Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
I spotted this on MAKE today, looks pretty cool. Sadly, it’s not part of some giant Victorian inspired wooden robot thats driven by steam and springs that will clamber across the lowlands in search of villages to trounce. It’s part of an assignment to build a wooden toy that was inspired by the works of Leonardo da Vinci.
[via MAKE]
Traditionally, an air plane uses control surfaces like flaps to translate from one position and orientation to another in space (air). In England, an aircraft is being developed that will do away with movable surfaces and replace them with vectored thrust. Than means that in place of a flap there will be a vent that will blow air out of the trailing edge of the win. The result will be a plane with far fewer moving parts, lower cost, and an over all higher reliability.
My Flickr contact Nicolai_g posted a how to on adding bulb and multiple exposure capabilities to a simple ‘toy/crap’ PHD camera. You might not think that it’s worth doing but if you want to have a very cheap camera to mess with this is the way to go. I expect that the the internals of this camera are not all that different than the ones you will find in your local Goodwill or thrift store so if you can’t find this exact model you should be able to figure out the correct hack.
(BTW, in this case ‘PHD’ means ‘push here dummy’)
This is sweet! As it could only come from an Asian manufacturer the ad blurb is a little quirky but who doesn’t like that? As they say, "It is a fashion Embodiment of the audio-visual products.." I should have been looking for these on my trip to Thailand, I bet these are pretty popular there. Heck, I bet they would be popular in the states if you could get away with selling them. Something like this would be labeled a tool of terrorism by the RIAA and anyone owning one would be an enemy of the state.
Support MPEG1 (VCD ) / MPEG2 (DVD ) / MPEG4/WMV/WMA/MP3/JPEG forms of many kinds of multimedia. Support 2.5" mainstream IDE hard disk (notebook computer hard disk), One 40G hard disk have can hold 100 MPEG4 high-definition film file , support Divx, Xvid the code compresses. It is the present hot multimedia that play form , the finished product is small , light, easy to use, can In order to download the multimedia file from the computer through USB2.0 port, ,And can hold concurrently and act as the Move hard disk. Can meet user’s instructions for use in different occasions . It is a fashion Embodiment of the audio-visual products..
MPEG4/DVD/HDD Multi-media Player-MIDI/HDD Karaoke machine,DVD/hard disk/MPEG-4 decode board
This is quite sad. Another blow to amateur scientists everywhere:
The United States CPSC has initiated criminal legal action against us and other chemical suppliers. In short, the CPSC would like to ban the public from all access to chemicals. This would mean an end to hobbies such as model rocketry, pyrotechnics and of course chemistry. One by one, our freedoms are slowly being taken away from us – this action must be stopped now.
I suppose that in 15 years people in the US will look around themselves in their high security cities and wonder why all the equipment and technology is being sold to them by Chinese R&D labs. I suppose they won’t care because the call center jobs pay pretty well even if you do have to learn Mandarin to work there.
(There’s irony in there but the fedral government doesn’t want anyone to point it out.)
Boing Boing:US bans sale of chemicals to hobbyists without $1K license
Mumm… Old science tutorials are the greatest. Back when the world was a simpler place, little Timmy Citizen was encouraged to explore the world of science via discoveries that he would make in his back yard laboratory himself, and not just by reading boring old facts from a text book. This is an extract from a 1949 issue of ‘Modren Mechanix’ that details the production of nitrous oxide.
But don’t go trying this at home these days kids, just having ammonium nitrate (the prime ingredient in this experiment) without the proper papers will get you jail time. You could be a druggie, or even a terrorist! So be happy to just read about how reactions and decomposition takes place from a book and know that your better off blindly taking their word for it that this is how things work. Think of it like reading a cook book but being forbidden from owning any food. I’m sure all the best cooks in the world got to be what they are by just reading and never touching the ingredients…
[via Boing Boing]