Oooooh baby. 3 VCOs of solid gold! A semi-modular synth that competed directly with Moog’s modular behemoths. Launched in 1971 with a bootleg of Moog’s patented ladder-filter (4012), the ARP 2600 was produced for nine years. If you’re willing to shell out $4k – $10k, clean examples can be purchased from various sources online, including eBay. Check ToneTweakers for all your vintage synth sales and service needs.

LED Throwies

Graffiti was mainly the province of street style hipsters until they started crossing over into nerd territory by using technologies beyond paint. The good folks over at Graffiti Research Lab and Instructables provide great jump-off points for creating some guerrilla communcation schemes of your own.  Explore GRL’s work and check the “Related” items on the instructables page for all sorts of deviant fun. There are myriad LED suppliers on the web, but Robert over at Buy LEDs Online has an excellent selection and provides great customer service even if you’re new to the game and buying in small quantities. By the way, the beautiful song on the GRL site is Jose Gonzalez’s cover of Silent Shout’s “Heartbeats.”

bright idea

This inaugural post features C.Crane’s GeoBulb, an LED replacement for 60W incandescent bulbs that uses less than 8W of power and will last for 10 years at 8 hours per day. The design is exquisite and functional, at once both referential and futuristic. Comes in warm white (shown), soft white and cool white. Although I have not done a full net-present value analysis, it should more than pay for itself in energy savings as long as your kW•h costs are greater than $0.07 per. But let’s face it, if you’re shelling out $120 for a light bulb, you’re not doing it for the 10-year breakeven.