I saw this on Boing Boing today and I knew I had seen this a few years ago. With a bit of work I was able to find the original site. The fishhighway domain is gone but thanks to Wayback Machine it still lives on. (Make sure you check out the images on Archive and not the other site that is just serving up the photos and raking in the ad bucks). Apparently it’s based on an old patent from 1877, you can see an image of it here. It’s a clever idea but even if you can clean the tubes with a magnitized cleaner it would still be a pain. But as aquariums go it does look awesome.
Category: Cool
Weighing the Web
Quick! You need a factoid fast! Here’s one, what does the Internet weigh?
A statistically rough ( one sigma) estimate might be 75-100 million servers @ ~350-550 watts each.. Call it Forty Billion Watts or ~ 40 GW. Since silicon logic runs at three volts or so, and an Ampere is some ten to the eighteenth electrons a second, if the average chip runs at a Gigaherz , straightforward calculation reveals that some 50 grams of electrons in motion make up the Internet.
Thats the mass of a medium sized chicken egg.
[via eyebeam and collision detection]
Lego Magnets
LEGO and magnets… Perfect!!!
"…gave us a set of Magz for Christmas and i noticed that the small magnets in the bar component of the toy looked like the right size to fit in the cylinder in the bottom of Lego bricks. I have scads of Lego but was lucky enough to get a bit of new Lego as a gift also. Tonight i put the two together."
[via MAKE]
‘Are you from the past?’ IT Crowd Fan Shirts
As anyone in IT knows, helpdesk is like being in hell but with ‘special’ people asking you questions all the time. If you don’t know what that’s like then you need to see a British comedy called ‘The IT Crowd‘ (if you looked you could find it online but I don’t know anything about that).
Roy: Yeah, you do know how a button works, don’t you? No, not on clothes. No, there you go, I just heard it come on. No, that’s the music you hear when it comes on. No, that’s the music you hear when… I’m sorry, are you from the past?
Express your inner nerd with one of these the next time you have a casual Friday and the office.
[via Boing Boing]
Light Bulb Aquascape
Another great use for a light bulb. This is using a 250W bulb so there is quite a bit of room to work with in there. This example is just for plants, but as I’ve discovered, fish like a Betta can live in tiny spaces like this fairly well.
[via Boingboing and MAKE]
Palmtop Aquariums
Inkless pen made of solid metal
I wonder if this uses a low melting point alloy like Field’s metal.
The solid metal ‘nib’ consists of a metal alloy, that leaves a mark on most types of paper. If you use the sort of paper typically used in printers and photocopiers, the pen leaves a mark that looks as if it was made by a pencil. However the line will not smudge, and cannot be rubbed out. Since there is no ink, there is nothing to dry out, so the pen will work just as well in 25 years time as it does today. And of course it never needs sharpening.