Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
I’ve been taking quite a few photos with my scratch built pinhole cameras lately and in my Internet treks to find out what other people have been doing I discovered f295. In the forums you can find discussions on everything from pinhole design and camera modification to building your own lenses (if your into that ‘glass’ thing). Pretty cool resource. Go read for a while and see if you don’t get bitten by the pinhole bug.
Ah, a dream I’ve had for years… Remote controlled steam powered machines toy. They still use a battery to power the electronics (no generator on board) but it’s quite amazing to see the steam tank clamber over a block of wood.
Well, it was released but only lasted a few orbits. Pretty cool idea though, using an old unserviceable space suit and some Ham gear as an impromptu satellite. I love the way it was hand lunched from ISS. As it was released, Cosmonaut Tokorev proclaimed, "Dosvidanya! Good-bye, Mr Smith!". Hopefully they will try something like this again. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the transmission failed because the batteries became too cold for them to sustain a usable output voltage? Who knows, if the suit heats up from sunlight it might squeak out a few more bits of data until it eventually re-enters and burns up.
I brought two BitChar-G car sets back from Japan about six months before the craze swept through the US. That was in 2002, nice to see that there are still a bunch of people that like to race them and ever better, do mods on them. The picture here shows new wheels made from the little rubber finger pads from a pencil. Pretty cool, eh?
Now this is a company that has an eye on the adventuresome consumer. This hand held game platform was released by the Korean company GamePark Holdings a few months ago and caught my attention because if you want you can download the programming development software for it. yep, that’s right. This company expects you pop the covers off and see how it ticks. The unit has a Linux core and runs Mplayer so it likes happy media flavors like OGM, DivX, XviD, JPG, and MP3. Plus you can also find emulators that will run the 8-bit games that the kids like so much today (NES, GB, Sega…). If there was a way to add a hard drive to it this would be the king of hacker toys. Mumm… can you add a thumb drive on the USB 2.0 port? Anyway, if I find one of these I’m going to get it, not because I like Mario Golf and Tetris or that I want to have a photo gallery or even an eBook reader, I want a device that is made by a company that realizes that the people that buy their products aren’t dumb end users. To me a customer shouldn’t be given the idea that the item in their hands has only one single use and if you try to do anything else with it you get a lawyer thrown at your head.
Ok, a little big for you wrist but it would be perfect for the computer room. I love all the ePaper applications that are being thought up these days. However, they need a few more:
Ok, if you see any of these ideas out there tell me, ok?