My parents recently visited my aunt and uncle in china, and while there they picked up some rather nice high end watches direct from the factories. Most of the time, my father prefers his digital, and only wants to wear the watch he picked up in china when he’s in more formal dress. Thing is, the watch he bought is autowinding, so it’s always either dead, or at the very least really wrong every time he puts it on. So he asked me to come up with a crazy contraption to wind his watch. This is what I came up with:

Check out the pipetastic mad whack watch winder.

Russ Nelson is going to be in town tomorrow and he’s going to stop by tonights craft/hack night and give a short talk about Open Street Map, the open source map project. I asked him, “Why Map?”

Sure, maps exist, plenty of them. The critical part is that like any document, what goes into it reflects the concerns of the author. If you have the military make your maps, they’re concerned about militarily important targets. If you have the businesses make your maps, they’re concerned about the commercially important entities.

When the community makes a map, it maps whatever it feels is important. That’s why we map.

Craft/Hack night at NYCResistor is a night to swing on by NYCResistor with a project, hang out, talk shop, knit, or needlepoint or all of the above. It starts around 6:30 and wraps up around 9. Russ will begin his presentation at 8pm!

Ok, there have been a few people bragging that they can count in binary on their fingers faster than anyone else. Enough trash talking! I want evidence! Here’s what you do if you want to participate in the first ever binary count off.

1. Learn to count in binary.
2. Practice.
3. Make a video showing your skills to the sound of Thumbuki’s Binary Solo MP3 which he has released to the world under a CC license. How high can you count in the 31 seconds it takes to listen to his MP3?
5. Get your video done by Sunday night, February 22nd.
6. Post a comment here with a link to your video!
7. I’ll put together a panel of judges and whoever they decides has the fastest binary counting video wins.
8. I will send the winner a Things t-shirt in whatever size you like. I have some girlie shaped t-shirts too, so this contest is not just for guys!

I rarely go to the post office. This is huge! I can’t wait to see if people are just talking or if they actually have some skills. Bring it!

(It will become very interesting if someone from FAT Lab competes!)

Fat Lab has thrown down the gauntlet and challenged NYCResistor to a war. From Feb 15th – March 15th we’ll be tracking website hits, YouTube views, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, RSS subscribers… whoever posts the biggest gains wins. Grading will be conducted by Internet Famous Class technology.

Official war page w/ preliminary stats is available here.

After looking at that link, I’m a little nervous, how are we going to compete with the amount of eyeballs that have seen the things they have done?

We’ve got a strategy to create and release awesome projects this month.

You can help NYCResistor win!

* sign up for our new Facebook group
* follow twitter.com/nycresistor to receive frontline dispatches.
* tell your friends

Super big props to Eric Skiff and Kellbot who were guests in this Things video! More info on my blog.