machining

Take a lowrider car club. Add a couple of artists. Throw in some wireless audio technology. Do some choreography. Practice for four months. Roll it all out in a parking lot in Albuquerque, N.M. Congratulations, you've just created a lowrider symphony.

Officially called "Symphony 505," a reference to one of New Mexico's two area codes, the performance piece took place during ISEA2012 Albuquerque: Machine Wilderness, a collection of art, science, and technology events with an international conference.

I caught the event on a warm New Mexico Sunday evening. It was equal parts baffling and fascinating. The cars moved about the parking lot, sometimes following each other, sometimes making their own purposeful paths. … Read more

A very odd flock of birds landed in Albuquerque, N.M., this past week. There wasn't a feather in sight as four winged creatures sat on bare branches, flashing their eyes and lifting their wings. These art objects are fashioned entirely from recycled phone parts.

Escape, an installation piece by U.K. artists Neil Mendoza and Anthony Goh, turns unremarkable phone scrap into curious and engaging little birds. Each bird contains an Arduino controller.

When hooked up to the cell network in Europe, the birds can take and make phone calls. Here in New Mexico, they are reprogrammed to react to the proximity of people approaching them. … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week readers wrote in with questions about whether or not the Maps app from iOS 5 could be installed and used on iOS 6, how best to use an Apple ID for business purchases, if you can back up multiple internal hard drives to Time Machine, and how to tackle PDF files appearing black in Web browsers. We welcome views from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Using Maps from … Read more

Few of our past Lego stories compare to this elaborate device, which sends hundreds of small toy balls through a series of 17 challenging Lego Mindstorm contraptions including zigzag stairs, spiral lifts, and even a basket shooter.

The mesmerizing machine took a 21-year-old Japanese brick artist nicknamed "akiyuky" more than 600 hours to build and stretches beyond imagination at 4.9 feet by 21.3 feet. While we could spend several paragraphs describing the many intricacies of this doodad, the embedded seven-minute video below shows in better detail than we could tell the full 101.7-foot path each ball travels through. … Read more

Security researchers have discovered a single piece of malware that is capable of spreading to four different platform environments, including Windows, Mac OSX, VMware virtual machines, and Windows Mobile devices.

First uncovered last month by security company Integro, Crisis was originally described as a Mac Trojan capable of intercepting e-mails and instant messages and tracking Web sites visited. Additional scrutiny by Symantec has found that the malware targets both OSX and Windows users with executable files for both operating systems.

Crisis is distributed using social engineering techniques designed to trick users into installing a JAR, or Java archive, file masquerading … Read more

Having a full system backup solution for any PC is a highly recommended setup, but a preferred setup is to have redundant backups either in the same location or better yet, in multiple locations. While Apple has offered its Time Machine service as a fairly robust backup solution for OS X users, the service has been limited to a single backup drive and did not support any redundancy options. In Mountain Lion this has changed and you can now use multiple drives with Time Machine for the same system.

In prior versions of OS X, users had to either use … Read more

What makes Paris look like Paris? Hint: it ain't the Eiffel Tower.

It is instead the details woven into the urban fabric that form a pattern, according to a machine learning system that's part of a U.S.-French visual data mining project. Yes, computers are learning to ID your city just by looking at random photos.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and INRIA/Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris had the system look at 40,000 Google Street View images of Paris, London, New York, and Barcelona, as well as eight other cities to find frequent and unique elements. … Read more

There's an image floating around the Web that is both disturbing and humorous. It looks pretty much like a petrified zombie head with a gumball machine where the brains should be and a lone gumball clinging to the tongue.

This is not the sort of image you can forget once you've seen it. It's actually a sculpture created by artist Thomas Kuebler. "I grew up with an interest in monster movies, circus sideshows, and all things bizarre," Kuebler tells Crave. "My artwork often reflects that." … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week readers wrote in with questions on how to back up to an internal partition or drive in a Mac, what to do about files not opening in the appropriate application when double-clicked in the Finder, and whether or not the Mountain Lion upgrade will affect Boot Camp partitions. We welcome views from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, post them in the comments!

Question: Backing up to an internal drive or partition MacFixIt reader Curtis asks:… Read more