I love this scene. Reminds me of when I moved to Arizona, tinder box of the Southwest, from the Dakotas. We had everything up there, the Fourth of July was a time when kids played with fire and dogs ran for cover. Few things are as fun as adult sanctioned patriotic pyromania.
Joe Dirt Quotes
Category: Cool
Live Linux Game DVD Distro!
I have been trying this out and I can genuinely say that I’m impressed.
The project live.linuX-gamers.net was founded with the idea to present Linux games at the Linuxtag exhibition in a novel way. A collection of games should be shown to directly run from DVD without the user in need to know about Linux or care about his system. After some intense brainstorming sessions the team decided to create and publish this DVD as a live distribution project. Thus an additional and very difficult problem had to be solved: The dvd should run on every x86 PC out there.
The Domestication of Cats
I think this sums up who man’s best friend actually is.
Cats will always remain mysterious animals–but exactly where they came from is no longer a riddle. A genetic study has shown that the ancestors of all of today’s domestic cats prowled the Near East. The work bolsters the notion that cats became useful to humans when agriculture started–which scientists believe happened in the Near East–forcing people to protect grain stores from rodents.
A Fertile Domestication of Cats — Holden 2007 (628): 1 — ScienceNOW
Chumby Launching Soon
The hipster hacker friendly micro platform known at the Chumby should be relaesed upon the public soon. Any day now. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe. I don’t code but I’d be willing to learn if I had one of these.
Wooden Binary Adding Machine
Quite amazing. I hope he builds some more computer parts out of wood.
… a few months ago, I had an idea as to how the divide by two mechanisms from my first marble machine could be cascaded together to actually function as a sort of adder or counter. Once I had that idea, I knew I had to try it at some point, and recently, I finally got around to building my marble binary adding machine.
Musical Tesla Coil
Astounding!
This is a solid-state Tesla coil. The primary runs at its resonant frequency in the 41 KHz range, and is modulated from the control unit in order to generate the tones you hear.
So just to explain a little further, yes, it is the actual high voltage sparks that are making the noise. Every cycle of the music is a burst of sparks at 41 KHz, triggered by digital circuitry at the end of a "long" piece of fiber optics.
So just to explain a little further, yes, it is the actual high voltage sparks that are making the noise. Every cycle of the music is a burst of sparks at 41 KHz, triggered by digital circuitry at the end of a "long" piece of fiber optics.
I personally think that this should be standard fare in a marching band. Just think of it for a second, it’s perfect. Loud enough to be heard over the roar of the crowd, easy to play (keyboard interface?), and it includes it’s own light show! Sure, it might take twenty people to haul the batteries around behind it but that is a small price to pay for something as spectacular as this.
And just think of it in a battle of the bands. Put one of these on the point of your formation and the competition will drop like flies. You might need to insulate the musicians that have to march near it but that would sort itself out I would think.
[via boingboing]