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Squirrels have managed to destroy our bird feeder twice.  I put together this incredibly simple squirrel feeder that will hopefully keep them away from the bird feeder.

Step 1: Find a scrap of wood.

Step 2: Put a screw through it.  I used a drywall screw, because that is all I had.  A wood screw with a larger thread would be better.

Step 3: Nail it to a tree.

Step 4: Attach corn.

Hopefully the squirrels will find this soon.  I’ll probably update with pictures of them on it.

After my post on the PC pop up book took off, I decided to look around for other interesting pop-up books I could find and write about.  Looking around on Amazon I found lots of interesting ones, but they have been covered over and over again by other bloggers.  Eventually I decided to sort by price and found all sorts of interesting books.

The most expensive pop-up book on Amazon is The Wizard Of Oz Pop Up Limited Edition.

Here is an image of the inside of the commemorative re-release, which I believe is the same as the original:

You can find many other images and videos online, and it is obvious that this is a very beautiful and well-designed book.  I would love to have it, but it is listed at $1655.29 on Amazon.

The next most expensive is The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (Limited Edition): A Pop-up Book for $1400, which is apparently a pop-up edition of a book by Steven King and Kees Moerbeek.  I’m not sure what makes this worth so much - the images on Amazon show rather dull pop-ups.

Next up is the very long-titled Buck Rogers 25th Century Featuring Buddy and Allura in Strange Adventures in the Spider Ship, The Illustrated Pop-Up Edition.  The pop-ups aren’t fancy, but I love the style of the artwork.

It is listed for $1070.18 on Amazon, but the pictures are from this eBay auction, which is listed at $675.

The next book, is a 1930’s Disney pop-up, The Pop-up Silly Symphonies Containing Babes in the Woods and King Neptune for $1059.73.  I found images here.

The last entry in my list is another Disney book, Mickey Mouse in King Arthur’s Court , listed at$874.71.  The images are from an eBay auction.

I recently discovered that during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s it was common to draw large panoramic views of cities. The Library of Congress has a huge collection of them available on their website. Some of these maps are incredibly detailed. They show each house on every street, sometimes with enough detail to recognize certain homes.

Here is a close up of Kalamazoo’s downtown in 1883.  In the full view available from the LoC you can see that my neighborhood didn’t even exist yet.  The only roads in the area are Riverview, Gull, and East Main.  They are all major roads now, but they aren’t even labeled on this map.

Reprints of these maps on Amazon

Corrin and I dropped some stuff off at Goodwill the other day, and when we were looking around inside I made an amazing find.  For only two dollars, I purchased a pop-up book describing the internals of a 1980’s PC!  I’ve uploaded pictures of most of the book.  I left out a few of the more boring features, such as opening a floppy disk to see the mylar disc inside.  Sorry about the datestamps - I always forget to turn them off.

This pop-up computer greets you when you first open the book.  The text on screen says “Insert disk and close door.”  When you do, the text changes to a welcome message describing the purpose of the book.

When the tab at the bottom is pulled, the M key is depressed and the binary signal sent by the keyboard is shown.  The next two pictures are a binary and an ASCII decoder that are also on this page.

This page doesn’t have any interesting interactions.  There is a chip in a pocket on the opposing page that can be placed in the slots on the lower right.

The disc can be slid in, showing how it lines up with the read/write heads.

This is one of my favorite pages.  The electron ray is made of string, and pixels appear behind it as it shoots down the scan line.

This is the last page of the book.  Pulling the tab on the right moves the print head across the screen to reveal the word “Goodbye.”

Inside the Personal Computer: An Illustrated Introduction in 3 Dimensions on Amazon

Books by Sharon Gallagher - This Amazon search might find you some better priced copies than the one linked to above. It is only sold through Amazon partners, and they all seem to enter it in a little differently.

Welcome, StumbleUpon, reddit, Gizmodo and anyone else who ends up here!  If you liked this post, you might like the Most Expensive Pop-Up Books post I just made.

I found this receipt today:

I have no memory of buying any of this, but I think it is the most amusing receipt I have ever seen.

Via DeputyDog

A: He sits on an acorn and waits.

Or, for a quicker solution he can use this device patented by Hermann Reiche in 1891.

[The invention enables] heavy quadrupeds to walk up and mount the top of the platform, as shown by the elephant in the drawings, or, in other words, “to enable an elephant to climb up a tree.”

Via Dis and Pandemonium

Baby #3 was over with his brother in the corner when I got up. But he still
had his egg shell on his back. So I sprayed him with water and it loosened and
came off. He is a big one. I think he is fatter then #2. Cari wants to call
one Squirtle after a Pokemon creater. Mike doesn’t know yet. I just call them
1, 2 and 3. They have different neck markings so we can tell them apart. I
have seen 2 eating. I got them weeds from the pond and they like it. Plus I’m
giving them fish food flakes like the books say. We have our fingers crossed
for them to do good. They are lively. Here are the pictures of #3 and his
brothers. (I call them brothers because I think they will be the new Teenage
Mutant Turtles) Enjoy. Jeanna