Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Mystery Camera and the Film From Within…

Every once in a while I’ll stumble across a ‘classic’ camera when I visit the local second hand store. I recently picked up a Kodak Duaflex IV that was in pretty bad shape. The faux leather case was hard and cracked, there is rust on anything that could rust and weird corrosion on whatever wasn’t rusty but the lenses looked OK and the shutter moved. I was thinking that this would be a great camera to pull apart for the glass and shutter mechanism. I’ve been doing an on again off again search for simple camera shutters for my own creations, the Kodak looked to be a likely source. I’d rather have a nice Copal or Zeiss shutter from a folding camera but this would do.
How I managed not to open it while I was at the store is beyond me. If I had I would have noticed the exposed roll of vintage 620 format Kodacolor-X that was neatly waiting for someone to process it. Read the rest of this entry »

Mishap With Helium and a Balloon

Had a little drama at the last HeatSync Labs meeting when one of the members was filling up a balloon with helium…

Zapping Mosquitoes With Frick’en Lasers!

We live in amazing times.

…If Microsoft founder Bill Gates unleashes more mosquitoes at this year’s Technology, Entertainment and Design conference, Nathan Myhrvold will be ready for him. Myhrvold demonstrated a “Death Star” laser gun designed to track and kill mosquitoes in flight. The device was crafted from parts purchased on eBay by scientists at Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures Laboratory. As Myhrvold explained, a child dies every 43 seconds from malaria. Current methods for eradicating the disease aren’t working very well. There’s no viable vaccine yet, and although mosquito nets work, people don’t always use them. When given free nets by public health organizations, many people in the developing world use the nets for fishing instead. So until the time comes when malaria can be controlled, Intellectual Ventures thought it might be a good idea to try to control mosquitoes. Myhrvold’s team demonstrated the system onstage using a green laser light rather than a real laser for safety reasons. They let loose mosquitoes in a glass box rigged with a camera on one side of the stage, then pointed the laser device at the box. The laser lights quickly located the mosquitoes in flight. After the live demo, Myhrvold showed a video depicting mosquitoes being zapped for real in flight. They’re currently examining how cost effective it would be to deploy the device in places like Africa.

[via Wired: Epicenter ]
Intellectual Ventures Laboratory

Space Wallpaper Direct From NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Brighten up your desktop with stunning shot of science imagery. Over 80 to choose from at various dimensions to fit even the most ‘embiggened’ of monitors. There are even instructions on how to apply this as a desktop to your computer if you were wondering how that sort of thing was done. Space craft, planets, satellite pictures of Earth, there are enough pretty pictures to make most everyone happy.

Space Wallpaper, Earth, Mars, Saturn, Moon, Stars and Galaxies – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

It’s Halloween Again!

Over the years I have put together a few costumes for Halloween. Some took a few hours, some took days to build. The DIY Cricket bat and the robot costume have been my favorites:
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How To Spot Chain E-mail FUD

Everyone gets email these days. Most of the time it’s stuff you want, confirmation of an order made online, notes from a friend, amusing photos from a coworker. Stuff you want and know that it’s on the level. But what about the chain emails that some people think are just so important they have an overwhelming need to share it with everyone in their address book? Generally it will be a message of some dire predicament that the government is going to put everyone in if they vote a certain way or some message of warning that some food will kill you faster than life normally would or even that our country is going to hell in an express hand basket because our cities don’t look as clean and neon lit as someone else’s city.  It’s filled with FUD. What is FUD? It’s a catch all term for ‘Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt’. It’s the monosodium glutamate of today’s information, sad to say… I personally don’t make a point of correcting the enormous fallacies the chain emails promote, but in the past I have done just that. It takes time and eventually I realize that I’m just shouting in the wind, it’s going to to little good to whomever sent me the rant. I now realize that a much better plan is to attempt to educate the general population as to how best to avoid bogus email in the first place.
In looking around the interwebs I found this gem from FactCheck.org. These are the folks that go to the trouble to verifying that what politicians say is how it actually is. It matters little what your political affiliation is because this place is an equal opportunity offender. They call it like it is saying yep or nope to the points in question. Handy site to refer to in these days of amazingly polarized opinion.

If there was ever a case where readers should apply a guilty-until-proven-innocent standard, this is it. We at FactCheck.org ask the public to be skeptical about politicians’ claims. With these e-mails, outright cynicism is justified. Assume all such messages are wrong, and you’ll be right most of the time.

I like their style. ‘Question and verify’, words to live by if you read anything on the Internet or hear anything on the news. Even more so with chain emails. So have a nice sit down and read their how-to guide over a strong cup of tea and maybe you will think twice before you forward a chain email message.

That Chain E-mail Your Friend Sent to You Is Likely Bogus. Seriously. | FactCheck.org

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