Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
What a perfect companion to my light bulb DIY! This has some amazingly valuable information on how to cut, bend, and blow glass for scientific devices. It also has information on how you can use this new found knowledge to make your own photo cells, vacuum diodes,and even a cathode ray tube. For the amateur scientist this is a gold mine of information.
[via MAKE]
The next crop of astronauts should be tested on their improvisational skills when they are going through the whole NASA testing and stuff. We need some spacemen with major MacGuyver skills while on orbit to be sure. back on Mir, if you didn’t have the ability to make due with what you had on had to solve a problem you were SOL. I’m sure with impending budget cuts to the space program things might prompt some astronauts to get creative to carry out their duties.
[via neat-o-rama and Popular Science Blog]
Hey, nifty soft plastic covers for your kid’s to wear over their bike/rollerblade/skateboard helmets. I’m sure adults could wear them too if they wanted.
[via Giz Wiz Podcast]
I’ve been making quite a few changes to the ‘ol site lately. If your a new reader you might not notice, if not let me know what you think. Mmm-kay? I had to re-do the RSS feeds that are going through Feedburner because my .htaccess file had become snorked up. I fixed it so if your feeds haven’t been coming through you will know why. Every thing is normal here now. OK, should be normal. If not let me know.
I ended up opting for a plugin solution to my RSS redirection as hand editing the .htaccess file is becoming a right pain in the arse. I went with the plugin offered by Steve Smith. A very cool and slick interface for setting all of it up. Just on note, if you choose to use the plugin yourself, you might have to do edit a couple of things. If your WordPress isn’t in the root you will have to change the feed that you give Feedburner. Remove the ‘/wordpres/’ bit. You will know it when you see it. Also, in the .php file for the plugin you should change ‘get_settings(’home’)’ to ‘get_settings(’siteurl’)’. You do that (and provided your .htaccess file is set to 666) and your in like Flint.
This quote sums up this DIY project quite nicely:
When you go to the hardware store, or even the grocery store, force yourself to start looking for product containers that have interesting shapes. Don’t look at them and think: "Oooo, only my spouse would buy a bottle like that." Instead look at it and think: "Wow-There sits my next starship engine nacelle", or "Man-that deodorant stick case would make a great hand phaser with some additional parts."
I do this all the time. Kitbashing and scratchbuilding models has been a hobby of mine for years. Go have a look at this outstanding tutorial and have a go at it yourself. Trust me, you will never look at a bit of plastic packaging the same way again. Someday I’ll have to post photos of all the weird junk I’ve made by doing this.
[via MAKE]
Man, when the guys at Microsoft are saying that it’s better to nuke a system than to try and clean off the malware you know it’s getting bad. I think that in the future Microsoft will be releasing virtual environments for your browser to work in. Much like running Virtual PC on a Macintosh or VMware, these will be fully self contained virtual machines that can be wiped and reloaded on the fly. The only thing I can see that would be a problem is that keeping personal configurations like bookmarks or cookies around after a nuke might pose a security problem.
For now, having a healthy collection of tools and the know how to use them is your best defence. I personally use SpyBot Search & destroy, RootkitRevealer, Windows Defender, HiJack This. If these don’t cure ya, you might want to try an Apple.