors) Trix TickLasso (via Cool Tools ) This post is part of a theme day: BBG on Camping .

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Tick Removers: Which Do You Use?

It’s a $35 hammer with a Cat’s Paw at the end. Mostly I just wanted to write that headline. [via Toolmonger ]

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The HomeWrecker exposes studs

( Download MP4 . This episode of Boing Boing Video is brought to you by WEPC .) Boing Boing Video guest contributor Miles O’Brien brings us this special report on the same day NASA astronauts complete their final space walk — and zero-g repair job — on the Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission #4 . Miles says: Astronauts spend a lot more time training for missions than flying in space. But I wouldn’t feel sorry for them as the training is an amazing adventure unto itself. They practice in airplanes that fly a roller-coaster pattern to give them brief stints of weightlessness (the so called Vomit Comet); they get to zoom around in supersonic T-38 training jets; they fly approaches to shuttle runways in a Gulfstream jet rigged up to fly (or more accurately, plummet) like a real orbiter; they get time in high-fidelity full motion simulators; they use virtual reality goggles to practice tasks they will perform in space - and if they are a spacewalker, they get to spend a lot of time in a huge swimming pool in a former hangar at Ellington Field - near the Johnson Space Center in Houston - learning the nuances of working in the void. Astronaut John Grunsfeld, who is an astronomer and a huge fan of the Hubble Space Telescope, invited me to join him during one of his 6 hour “runs” in the big pool - officially known as the Sonny Carter Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. I watched him as he practiced the most challenging spacewalk of his long career - the resuscitation of the Advanced Camera for Surveys. Worried as he was about accomplishing this intricate task - not designed to be done by the thick, gloved hand of a spacewalker - when he did the real thing the other day (Saturday) it went of without a hitch - unlike the other 4 spacewalks of the fifth and final Hubble Repair Mission. The spacewalks are now over - and a shuttle crew has left Hubble behind for the last time. The telescope is in the best shape it has ever been in - Hubble’s “Perils of Pauline” tale now mashed up with “Benjamin Button”. The eye above the sky will begin a new phase of scientific discovery making astronomers pretty happy right about now. But for those of us who are passionate about sending human beings into space, and have enjoyed watching this adventure unfold over the past 19 years, it is the end of a great era - a wistful moment. Miles is the only reporter who has ever dived in the NBL. Hubble crewmember Mike Massimino, shown above doing Hubble telescope repairs today in the Atlantis cargo bay, is on Twitter: @Astro_Mike . You can follow Miles O’Brien on Twitter, too: @milesobrien . And catch his launch coverage at spaceflightnow.com . Official NASA STS-125 mission page is here . RSS feed for new episodes here, YouTube channel here , subscribe on iTunes here . Get Twitter updates every time there’s a new ep by following @ boingboingvideo , and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video . (Special thanks to Boing Boing’s video hosting partner Episodic ). Previously: Boing Boing Video: Welcome, Miles O’Brien! - Boing Boing BB Video - Miles O’Brien Reports: An Astronaut Climbs Everest …

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BB Video - Diving into Space: Miles O’Brien in NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab