A Better Mousetrap, At Least For The Mouse

No mice were harmed in the making of this non-lethal soda bottle mousetrap.

Depending on your opinion of these little critters, that could be a good thing or a bad thing. We don’t deny that mice are cute as all get-out, but when they do damage to foodstuffs that you’ve put an entire summer’s effort into growing, harvesting and preserving, cute isn’t worth much.

Our preference for taking care of rodent problems is either bioremediation or rapid cervical dislocation, but if you’re more of the catch-and-release type, this trap is for you. It’s just a 2-liter soda bottle on a wire pivot and mounted to a scrap wood frame; when the offending critter unwisely enters the neck of the bottle, its weight flips the bottle down and blocks the exit. Release is as simple as removing the bottle from the frame and letting Monsieur Jingles wiggle free. The questions of where to release and how many times you’ll keep catching the same mouse are left as an exercise for the reader.

Remember – a live catch trap is only humane if it’s checked regularly. To that end, maybe something like das Katzetelegraf could be added to this trap.

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Failaffle

Fail Of The Week: Not All Mold Releases Release All Molds.

I’m writing a series of articles on resin casting as an extension to my experiences with the instructions found in the wonderful Guerrilla Guide. However, mistakes were made. Having run out of my usual mold release I went to a back-up jar that was lying around from a casting project long, long ago in a workshop far, far away.

GLUE
Never much for readin’ the nutrition facts myself.

I’m refining a technique of making a mold the quick and dirty way. Everything was going well, the sprues looked good and the master released from the silicone. It was time to do the second half of the mold. As usual I applied a generous amount of mold release. Since it was the first time this mold was to be used I went ahead and did all the proper steps. Rubbing off the dried release and applying a few more coats just to be sure.

I was completely unaware that I was applying mold release designed for urethane molds only. In other words I thoroughly covered my silicone mold in silicone bonding agents. I remained unaware until trying to separate the halves of the mold and found them thoroughly joined. After going through the stages of grief I finally figured out where it all went wrong.

Oh well. I’m ordering some of my regular pick, Stoner A324, and that should do the trick. There’s also Mann- Ease Release 200. While having probably the best name a release agent can have, it doesn’t work as well and needs approximately 100 years to dry. After this setback I’d rather just, grudgingly, learn my lesson and order the correct thing.

I wonder if the smooth-on description can say URETHANE RUBBER a few more times.
Oh. Yes I see. Urethane… Urethane…

So now that we know the right way to fix this is to order the right product, is there a hack to get around it? Does anyone have a homebrew trick for release agent that can be used in a pinch? Leave your comments below.

Laser-cut Album Released

In some alternate universe, where laser cutters and phonographs are more common than MP3 players, it makes a ton of sense to release laser-cutter files for your band’s new album (Translated). In this universe, it’s wacky and awesome.

The new EP from ASIC, alias [Patric] from Fablab Zürich, is out as PDF before it’s out in other forms of digital download, and the trailer video (embedded below the break) looks fantastic.

The release draws on this Instructable by Amanda Ghassaei to turn the music into PDFs suitable for feeding into a laser cutter, and we think it’s classy that she gets a shout-out on the label’s release page.  Everything else about the album will be released under a Creative Commons license to boot.

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Python 3000 Officially Released

python3k

Python 3000 has officially been released. The final bug, Issue2306, “Update What’s new in 3.0” has been closed. Python 3000, py3k, Python 3.0, is a major release for the community. [Jeremy Hylton] pegs the earliest mention of the beast to January 2000. The new release has grown from PEP 3000, opened April 2006.

Py3k breaks backwards compatibility with previous releases in order to reduce feature duplication and promote one obvious way of getting things done. The first major change is that print is now a builtin function and not a statement. int and long have been unified, and integer division now returns a float. Py3k uses concepts of “text” and “data” instead of “Unicode strings” and “8-bit strings”. You can read about many of the changes in What’s New In Python 3.0. Some new features have been backported to Python 2.6 so you can start implementing them in your current code to ease the transition. 2.6 also has the -3 command line switch to warn you about features that are being removed or changed. Finally, the tool 2to3 is a source-to-source translator that should automate a lot of the changes.

Documentation for the new release is online. Source packages and binaries are available now.

[via johl]