Review: Neil Gaiman’s TV adaptation of Good Omens is glorious good fun

Heaven and Hell prepare to face off in the long-planned battle of Armageddon, but an angel, a demon, and a rebellious Antichrist aren't quite as enthusiastic about the prospect in Good Omens. The six-part limited series is based on the original 1990 novel by Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett, and it's every bit as entertaining as the source material.

(Some spoilers for the book and series below.)

Confession: I am an uber-fan, having read the book multiple times over the last 19 years. I'll likely read it several more times before I kick off this mortal coil, so I'm very much in the target audience for the series. Good Omens is the story of an angel Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) and a demon Crowley (David Tennant) who gradually become friends over the millennia and team up to avert Armageddon. They've come to be rather fond of the Earth and all its humans with their many foibles, you see—not to mention the perks that come with it, like sleek electronics and quaint little restaurants where they know you. The supernatural pair doesn't really want the Antichrist—an 11-year-old boy named Adam (Sam Taylor Buck)  who has grown up unaware of his pivotal role in the coming apocalypse—to bring an end to all of that.

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3D Prints Turn Any Keyboard Isomorphic

In the history of weird musical instrument interfaces, isomorphic keyboards are a favorite. These keyboards look like a grid of buttons, but when you play them, the relative shapes of chords are always the same. The benefit? Just say no to five hundred years of clavier tradition. It looks cool, too. Theoretically, it’s easier to play independent of whatever key you’re in. [John Moriarty] has built one of these isomorphic keyboards, and unlike everything we’ve ever seen, there are no electronics. It’s all 3D printable and turns any MIDI keyboard into an isomorphic keyboard.

We have seen isomorphic (piano) keyboards before, from a slew of Cherry keyboard switches to a bunch of arcade buttons. There is one downside to these builds, and that is that it’s really just building a MIDI controller. [John]’s build is simply a 3D printable overlay for a traditional piano that turns any standard keyboard into an isomorphic keyboard. The advantage being that this is really just a few pounds of plastic to be printed out and not a mess of wiring and electronics. Simple, removable, reversible. Not bad.

This keyboard effectively adds two differently colored keytops to each key on a keyboard. The best explination of how this keyboard works is in this video, but the basic idea is that all the note names are grouped together by color; C flat, C natural, and C sharp are all blue, for example. This means a third interval is two colors away, and a minor third is two colors to the right and one ‘row’ down. Yeah, it’s weird but that’s what an isomorphic keyboard is.

Since this is just a bunch of 3D printed parts meant to fit on any piano keybed, this is something that’s extremely easy to replicate. All the files for this keyboard overlay are available on Thingiverse, and [John] is offering to print these key tops for others without a 3D printer.

Paper Strandbeest Is Strong Enough To Walk

Most readers will be familiar with the work of the Dutch artist Theo Jansen, whose Strandbeest wind-powered mechanical walking sculptures prowl the beaches of the Netherlands. The Jansen linkage provides a method of making machines with a curious but efficient walking gait from a rotational input, and has been enthusiastically copied on everything from desktop toys to bicycles.

One might think that a Jansen linkage would be beyond some materials, and you might be surprised to see a paper one. Step forward [Luis Craft] then, with a paper walking Strandbeest. Designed in Blender, cut on a desktop CNC paper cutter, and driven by a pair of small robots linked to an Arduino and controlled by a Bluetooth link, it has four sets of legs and can push around desktop items. We wouldn’t have thought it possible, but there it is.

He claims that it’s an origami Strandbeest, but we’re not so sure. We’re not papercraft experts here at Hackaday, but when we put on our pedantic hat, we insist that origami must be made of folded paper in the Japanese style rather than the cut-and-glue used here. This doesn’t detract from the quality of the work though, as you can see in the video below.

We think this is the first paper Strandbeest we’ve seen, but we’ve brought you countless others over the years. Here’s [Jansen]’s latest, wave-like take on the idea.

A Briefcase Computer For Your Hacking Needs

Decent laptop computers have been available for decades now. Despite this, there’s still something charming and enigmatic about a computer hidden within a briefcase. [MakeFailRepeat] wanted just such a rig, so did the maker thing and built one.

The project began when [MakeFailRepeat] was donated a 15″ monitor that ran on 12V. Naturally, it needed to be used in an awesome project, and the build began. MDF panels were cut to mount the screen inside an aluminium briefcase, and covered in black felt for a pleasing look and feel. A Logitech wireless keyboard and touchpad combo is used for input. The brains of the operation is a Raspberry Pi, equipped with a UPS HAT to handle battery and mains power, and an Adafruit Speaker Bonnet for sound.

The project was inspired by the classic video game Captive, released on Amiga, Atari, and MS-DOS platforms way back in 1990. While we’re pretty sure [MakeFailRepeat] isn’t trapped on a space station, his briefcase computer should nonetheless prove useful. A computer isn’t the only thing you can build into a briefcase, though. Video after the break.

The Automated Solution To Your Unpopularity

You feel that you’re unpopular and no one likes you. The bad news is that if that’s the case in the real world there’s no easy way to fix it. The good news is there’s a great substitute — your popularity on Instagram. With this vending machine you can replace your personality with followers on Instagram. It’s just a shame we have to wait a year until Coachella.

This project is an interactive installation from [Dries Depoorter] that makes it possible to buy followers and likes in just a few seconds. It’s not limited to Instagram — you can get followers on FaceBook, YouTube, and Twitter, too. The hardware consists of a Raspberry Pi 3B+, an Arduino, coin acceptor, a few character LCDs running over I2C, and somewhat surprising for a one-off ‘art installation’, a lot of DIN rails mounted to a real industrial enclosure. Someone here knows what they’re doing;  there’s something resembling cable management inside this box and this vending machine is built to last.

Using this vending machine is as easy as sticking a few Euro coins in the slot and selecting the number of followers or likes you’d like. In a few minutes afterward, hundreds of notifications pop up on your phone. There’s no mention of the software in this vending machine aside from it being written in Python, which makes us wonder where these Instagram bots are based. Check out the video below.