Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
The 2006 Makefaire is going on in San Francisco Ca this weekend. If your in the area or have enough cash burning a hole in your pocket to get a flight there you should go. Hobbyists, scientists, tinkers, gadget makers, Mythbusters, warrenty voiders, and a slug of other cool people are there discussing what they do and showing you how to do it. If your like me and are stuck at home, you can catch some video and see photos of it online.
Now this is a book I can sink my teeth into! An entire book packed with projects just itching to void the warranty on that shiny new camera your loved ones bought you for Christmas. Mumm… Is that the sizzle of hot solder on a cleaning sponge? You bet it is! These are a few of the projects that are covered in the book:
Looks darn handy for anyone that is looking to think out of the box and so something special with their camera.
If you every play with webcams you quickly discover that the field of view just isn’t what is should be. These guys have put together a nice little hacking tutorial on how to mate a door peephole lens with an ordinary low end digital camera. Now I’ve been doing this for some time, either with peepholes like these guys or with some random lenses that I happen to have in my junk box (meniscus, plano convex, convex, etc.). Years ago I used to have a web cam pointed at a TV with a plano concave lens taped in front of it to expand the field of view. Worked great, it was fun to mess with. Adding a super wide angle lens to a low end camera will yield some pretty cool results, I suggest that you run out and pick a few peepholes up, they don’t cost much. I got mine and Home Depot for around $5USD. Heat up the hot glue gun and have fun!
[via Hack-a-day]
The Aggregate: Fisheye Digital Imaging For Under Twenty Dollars
Everyone needs a good reversing ring and a set of macro tubes for their camera. Now some people choose to buy theirs as I did my reversing ring, but others like to take up the challenge and build their own. Here is a page with instructions on how to build your own reversing ring and tube set. Have fun!
[via MAKE]
My Flickr contact Nicolai_g posted a how to on adding bulb and multiple exposure capabilities to a simple ‘toy/crap’ PHD camera. You might not think that it’s worth doing but if you want to have a very cheap camera to mess with this is the way to go. I expect that the the internals of this camera are not all that different than the ones you will find in your local Goodwill or thrift store so if you can’t find this exact model you should be able to figure out the correct hack.
(BTW, in this case ‘PHD’ means ‘push here dummy’)
This is sweet! As it could only come from an Asian manufacturer the ad blurb is a little quirky but who doesn’t like that? As they say, "It is a fashion Embodiment of the audio-visual products.." I should have been looking for these on my trip to Thailand, I bet these are pretty popular there. Heck, I bet they would be popular in the states if you could get away with selling them. Something like this would be labeled a tool of terrorism by the RIAA and anyone owning one would be an enemy of the state.
Support MPEG1 (VCD ) / MPEG2 (DVD ) / MPEG4/WMV/WMA/MP3/JPEG forms of many kinds of multimedia. Support 2.5" mainstream IDE hard disk (notebook computer hard disk), One 40G hard disk have can hold 100 MPEG4 high-definition film file , support Divx, Xvid the code compresses. It is the present hot multimedia that play form , the finished product is small , light, easy to use, can In order to download the multimedia file from the computer through USB2.0 port, ,And can hold concurrently and act as the Move hard disk. Can meet user’s instructions for use in different occasions . It is a fashion Embodiment of the audio-visual products..
MPEG4/DVD/HDD Multi-media Player-MIDI/HDD Karaoke machine,DVD/hard disk/MPEG-4 decode board