Category: Cool

Neverlate 7-day Alarm Clock

Neverlate alarm clockI saw this on ThinkGeek today:

Setting each daily alarm is as easy as oversleeping. Just turn the top inner knob to the day, and rotate the top outer wheel until the proper time is displayed. Advance the knob to the next day and repeat. Once all the alarms are set, you’re good to go. Get the notice that tomorrow’s class or early meeting has been cancelled? Not a problem – just turn off tomorrow’s alarm, and leave the rest of the week active. Each alarm is really that independent!

I need one of these… If anyone would like to send me one drop me a line at the contact address on the right and I’ll be forever grateful to you.

ThinkGeek :: Neverlate 7-day Alarm Clock

Astounding Steam Powered Robot Arm

 
What a cool application of steam power. The perfect super retro project!

Armatron was my favorite toy as a kid, it was made by Tandy, and sold through Radio Shack in the 80’s. It was made with ONE electric motor, with gears and clutches throughout the entire base and arm, controlled by 2 joysticks that engages and disengages gears for 6 degrees of movement (the joy stick each move in 2 axis, plus they twist for closing/opening of the jaw, and rotating of the hand). This complex machine is a marvel of engineering, the amazing control and ease to operation made this toy amazingly fun to play.

Steam Armatron – Crabfu.com

Apple IIe Animation from 1985

 
As seen on MAKE today:

Phil, you should check out this cool Apple II stop motion rig one of my commenters made in the 80’s, I think it’s right up your alley. He had the computer control the camera and a spinning wheel of color filters. The computer rendered one frame in monochrome for each color of each frame.

Years ago some of my friends were starting up a computer animation company, this was around 1990 or so. The computer they had was a 486DX that had MS DOS as it’s OS and was running a 3D program called Topaz. The computer had two special cards in it, one would act as the controller for a Sony Beta deck VTR and the other would display an image onto a NTSC video display. The animations were rendered to the video display one line at a time, sometimes taking hours for a single frame to render.  When the frame was finished the Beta deck would spring to life and make all sorts of mechanical sounds as the tape was brought to the record head and a single frame of video was recorded. This would repeat over and over again until the segment had been recorded. I’m very glad the good old days of computing are long gone.

Flickr – Cinimagic 1985

You Want to Build a Tesla Coil?

1 million volt Tesla coil
If you ever find yourself with a pile of wire and big transformers and can work with tools without killing yourself you might want to build a Tesla coil. What a Tesla coil does is transform low voltage low frequency (120V / 60 Hz) power into high voltage high frequency (5-1000 KV / 10-2000 KHz) power. It’s done by finely tuned coils and capacitors that resonate at the greatest efficiency. The results can be quite spectacular. The image I used for this entry is of a Tesla coil I shot a few years ago. It was pounding out a million volts of electricity and producing a dazzling display of sparks. The coil was about three feet high and the breeze made by the charge was downright amazing.
The guys at Deep Fried Neon have all the info that you will need to get started in the wonderful hobby.

DeepFriedNeon – Tesla Coils

Your Photos in a Museum?

Most photographers can only dream of having their works seen by countless numbers of patrons ‘de arts who mill through the galleries munching on crackers and brie while making casual remarks on the expressionistic realization of the artists as if they have a clue. Well, tough. Chances are that you won’t be seeing your photos on any ones walls other than your own and maybe the Post Office. But you can have some imaginative play time fun and make like the big time cam a knockin.
Upload your photo (or send it a URL) and choose the setting and the Museumr will do the heavy lifting for you. All you have to do is to sit back and have a sip of vino and bask in the radiance of pseudo artistic achievement.

[via photojojo]
Present your photos in museums on dumpr.net