Archive for February, 2010

MONOCHRON – Monochome display clock kit

Another very cool clock kit to lust after. I swear, if I had my way my room would look like Doc Brown lived in it…

The second clock kit from ladyada & Adafruit Industries, we present MONOCHRON!

We wanted to make a clock that was ultra-hackable, from adding a seperate battery-backed RTC to desiging the enclosure so you could program the clock once its assembled

• 128×64 LCD (KS0108) – we special-ordered the black and white display
• ATmega328 processor (we even stuck an ‘arduino’ stk500 bootloader on there too)
• Laser cut enclosure in black acrylic
• Beeping/blinking alarm with 10 minute snooze
• Battery backed-up real time clock (DS1307) keeps time even when power is lost for years
• European/US 12 or 24 hour time display as well as date
• Completely open source hardware, all firmware, layout and CAD files are yours to mess with
• Plenty of space for mods, a prototyping area for soldering stuff in
• Soothing animation of retro arcade style table-tennis for two

MONOCHRON – Monochome display clock kit.

30 Best Practices for Writing HTML

Even if you are not a professional web developer and can only just cut and paste enough HTML to make a web page not totally suck these 30 tips are something that you should read. Lot’s of good practical advice, stuff like closing your tags and if you use inline styles an asteroid will strike you dead (not really but inline styles are still a bad idea). Read it and remember it the next time you are working on your magnum opus ‘Hello World’ page.

30 HTML Best Practices for Beginners

Zapping Mosquitoes With Frick’en Lasers!

We live in amazing times.

…If Microsoft founder Bill Gates unleashes more mosquitoes at this year’s Technology, Entertainment and Design conference, Nathan Myhrvold will be ready for him. Myhrvold demonstrated a “Death Star” laser gun designed to track and kill mosquitoes in flight. The device was crafted from parts purchased on eBay by scientists at Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures Laboratory. As Myhrvold explained, a child dies every 43 seconds from malaria. Current methods for eradicating the disease aren’t working very well. There’s no viable vaccine yet, and although mosquito nets work, people don’t always use them. When given free nets by public health organizations, many people in the developing world use the nets for fishing instead. So until the time comes when malaria can be controlled, Intellectual Ventures thought it might be a good idea to try to control mosquitoes. Myhrvold’s team demonstrated the system onstage using a green laser light rather than a real laser for safety reasons. They let loose mosquitoes in a glass box rigged with a camera on one side of the stage, then pointed the laser device at the box. The laser lights quickly located the mosquitoes in flight. After the live demo, Myhrvold showed a video depicting mosquitoes being zapped for real in flight. They’re currently examining how cost effective it would be to deploy the device in places like Africa.

[via Wired: Epicenter ]
Intellectual Ventures Laboratory

Airborne Laser Testbed Successful in Lethal Intercept Experiment

Spotted this real-world application of way cool technology today:

Airborne Laser Testbed Successful in Lethal Intercept ExperimentFeb. 11, 2010 – At 8:44 p.m. (PST)
A short-range threat-representative ballistic missile was launched from an at-sea mobile launch platform. Within seconds, the ALTB used onboard sensors to detect the boosting missile and used a low-energy laser to track the target. The ALTB then fired a second low-energy laser to measure and compensate for atmospheric disturbance. Finally, the ALTB fired its megawatt-class High Energy Laser, heating the boosting ballistic missile to critical structural failure. The entire engagement occurred within two minutes of the target missile launch, while its rocket motors were still thrusting.

[via Launch-Alert mailing list]
Airborne Laser Testbed Media Gallery