Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
A few months ago I blogged about a 4x4x4 LED cube project by Chris Lamont and company. Now after much hard work on their part they are close to announcing their latest insane creation, the 8x8x8 RGB LED cube. These things look great! I can hardly wait for the kits, even a 4x4x4 single color verson would be be ass kicking cool on your office desk. Make sure you see the videos. Quite hypnotic.
[via MAKE]
NASA has announced that they will be launching a new space craft that will search for ice at the moons south pole. The hope is that water ice may be found to exist in the craters that never receive direct sunlight. If this is the case then the pathway to a fully manned moon base might be one step closer to being traveled upon. I hope that I can soon sit with my children in my arms and say, "Look at the moon, if you play your cards right you can live up there."
This is pretty neat stuff, the thing that makes it even neater is that it uses the same principal that keeps a gecko lizard stuck to walls.
Dartmouth College engineering professor Victor Petrenko… has devised a way to use a burst of electricity to remove ice caked on walls or windows. For surfaces coated with a special film, the jolt gets rid of ice in less than a second, far less time than it takes to hack at it with an ice scraper.
Look for this soon on everything from car windows to the wings of airplanes.
Firefly squids light up the night in this Japanese sea port.
[via MAKE]
I saw today that ThinkGeek is selling a few seige machine kits. Pretty cool if you ask me. How often have you wanted to practice your indirect fire skills in the cube farm?
However, once you get tired of these little kiddy kits, go shopping over at CatapultKits.com for some real fun. I’d suggest getting the Mini Desktop Mangonel. The sucker looks dead cool!:
Hardwood, real leather, low price and a range of 20+ feet are just a few of the features of this high quality kit. I personaly want the Floating Arm Trebuchet kit, but I know I’d get in trouble with it.
This is like the holy grail of after hours computer techs, Do you have any idea how hard it is to diagnose Wi–fi reception problems? You have to do trial and error equipment placements for ever. The same setup in one place is totally worthless in another. It wold be darn cool to be able to pull this out of your kit and show the customer what the local environment is like.
Wi-Spy is the world’s smallest 2.4 GHz spectrum analyzer, and has been designed specifically for troubleshooting and analyzing Wi-Fi networks. It shows the signal strength for all Wi-Fi networks as well as Bluetooth, 2.4 GHz cordless phones, microwaves, Zigbee, and all other 2.4 GHz transmitters. At a glance you can see what Wi-Fi channels are quiet and what channels you should avoid if possible. This makes it easy to pick a quiet channel for your access point instead of picking your favorite number between 1 and 11.