http://www.hiddenpassageway.com/

Twist a candlestick and your fireplace rotates, granting access to a hidden room(…)

Being a superhero is exciting but also has its drawbacks. It is a demanding occupation that tends to interfere with your personal life, hence the need to keep your public identity safe. Even if you live alone you will surely receive visits every now and then; I bet you can remember at least one or two times when you had to Read the rest of this article »

He who practices kindness will never have enemies.

Last Updated 16.06.06

http://www.chennaionline.com/food/recipes/nan.asp

Nan is a wonderful Punjabi leavened bread that goes well with any Vegetable Kormas or Dhansak.

Officially Nan stands for not-a-nerd, but I just found this recipe for making Nan bread. See, we´re so cute you could eat us!

ps. Actually I´m going to try to make a loaf of Nan bread, so stay tuned for updates

Update 16.06.06 Ok, I tried… you can see the results for my first experiment below. More experiments will follow, but any advice or pictures or help would be greatly appreciated (at least I didn´t burn anything!)

He who talks too much and without common sense rarely puts in practice what he says.

Construction of a Menger sponge can be visualized as follows:

1. Begin with a cube.
2. Shrink the cube to 1 / 3 of its original size and make 20 copies of it.
3. Place the copies so they will form a new cube of the same size as the original one but lacking the centerparts, (next image).
4. Repeat the process from step 2 for each of the remaining smaller cubes.

After an infinite number of iterations, a Menger sponge will remain.

from Wikipedia

The Menger Sponge is a fractal particularly appealing to modular origamists, and I believe that for two reasons: it can be made out of Sonobe modules (the very first “brick” that every origamist learns), and given its fractal nature, it can be expanded forever and ever. What follows is a list of origami websites on this fascinating structure: Read the rest of this article »

If you ask for the return of money you lent, you will see that your kindness made an enemy of your friend.

He who made money quickly, if he doesn´t save it quickly, will quickly lose it.

http://www.lego.com/eng/factory/

With the free Digital Designer software you can build absolutely anything with virtual LEGO bricks right on your computer. Then you can buy the real bricks to build your creation and you can share it with thousand of other LEGO fans.

One of the problems I used to face every time I wanted to make my own lego models was that I never had enough bricks of the kind I was needing. It must be one of those “murphy´s laws” that the brick you just need is the one you lack!

Until now, there was a partial solution to this issue: the L-cad program allowed you to design your model in the computer so that you could afterwards order the pieces you wanted. This walkaround was (is) very useful, but if there were an easier option to custom design-custom order models which was backed by lego, that would be amazing, and if it were user friendly… whoa!

Well, so a big WHOA! to lego, since they have done exactly that. Besides giving the users an easy way to design models on the computer, they have made it just as easy to order those models as custom sets. Again, WHOA!!

To give advice is almost to give help.

http://www.imagesco.com/ufo/index.html

Over the years many UFO sightings have reported magnetic and electromagnetic disturbances. The UFO Detector is designed to sense these disturbances and will signal their presence by flashing an LED and beeping.

I don´t dare to say that there´s people out there who would actually buy these UFO detectors for the sake of… well, detecting UFOs, but you never know. Anyway, from a nerdologist point of view I think they could be classified as gadgets, as they are small, expensive and, unless you live near Roswell, you don´t really need them (but still want to try them, eh…).

By the way, don´t miss the explanation of how they work. Since asking a local ET to fly nearby to try the device seems a little bit unpractical (lots of bureaucracy, mainly), at least they give several alternative ways to see that it works (whatever that means).

All in all, these UFO detectors, though expensive, are probably the best gift for those who want to believe (sing the soundtrack with me: nanananán-nanán-nan-nin-nin-nin-nin).

My friend Covadonga sent me a very nice step-by-step guide to making this origami envelope, originally attributed to Frances Levangia. She writes, “I made these diagrams based on paper models because otherwise I would forget how to make it, so when I like something, since I have no idea of how to diagram, I do it in this way”. Thanks Covadonga!

While searching for information on the envelope, I came across this site, where you will find a very nice collection of letterfolds and envelopes diagrammed by John Cunliffe. This same model is included among them; for those who are learning how to read diagrams, it could be interesting to compare it with Covadonga´s instructions to see how the drawings translate themselves into foldings.

Related Article: Origami cd case

If you do something, do it.

Some time ago my friends in the Origami Group showed me how to make a box model originally designed by Clemente Giusto. I found it interesting, especially since when folding it you have to use a “twisting” technique that afterwards, when the model is finished, allows you to open and close it without needing to make a second matching part.

The fact is that the flaps of paper on top of the box made it look kinda strange, as they were really big in comparison to the rest of the piece. Therefore, I started fiddling with it to see if I could Read the rest of this article »

Last Updated 01.07.06

If you have ever been to this site before, you most likely have seen the “cool lil´pic” to the left, in the sidebar. As the sentence said, the pictures there were… little, so clicking on them had no effect. Well, from now on not only can you click on the picture, but I encourage you to do so! Every week I´ll be adding a new flash game playable within the site, which can either be accesed from www.envelooponline.com/nan/games, or directly (and more conveniently, I believe) from said space in the sidebar.

This said, I thought on keeping the lil´ pictures along with the games´ pictures in the sidebar, but I thought I risked cluttering the area too much. Anyway, if you would like to see the little pics too, just let me now. I hope that you enjoy this new feature, brought you by nan! MwaHahahahaha!! (another step in the making of a media empire, Pinky!!)

Update 01.07.06 As part of the site´s latest (still ongoing) updates, I removed entirely the “little image” from the sidebar, since now games can be accessed from the main navigation menu. More important, I changed the way the games´pages are made (now they´re part of /nan and I can create them within wordpress), so it is much easier for me to add new games.

Nature does not do anything in vain.