Author: John

Mars Unearthed – In 3D!

Mars Unearthed

Here is an impressive collection of images of the planet Mars from the spacecrafts and rovers that are out there now. I’m partial to the crosseye stereo images myself but some of the anaglyphs are pretty cool.

This site contains Mars 3D anaglyphs, 3D flash movies, comparisons, and free view stereo pairs from images returned by the Mars Global Surveyor’s Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC), camera systems aboard the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, and European Space Angency’s Mars Express High Hesolution Stereo Camera (HRSC).

Mars Unearthed

Online Books Page

The Online Book Page UPenn

Looking for a good read thats free? Don’t want to mess with files like LIT and PDF? Have an old PDA that can’t keep up with all that annoying DRM stuff? The Online Book Page at the University of Pennsylvania may have what your looking for.

The Online Books Page is a website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the Internet. It also aims to encourage the development of such online books, for the benefit and edification of all.

Best thing is that most works are in good old ASCII text format. Easy to read on just about everything.

The Online Books Page

Underwater CVS Camcorder hack

Underwater CVS Camera Mod

What a fantastic mod! I love the magnet and the reed switch. 

Connect this one to the contacts of the record button and mount it on the back of the case, right under the screen. Now, waving a magnet by the bottom of the screen will start and stop recording underwater, without breaking the seal of the case.

I’ve often thought of building an underwater case for a camera but doing the interfaces for the buttons has always been a daunting task. For a while I was thinking I would use a water proof IR remote but never worked quite right. Plus it was a pain to mess with underwater. The magnetic switches are perfect. I wish I would have had this while I was on the beach…

Underwater CVS Camcorder

Storage The Old Fashioned Way, On a Drum

Burroughs drum storage 

Today when people talk about storage you hear megabytes, gigabytes, sometimes even terabytes. Luxury. Back in 1957 you had to make do with 4000 words of storage on a big old spinning drum.  Each word was made up of 10 decimal digits and one additional digit that was used for marking if it was an algebraic expression or an instruction. Each digit is made up of a four bit binary number (called a ‘nibble‘ now days). This gives you about 20KB of storage in today’s world. This was pretty major storage back then. I can’t help but think that this kind of old computer technology couldn’t be used in making simple robots, or even some sort of LEGO device. I think it’s pretty cool none the less. You can see more of the venerable Burroughs computer manuals here at the  Department of Computer Science (University of Virginia) Historical Computer Literature page.

Burroughs 205 Central Computer Handbook

Looking For Aliens On The Moon

Moon

But the big question is: If something is found, will they tell anyone?

When astronauts return to the Moon, they should keep their eyes peeled for extraterrestrial artefacts – pieces of technology from alien civilisations that have wound up on the lunar surface either by chance or design.

[via Futurismic] 

Looking for aliens on the Moon

Hitachi Mechanical Toys

Simple and not so simple mechanical toys from the engineers at Hitachi. The designs are quite clear and should tickle your brain to come up with ones of your own. The ‘south’ pointing car is a classic design that could have some use as a maze solving robot, or at least one that keep track of what was was south when it started.

[via MAKE fourm] 

HITACHI : ????? : ????????????

Translated page via Google