Author: John

Space Ram, the Noodle of Astronauts

Noguchi

I’m sure this item will eventualy make it to the ramen noodle museum in Yokohama Japan soon.

Astronaut Soichi Noguchi on Tuesday described his encounter with instant noodles aboard the space shuttle Discovery with zeal.

Noguchi said during a news conference broadcast from space that he tried the instant ramen dish on the second day of his journey.

“I enjoyed it — it was surprisingly close to the taste (of noodles) on Earth,” he said.

The special noodles, Space Ram, were developed by instant noodle pioneer Nissin Food Products Co.

They become edible after five minutes steeped in 70-degree water. To prevent spilling in zero-gravity, the broth is thicker than normal and the noodles are in blocks.

Noguchi helped develop the product in its initial stages.

Noguchi relishes his space-shuttle instant noodles
ramen, Noguchi, space, NASA, Japan


In Car Black Box Video Recorder

In car cameras

I can see these becoming the next thing in high tech ‘must have’ add-ons in luxury cars. If you think about it, if you had one of these and you knew it would be buffering images from the cameras all the time even while driving you might be a bit of a better driver. Even more so if you knew that if there were an accident that you were involved in the device would have a record of the accident and a few seconds before it. It might be a real help in pointing the finger at who did what to who. Then again, the same idea might ensure that the idea never gets off the ground, from what I have seen on the roads most of the more expensive cars and SUVs are driven by some of the worst drivers around. No, an H2 can not make a left had turn from the right lane and think that no one will notice! Maybe its just that the cars are so freaking huge that you notice them more and thus their poor driving is thrown into sharp contrast. Anyway, this is a mighty clever security system – one I’m sure that will make the main stream news any day now.

The Insight System is designed to operate in buffering mode for an average of two weeks without starting your vehicle. Thereafter it will run uninterrupted without buffering , all on a standard car battery. This ensures that the most useful images are recorded…Cameras are placed inconspicuously throughout the vehicle…a typical camera installation covers all angles of the vehicle, including events that occur both in front of and behind the vehicle.

InSight Sales brochure
Product images and ordering

8×8 LED Billboard

pixie2

A fun little hardware project if you have some down time. This is an 8×8 update to his original 4×4 project, I’m not sure how many ‘pages’ you can store in the micro’s memory but it should be enough to make some simple designs move. in my opinion, this would be a good project for someone who is looking to build a PIC based project for the first time.

picxie 2 led billboard
[via: hackaday]

LEDs, project, DIY, hardware

Blade Runner History

Blade Runner Falcon

For close to $14,000US you can have a piece of movie history.

The ‘Millennium Falcon’ miniature building set piece used in the Harrison Ford and Ridley Scott masterpiece Blade Runner. This large-scale set piece which began life as a Millennium Falcon miniature constructed by an ILM model maker, appeared in the cityscape overflight scenes of Blade Runner, standing upright and lighted as a building in the acid-rain soaked future city.

Millennium Falcon Miniature Building Set Piece

movie, props, star wars, blade runner

Buggy Coffee Machine

Coffee wagon

Not only does this heavely modded golf cart serve up coffee, but it also offers a way for a person to rebuild their life.

Experience of running the DASH business has taught us that is unfair to expect existing Streetwork staff, who’s skills and primary motivation is to help very vulnerable and damaged young people, to also run a retail business that competes with Starbucks or Costa. Therefore, in order to maximise the social business potential of street-based coffee selling, a new subsidiary company has been formed called Streetwork Trading Ltd.

Streetwork
[Via: we make money not art]

homeless, coffee, UK